Some thoughts on the Concordia disaster

Walter is my go-to guy on cruises and cruise ships.

Walter, who now lives in New Haven, Conn., is my oldest friend -- and I mean that both in terms of the longevity of our lives and his time on earth. (That last reference will probably stick in his craw, since I am older than he is.)

Beginning in the early 1970s, he and I took a handful of Caribbean cruises together, our first on the old Anna Maria, which later became SS Carnivale, and our last on HMS Queen Elizabeth II, which was retired in 2008. That was the end of my cruise-ship experiences, but Walter has continued to cruise and now has scores of trips under his belt. He continues to send me clippings and links about ships we have both sailed on and info about his current experiences. His most recent journey, late last year, began in Civitavecchia, the port that serves Rome, and ended in the United States.

Civitavecchia probably sounds familiar to you. That's the port from which the ill-fated MS Costa Concordia sailed before partially sinking on Jan. 13.

We have both followed the coverage of the disaster on TV, the Internet and in print. Walter's perspective is practical. His latest blog post asks a fitting question: "What would we have done had we been in the dining room and felt the collision?"

As a retired journalist, my interest has been focused more on the coverage of the story. The reporting out of Italy has ranged from dismal to merely adequate. Is the site of the sinking, the Italian island of Giglio, pronounced Jee-lee-oh or Geej-lee-oh? American TV reporters called it Jee-lee-oh for a week. This morning I heard the Geej-lee-oh pronunciation on both ABC and CBS TV.

Did the ship founder or sink or capsize? I've heard all three used, and each word paints a different picture. Reporters on the scene have wrongly used all three words interchangeably.

And what about the captain? I don't think we know the truth yet, but reports have said variously that, before all of the passengers had abandoned ship, he slipped and fell into a lifeboat, that he slipped and fell into the water, that he refused Italian Coast Guard orders to return to his ship, that he ordered dinner onboard for himself and a woman -- even insisting on dessert service -- 30 minutes after his ship crashed into a rock, and that he cried like a baby in the arms of the ship's chaplain when he reached shore. Can all of those things be true? I think not.

In addition, American reporters are using Italian newspapers and TV as their source in far too many instances for my comfort. News in Italy is generally more emotionally driven, and Italian journalists practice a tabloid style that plays fast and loose.

American networks are hamstrung by the fact that they have cut their teams of European correspondents to the bone. Do any of them have a Rome bureau now? It appears that most of the TV correspondents we now see on Giglio are home-based in London.

The most thorough coverage of the disaster I have seen on TV has come from BBC World News. On the whole, BBC's correspondents have been more reserved and precise. The BBC newscasts have devoted as much as 15 minutes at a stretch to coverage of the Concordia disaster.

And disaster is the right word. If what the newspapers and TV networks are telling us is true, a score or more people lost their lives, some because of leadership ineptitude and chaos. I mourn their loss.

I also mourn the loss of, and treasure my memories of, the way life on a cruise ship used to be. Before newer and bigger cruise ships began to carry 4,000 passengers and were overrun by "tourists." Before it became such a mass-market industry.

Am I glorifying a past that never really was?

Probably.

But I can say this: the disaster has prompted a lot of thinking lately, both about journalism and cruising. And about those halcyon days on board a ship with Walter in the 1970s.