Submersible vehicle of the type that is now missing

By now, many people know that a submersible vehicle that set out from St. John’s, Newfoundland on Sunday with five people aboard to explore the wreckage of the Titanic went missing after one hour and 45 minutes into its Atlantic Ocean dive. A search operation by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Royal Canadian Air Force is underway, with France also sending a ship to assist. This operation is a race against the clock, as the occupants only have about 70 to 96 hours of emergency air supply.  CNN is running a live feed on its website, with updates as they occur. [NOTE: given the potential for fast-changing events here, this blog post is also subject to updates, and therefore may not reflect the latest developments].

While this story is no doubt a human interest story that elicits empathy in many people (though some might scoff at the wealthy privileged occupants who paid $250,000 each for a close-up view of the Titanic), is it really a news story? Does it contain any wider implications for our lives?

CNN, where reporting gives way to feelings

Just one week after arriving at CNN after her stint at MSNBC, “analyst” Kasie Hunt came out with an unbelievably bad take when California Governor Gavin Newsom won his recall election in a landslide on Tuesday night:

CA GOV BIG PICTURE: One of the top Democrats in the country got caught living like an elite while everyone else suffered. Elites vs. the rest is the driving force in our politics right now and Democrats have a tough needle to thread both in California & nationwide … (1/)

— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) September 15, 2021

Hunt followed that up with:

Obviously California is a Special Place — but the fact that a Democratic national star in waiting *faced* a recall and then had to fight hard for it midway through the campaign does say a lot about the potential challenges Democrats face across the map (4/)

— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) September 15, 2021

And then, even though President Joe Biden had flown to California to help Newsom win impressively, Hunt couldn’t resist attacking Biden:

…especially if President Biden can't demonstrate he's capable of getting the resurgent pandemic under control, has another competence crisis a la Afghanistan, can't get his budget plan through Congress, etc. (fin)

— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) September 15, 2021

Leave it to the folks on Twitter, however, to set things straight. Here are a few of the many choice tweets that, to put it nicely, might make Kasie Hunt think twice about prioritizing “garbage takes” over solid reporting in the future: