Chris Hayes Rips Fox, CNN’s MH370 Coverage: Stop Creating ‘Boogeymen’ to Scare Viewers

MSNBC has covered the missing MH370 flight these past two weeks, but they haven’t been defined by that coverage nearly as much as CNN has, and Thursday night, Chris Hayes tore into both CNN and Fox News for promoting “completely baseless speculation” that ends up scaring the crap out of viewers for no reason whatsoever.

Hayes started things off with the wince-inducing clip of CNN’s Don Lemon speculating on the possibility of a black hole to explain how cable news is getting more and more “creative” to fuel viewer demand for missing plane coverage with the short supply of news they have to work with.

And most of the speculation is “relatively harmless,” as Hayes put it, but then he started going after the “paranoid” theories peddled on cable news that the plane is being made into a terror device and could possibly be targeting Israel.

Hayes sent a message to CNN and Fox News that they need to stop scaring viewers in the need to fill airtime.

“Do not use mystery and its presence to further whatever boogeyman you choice to make your audience scared of. That is the grown-up versions of monsters underneath the bed.”

Watch the video below, via MSNBC:

For more on cable news’ near-obsession with this story, you can track Mediaite’s coverage here.

[photo via screengrab]

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Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac

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