Bloomberg: more spin than truth to its columnist's views?(Air vs Sea disasters).

[bic_cherry]

Bloomberg: more spin than truth to its columnist's views? (Air/ sea disasters).

BLOOMBERG William Pesek, pls stop writing cr@p to sell papers.

Whilst it might be Pesek's intention to comment upon the nation's reactions to 2 quite dissimilar disasters albeit with significant fatality etc rates, I think it is grossly unfair for him to have omitted the facts towards the genisis of the respective disasters.

In the case of the Sewol, it was a timed disaster waiting to occur (repetitive contravention of cargo loading limits), however in the case of MH370, to date, no significant culpulbility can yet be assigned, some minor hicupps not withstanding. Where culpulbility is concerned, the corporate behind Sewol is definitely more culpulable than MAS is for MH370 anytime.

BLOOMBERG is supposed to be a credible news source, its reporters should have good overview of current affairs and not just write navel gazing articles to spin whatever corrupt fashion/ sentiment they wish to spin. In this case, the BLOOMBERG columnist has missed the woods for the trees. Hopefully, Bloomberg will stop publishing such illogical if at best tangential/ niche reports which perhaps do much more to mislead rather than to inform: the bottom line remains, reading the appended report was a waste of my time.

Re: One Missing Jet, One Sunken Ferry, Two Responses - Bloomberg View

EVEN AS THEY MOURN, SOUTH KOREANS DEMAND ACCOUNTABILITY AND ACTION FROM THEIR GOVERNMENT. PHOTOGRAPHER: CHUNG SUNG-JUN/GETTY IMAGES
ASIA
One Missing Jet, One Sunken Ferry, Two Responses
William Pesek

121 MAY 1, 2014 6:03 PM EDT
By William Pesek
There are no ideologues in a financial crisis, former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke once said. Clearly the same doesn’t hold true for political crises, as a comparison of Malaysia and South Korea very quickly reveals.
Tragedy has struck both nations in recent weeks, their travails played out in horrifying detail on the world’s television screens. Fairly or unfairly, the hunt for a missing Malaysian airliner and the desperate attempt to rescue and now recover victims from the sunken Sewol ferry are being viewed as tests of the governments in Putrajaya and Seoul, if not of Malaysian and South Korean societies. The grades so far? I’d give Korea an A-, Malaysia a D.
In the two weeks since the Sewol tipped over and sank -- almost certainly killing 302 passengers, most of them high school students -- Korea has been gripped by a paroxysm of self-questioning, shame and official penitence. President Park Geun Hye issued a dramatic and heartfelt apology. Her No. 2, Prime Minister Chung Hong Won, resigned outright. Prosecutors hauled in the ship’s entire crew and raided the offices of its owners and shipping regulators. Citizens and the media are demanding speedy convictions and long-term reforms.
And Malaysia, 55 days after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished? Nothing. No officials have quit. Prime Minister Najib Razak seems more defiant than contrite. The docile local news media has focused more on international criticism of Malaysia's leaders rather than on any missteps by those leaders themselves.
Both countries are democracies -- Malaysia’s even older than South Korea’s. The key difference, though, is the relative openness of their political systems. One party has dominated Malaysia since independence, while Korea, for all its growing pains and occasional tumultuousness, has seen several peaceful transfers of power over the past quarter-century. Unused to having to answer critics, Malaysia’s government has responded defensively. Korean officials, on the other hand, are reflecting, addressing the anger of citizens, and delving into what went wrong with the shipping industry’s regulatory checks and balances.
That’s why Korea is likely to come out of this crisis stronger than ever, unlike Malaysia. The two nations responded similarly after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, too. Malaysia’s then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad sought to prove Bernanke’s axiom wrong, bizarrely blaming some shadowy Jewish cabal headed by George Soros for the ringgit's plunge. Malaysia didn't internalize what had gone wrong or look in the mirror. It didn't admit it had been using capital inflows unproductively and that coddling state champions -- including Malaysia Airlines -- was killing competitiveness. Never did the ruling United Malays National Organization consider it might be part of the problem.
Contrast that with Korea's response to 1997. The government forced weak companies and banks to fail, accepting tens of thousands of job losses. Authorities clamped down on reckless investing and lending and addressed moral hazard head-on. Koreans felt such shame that millions lined up to donate gold, jewelry, art and other heirlooms to the national treasury.
South Korea's response wasn't perfect. I worry, for example, that the family-run conglomerates, or chaebol, that helped precipitate the crisis are still too dominant a decade and a half later. But the country’s economic performance since then speaks for itself.
Now as then, Korea’s open and accountable system is forcing its leaders to look beyond an immediate crisis. Ordinary Koreans are calling for a national catharsis that will reshape their society and its attitude toward safety. Park’s government has no choice but to respond.
Malaysia’s government, on the other hand, appears to be lost in its own propaganda. To the outside world, acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein performed dismally as a government spokesman: He was combative, defensive and so opaque that even China complained. Yet Hishammuddin is now seen as prime-minister material for standing up to pesky foreign journalists and their rude questions. The government seems intent on ensuring that nothing changes as a result of this tragedy.
As hard as it seems now, South Korea will move past this tragedy, rejuvenated. Malaysia? I'm not so sure.
To contact the writer of this article:
William Pesek at [email protected].
To contact the editor responsible for this article:
Nisid Hajari at [email protected].
One Missing Jet, One Sunken Ferry, Two Responses - Bloomberg View

 

[bic_cherry]

Re thread: Bloomberg: more spin than truth to its columnist's views? (Air/ sea disasters).
I wonder how do you come to such a conclusion.
Then again, since you are not bloomberg, you can be excused for not applying the same standard you expects of them on yourself?

The Sewol as repeatedly overloaded due to oversight and nonconformity with current rules and lax law enforcement with the straw that broke the camels back being a > 3x overloaded ship and inexprenced crew at the helm. Nobody can deny that the Sewol was in fact a programmed time bomb, doomed to go off. As for MH370, besides being an unpresidented accident, no significant culpulbility/ blame has yet been attached to any involved party yet although response could have been improved save the fact that a commercial airline plane so surreptitiously leaving its flight path in such untimely manner: remains an unpresidented occurrence.

Many have also commented that the two incidents are in fact quite dissimilar: giving each response a grade only serves to trivialise the matter.

That the Bloomberg columnist Pesek decided omit the facts behind each disaster to publish his heavily skewed report with a show stealing grading scale only goes to show how badly Bloomberg news is taking sides and choosing to scandalise the whole disaster issue.

In missing the trees for the woods and preferring to cherry pick the facts it publishes, Bloomberg news has simply revealed how untrustworthy news resource it really is.

Reference:

World
Tragic ferry Sewol repeatedly overloaded: report
For over a year the doomed ferry had been routinely overloaded on nearly every voyage in which it reported cargo, according to documents.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Sunday, May 4, 2014, 4:53 PM
YONHAP/REUTERS

South Korean Prime Minister Chung Hong-won (L) shakes hands with a family member of a missing passenger onboard the sunken passenger ship Sewol at a makeshift accommodation at a gym in Jindo May 1. Chung announced his resignation last Sunday over the government response to the ferry disaster.
INCHEON, South Korea — The doomed ferry Sewol exceeded its cargo limit on 246 trips — nearly every voyage it made in which it reported cargo — in the 13 months before it sank, according to documents that reveal the regulatory failures that allowed passengers by the hundreds to set off on an unsafe vessel. And it may have been more overloaded than ever on its final journey.
One private, industry-connected entity recorded the weights. Another set the weight limit. Neither appears to have had any idea what the other was doing. And they are but two parts of a maritime system that failed passengers April 16 when the ferry sank, leaving more than 300 people missing or dead.
The disaster has exposed enormous safety gaps in South Korea’s monitoring of domestic passenger ships, which is in some ways less rigorous than its rules for ships that handle only cargo. Collectively, the country’s regulators held more than enough information to conclude that the Sewol was routinely overloaded, but because they did not share that data and were not required to do so, it was practically useless.
The Korean Register of Shipping examined the Sewol early last year as it was being redesigned to handle more passengers. The register slashed the ship’s cargo capacity by more than half, to 987 tons, and said the vessel needed to carry more than 2,000 tons of water to stay balanced.
But the register gave its report only to the ship owner, Chonghaejin Marine Co. Ltd. Neither the coast guard nor the Korean Shipping Association, which regulates and oversees departures and arrivals of domestic passenger ships, appear to have had any knowledge of the new limit before the disaster.
“That’s a blind spot in the law,” said Lee Kyu-Yeul, professor emeritus at Seoul National University’s Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering.
Chonghaejin reported much greater cargo capacity to the shipping association: 3,963 tons, according to a coast guard official in Incheon who had access to the documentation but declined to release it.
Since the redesigned ferry began operating in March 2013, it made nearly 200 round trips — 394 individual voyages — from Incheon port near Seoul to the southern island of Jeju. On 246 of those voyages, the Sewol exceeded the 987-ton limit, according to documents from Incheon port.
The limit may have been exceeded even more frequently than that. In all but one of the other 148 trips, zero cargo was recorded. It is not mandatory for passenger ferries to report cargo to the port operator, which gathers the information to compile statistics and not for safety purposes.
More than 2,000 tons of cargo was reported on 136 of the Sewol’s trips, and it topped 3,000 tons 12 times. But the records indicate it never carried as much as it did on its final disastrous voyage: Moon Ki-han, a vice president at Union Transport Co, the company that loaded the ship, has said it was carrying an estimated 3,608 tons of cargo.
The port operator has no record of the cargo from the Sewol’s last voyage. Ferry operators submit that information only after trips are completed. In that respect, the rules for domestic passenger ships are looser than those for cargo-only vessels, which must report cargo before they depart.
... ...
Read more: Tragic ferry Sewol repeatedly*overloaded: report - NY Daily News