Guys, last week CNN devoted 758 broadcast minutes in a 24-hour period to coverage of the now infamous poop ship.
Yes, poop ship is the colloquial term for the Carnival ship Triumph. It’s a hilarious name for a really gross vacation.
A Carnival cruise ship sustained damage from a fire onboard that stranded the ship for days in the Gulf of Mexico.
“There were the immediate concerns, among them how to get the passengers home once they got off the ship, a process that was set to begin shortly after the ship docked Thursday at 9:30 p.m. Central time,” said a New York Times report. “Also at issue was how and why a fire came to knock out the propulsion system, the power, and the sewage, heating and air-conditioning systems on the 14-year-old ship, which had mechanical troubles last month that delayed a similar cruise to Mexico. “
The sewage is the main problem here. People had to poop into bags; sewage was leaking everywhere. It sounded like a horrible time.
“It’s like being locked in a Porta Potty for days,” said Peter Cass, a physician from Beaumont, Tex., as the ship got closer to Mobile, Ala., on Thursday, according to The New York Times article. “We’ve lived through two hurricanes, and this is worse.”
But they were still on a cruise, so the food was amazing.
Some people had to eat “jelly and bread and zucchini and red onion sandwiches” while other passengers had lobster and chocolate cake, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The running joke of the story is that CNN wouldn’t exactly cover the “floating Petri dish” until it was covered in poop.
And then it was like they couldn’t stop giving it news coverage. Those 758 broadcast minutes add up to about 52 percent of the day, according to BuzzFeed.
Maybe the media gives way too much attention to things once they get weird, but we should also be paying attention to a stranded cruise ship no matter what. Through the investigation of what journalists could do from shore, we learned some pretty neat things about the incident.
“I just wanted to vomit, like every second probably,” said 12-year-old passenger Allie Taylor, according to a CNN article.
The most heartening facts, though, were tales of how the crew handled the debacle.
“The crew worked around the clock to try to make the situation somewhat bearable,” read the CNN article. “They constantly checked on passengers, often with smiles on their faces.”
Thank goodness. Apparently losing power on a cruise ship is not as enjoyable as getting, like, locked in a mall like that one episode of “The O.C.”
Maybe it’s on us as a society to not go on such lavish vacations. Like, we’re so sorry that our luxury giant boat had a problem, and now we can’t eat all-we-can-eat like we originally thought.
Suck it, foreign countries that are struggling to put food on the table!
We need better priorities. We need to focus on real problems.We need to not broadcast poop ship for most of a news day.
