Concordia Cruise Ship Wreck

As I was browsing CNN.com today, I came across the headline "Survivors describe Concordia ordeal."   I'm sorry, "Survivors?"  Are they really referring to the thousands of people who made it off the Costa Concordia among the 11 that have died as "survivors?"  So I clicked in to the article to read more (sucker), where I found the headline on one of the videos "Ship sank quickly, like on the Titanic."

Now I was really interested, was one of the passengers seriously comparing this to the Titanic?  "Sank" is a loose definition for what happened in the first place and "like on the Titanic" is absolutely ridiculous.  This wreck isn't even comparable to the Andrea Doria.  So I decided to watch the entire video, and while one of the interviewees uses similar words, CNN has doctored the headlines up to make the whole thing more sensational.

Watch for yourself, the passengers aren't the ones sensationalizing - CNN is doing that on their own.  This is just one of many things that continues to piss me off about the news.  Links and video tags online are just like the ridiculous commercials we see for the 9 o'clock news everyday about what household product is going to kill you tonight.

For what its worth, I feel terrible for the families of the victims and I don't doubt that Costa Concordia will pay dearly for this mistake, nor do I have any problem with the lawsuits that Costa will lose.  I was on a cruise in November and I'd have been pretty freaking terrified if this happened to me.  I am on edge every time the boat hits a decent sized wave - I can't imagine how I'd react if the "wave" I just hit turned out to be something more and the ship didn't quickly rock back the other direction.

That said I do think the media is doing everything it can to blow it out of proportion in the interest of gaining more viewers and more clicks for the news channels.  And as I started typing this post I thought to myself, this seems way too familiar.  Because once again, Seinfeld beat me to it and I feel like, as always, George was right.  Damn you, Larry David.