Entertainment

Oof, This M370 Gaffe's Gonna Stick

by Alanna Bennett

We gotta find this plane, guys. Malaysia Airlines 370, along with all the passengers onboard, has been missing for twelve days. The situation is so confounding, in fact, that the public finds itself looking to people like Hole frontwoman Courtney Love for hope of resolution. And now, maybe out of confusion, perhaps out of a culture's over-reliance on pop culture (and I say that as a person who writes about pop culture for a living), an ABC affiliate's done a mock-up showing M370's situation as a poster for Lost .

Let's be clear: This is not something that would be shocking or even notable if, say, The Daily Show or The Colbert Report did it. In fact, I'm surprised those shows didn't do this, being satirical and often employing pop culture analogies and/or puns in their tackling of even the most serious of stories. A lost plane with little to no explanation, after all, is a concept all too similar to that of the popular TV show, and given that the Internet is, well, the Internet, there have already been a few crackpot conspiracy theories circulating that M370's disappearance has been viral marketing for a Lost movie following the show's ten year anniversary.

But no, the network responsible for this wasn't Comedy Central, it was the ABC affiliate KETV in Omaha, who tweeted out the graphic (which you can see above). They promptly deleted it, of course, because no one can yell at you and call out a gaffe like twitter can, but Deadspin got a screenshot of it, because nothing's done with on the Internet until half the world's chastised you for it.

Image: ABC KETV