Like most of you, I feel horrible for the families of the passengers in that Malaysian plane. 

One of them is from our area,  Mr Phillip Wood.  He apparently visited his family a couple of weeks before the tragedy.  Mr Wood is a father and son.  We send our sympathies to his family.

The interest in the story is natural because so many of us fly.  We understand the vulnerabilities of air travel.  In fact, a friend's daughter had taken that same flight two days earlier.

However, the story has gotten out of control - a perfect storm of news outlets that want more and more "breaking news" segments.

My problem with the coverage is that we are just watching speculation.  There is very little information.  We don't really know what happened in the cockpit or whether it was a mechanical problem.

Nobody really knows.  So why so much speculation about this or that?  

My friend Bill Katz, editor of Urgent Agenda, and former newsman, got it right this weekend:

"It was pointed out last night that the section of the Indian Ocean being searched is, even in normal times, a vast junkyard.  There's always debris there.  Unless the searchers can put eyeballs on some of the objects "sighted" by satellite we'll never know if these were chunks of the missing airliner, or stuff that has fallen off ships or dumped as refuse. 

It won't be many days before the battery power runs out on the pingers that sound when a plane goes down.  The search authorities hope they can home in on these pingers before the power goes out.  So far, no luck."

So let's cut back on "the 24/7 speculative stuff" and update audiences when something tangible is known.   Frankly, I fear that it maybe a while before we have a clue of what happened in that 777.

P. S. You can hear CANTO TALK here & follow me on Twitter @ scantojr.