If you’ve turned on cable news in the past few weeks, there’s no doubt you’ve been bombarded with theories about Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.
There was so much speculation with this story and almost no concrete information — always a dangerous combination when given to the ravenous hounds that populate airport TV screens all over America.
But that’s not what I’m talking about. Did anyone else watch this coverage and think, “Man, the oceans are really messed up?” That’s what I thought. Every time the search crews thought they found the plane, they just found some massive pieces of random crap floating in the remotest part of the Indian Ocean. “That oil slick could be from Flight 370” turned out to be just another everyday oil slick off the coast of Australia — there are so many, after all. 
When Courtney Love thought she spotted debris from the missing flight, it just turned out to be massive pieces of metal, weighing thousands of pounds each, drifting out at sea. Of course, CNN and the other networks conveniently glossed over that fact, because it didn’t fall out of the sky in an elaborate terrorist plot; it was probably unceremoniously thrown off a dock in middle-of-nowhere Asia, and that’s not sexy enough for our media. 
The level of pollution in our oceans is a far bigger news story than the disappearance of Flight 370 when you consider the long term implications that it has on all of humankind. Worldwide fisheries are collapsing at a furious pace and oil slick sightings are far more common than Orca sightings. I think that these past two weeks have quietly and accidentally exposed just how serious this situation is getting to be. If you can mistake just a random cluster of trash in the most isolated part of the ocean for an entire AIRPLANE, then something is wrong and it needs to be addressed.
Perhaps cable news should spend one percent of the time that they spend discussing sensational stories like Flight 370 on actual hard news that affects everyone, like pollution, and that would save them some of the wrath that they seem to incur from the American public nearly everyday. Maybe if Fox took an hour away from Sean Hannity and gave it oil-covered birds instead, they’d make a difference in this world.