Sometimes a news story simply jumps out at you and makes your soul ache with empathy for those involved.  In the case of a recent article that appeared on CNN.com (which gave lurid and macabre details from transcripts of the final moments of Flight 3407, which crashed in February of this year) my reaction was an intense disgust for the writer’s abandonment of basic journalistic ethics.

I wrote on the subject today at Examiner.com.  Here are the first few paragraphs of my commentary.

CNN’s Allan Chernoff – a senior correspondent who has made a career covering disasters both natural and manmade – has stepped over a line of decency in an article published Tuesday by CNN.com.  Running under the headline “Screams, ‘We’re down,’ recorded in cockpit of crashing plane,” was a report of the released transcripts of cockpit recordings from doomed Flight 3407 that crashed into a home near Buffalo, New York on February 12th of this year, killing all 50 souls aboard. 

In addition to revealing pertinent details from the transcripts that might be useful in shedding light on the exact nature of the pilot error which may have contributed to the tragedy, the article (which has no byline, but lists Chernoff as the sole contributor) uses the horrific account of the pilot and co-pilot’s final desperate words as a hook.

You can read the rest of the article at Examiner.com.

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