Other than the families and so on of the passenger list, why are people so exercised?
It's a couple of hundred people. How many died in Syria, for example, over the last week?
I think there are a few reasons, unfortunately most of them come down to variations of the word ‘entertainment’.
It’s on the news because people are interested, people are interested because it’s on the news. For this week, it’s replaced ugly dogs in council flats biting children. Dogs haven’t stopped biting kids, we’re just not doing that story this week.
There is the change in people’s perception of just how monitored we are. It would appear that the americans know I texted my dad a happy jihad message back in 2009, hilariously getting a predictive text jihad instead of birthday. However, they tell us they can’t find a big plane full of people. Is that believable? It’s open to debate.
We then get the three mumbling rabbits in headlights the Malaysian authorities have put up for press conferences. They are doing their best to look like evasive amateur baddies in a low budget movie. But in reality, just guys doing a job that suddenly got catapulted into the world media spotlight without a script or a PR lesson.
Personally, I’d discount the ‘it could have happened to any of us’ theory of interest. So could every car crash everyday and so could Greece or Crimea or wherever but we don’t view them in that way. Most humans will presume immortality until proven wrong, or nobody would smoke or drive a poorly maintained car.
Novelty of story is the key driver, with an outside chance of this being really really interesting. People will be ‘disappointed’ if this does turn out to be a series of mechanical faults that lead to a plane crashing into the sea unobserved. How many would prefer tonight’s news to show grainy long distance shots of a 777 under canvas in Turkmenistan, or covered in green netting in a jungle somewhere?
Much more fun than the budget.