A three-hour tour boat carrying 85 people on an excursion within a harbor is NOT a cruise ship.
08.30.11
Is this the so-called "cruise ship" this man was on when he tragically threw his son overboard.
Mainstream Media Stupidity over Cruising
Okay - I just have to rage a little over this because it makes me so mad. Local television news station web sites tend to write the most sensationalistic and least accurate news articles anywhere. So when I saw this headline for the first time...
Man Throws 7-Year Old Boy Off of Cruise Ship
It did not surprise me to see the article originated with a local TV news station web site in Orlando. I have had enough issues with this particular news station and their ignorance about the cruise industry before that when I went to make a comment to them I found I already had an account.
My comment was this...
"A three-hour tour boat carrying 85 people on an excursion within a harbor is NOT a cruise ship. It's a tour boat. How can you call yourselves news people if you don't even know the difference between a cruise ship and the Minnow from Gilligan's Island?"
I used the Gilligan's Island reference because I figured as local television news anchors it was a subject within their immediate realm of knowledge.
I honestly don't know if this was sensationalism or just stupidity. At first I suspected stupidity, but now I see that dozens of other so-called news outlets have picked up the exact same headline, and stupidity is actually not that common - so I now believe it has become sensationalism.
You know - there is nothing funny about people dying on cruise ships - but the fact is that there is a group of people who purposely write sensationalistic nonsense about cruise ships every day - very, very little of it with even a grain of truth, where they plant the idea that cruise ships are havens of covered-up crime where nefarious things happen daily and that these alleged crimes go completely unreported.
It just isn't true, and several years ago we went on a campaign to teach the mainstream media that people do not "fall" off of cruise ships, nor are they murdered and the body disposed of secretly without a trace. We got the truth out and the most of the media actually stopped sensationalizing cruise ships - until now.
Here is the thing - 13,000,000 cruises are taken by Americans each year. Each year a certain number of people go missing from cruise ships - these are in almost all cases suicides and nothing has ever been proven to show otherwise. It is sad - but it is a statistical fact of life.
I just read an article by Laura Bly in USA Today that said 17 people died in Yosemite National Park this year alone, two more than the annual average of 15. Now, I don't see any web sites alleging there is a cover-up conspiracy about people dying at Yosemite, yet when it comes to cruise ships certain "news people" just can't restrain themselves from falling into sensationalism.
I just want to say one thing - cruise ships are large vessels where people eat, sleep and spend several days traveling to distant places. They are extremely safe - statistically the safest vacation in the world. There have been crimes on cruise ships, even people murdered in the last couple of years, but the murders were not random acts - they were sad domestic issues that would have happened whether the couple was on a cruise ship or in a Winnebago at Yosemite National Park.
There is absolutely NO documented crime where a person, dead or alive, was ever thrown off of a cruise ship, and I expect the news media to know and respect that fact. How do you demonstrate that you know and respect that fact? You refuse to write headlines like the one above. It's a slap in the face to people like me who work in the real cruise industry.
