Mods: please feel free to delete this if you feel it is too off-thread.
As someone who left the BBC after 20 years I feel there is a poor understanding in the airline industry of how the 'media' work. If you understand it better you may save your GP's time in dealing with your elevated blood pressure.
'News' largely comes from information given to 'wire' services.
It is then regurgitated by Radio, TV and the newspapers.
It comes from many people and places, too many to explain, many of them making money from delivering it.
The BBC operates a hierarchy of 'wire' services. The big boys like Reuters are usually considered 'safe' to report. i.e. the information can be trusted. Other services are happy to post rubbish, hence the phrase 'we are getting an unconfirmed report'. If that report makes it onto AP or Reuters it will be assumed it is true, until countered.
These 'wire' stories are often then broadcast and printed pretty much verbatim.
This is often where some of the silliness comes from - "the 737's four engines" etc.
Here you have to balance speed with accuracy. It is true that errors get broadcast, but how often do threads here start with a link to a BBC story?
The errors are usually in the detail and language, and while everyone would agree that no errors should
ever be broadcast, the view is taken that errors in detail can be corrected as new information comes in, as long as the story itself is correct.
This is not an apology for broadcasting rubbish, but to a non-professional, saying there are 300 passengers on a 737, and then correcting it an hour later is, essentially, an acceptable error if the core of the story is right.
If you read all the newspapers, as journalists do, but most people don't, you will read the same stuff in many of them, including quotes.
This is not because all journalists are too lazy to follow things up, but because of the volume of material flowing through newsrooms.
In this case the Today would have got the story off the wires, and then sought someone to talk to who had been on the flight. How it got on the wires I don't know. A stringer in France?
The Today people would have been thrilled to get Pen Hadow because they had someone people might have heard of rather than an 'unknown'.
Now, before you condemn this, you must consider that YOU are ALL more interested in celebrities than unknown people. Any journalist would implicitly go for a 'known' person. Many reading this will be thinking that they aren't interested in celebs, but look at your broadsheets. Full of interviews and 'reactions' from people you have heard of before.
They are the way they are because it works.
Has anyone phoned YOU up lately for a profile? No?
Because no one will want to read it in the general media.
Your views and mine are not interesting.
Now, what jeremy Clarkson thinks will always SELL PAPERS.
You buy 'em. You chose what to watch.
Today record an interview with Pen. He makes 'claims'. Many of them wrong, but his honest perception. He witnessed events - he speaks.
Today contact Ryanair and they 'put up' MOL. Good for them.
He counters Hadow's 'claims,' rather well I thought.
I'm guessing that many here would feel that the BBC should have checked Pen Hadow's claims, found them to be false and then consigned his interview to the bin.
This is where I think you misunderstand what the Press think they are
for.
Hadow made 'claims'. By the next day these 'claims' may have been shown to have no substance, but at 4.00 am when the Today team were putting the programme together they were part of an emerging picture. In the world of rolling news these 'claims' are there to be countered.
Had the BBC broadcast them without giving the chance for Ryanair to respond they would have been breaking their own rules.
As it was they did, and they were countered.
The BBC has this story
BBC NEWS | UK | Forced landing for Ryanair flight on it's website which is a tidying up of the story as it unfolded. It doesn't lead with Hadow's 'claims', but it does continue to report his views that Ryanair communicated badly.
They also got Tom Symonds (who I think is seen here on Pprune trying to get facts, something I think you should encourage) to do this piece
BBC NEWS | UK | What to do when planes lose pressure which is quite a decent job of trying to educate us SLF. The BBC ran this on the front page of it's news site for quite a long time. Which means a staggering number of people will have seen it.
Other did quite a similar piece, Metro I believe for instance.
So, in summary, I would guess that pretty much all journalists, wherever they were from, would argue that Today did exactly the right thing in broadcasting the Hadow interview, and getting a rebuttal from MOL.
As I said elsewhere, the slightly bizarre upshot is many, many people are probably better informed about cabin depressurisation and O2 masks....
On a last, slightly self-serving note, it is unlikely that The Daily Mail, The Sun, The Daily Express, The Mirror, and the others would have not felt they should
seek the Ryanair rebuttal. They have no rules that I am aware of they tell them to include the counter-argument.
As a colleague said who worked for one of the above - "They tell you what the story is, you call a couple of people and it turns out it's not right. You tell them and they say "you've been told what story to write, now write it."
And while we're at it, in many cases, where you read an unattributed quote in the newspapers it was made up.
"A close friend said she is heartbroken over the split" is MADE UP.
A they are constantly having a go at broadcast media. It beggars belief.