The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [101]
Another error journalists sometimes make is to report a statistic out of context. U.S. News & World Report, in a cover story in June 1995, reported that “last year alone ... 269 people lost their lives,” thereby implying that the nation’s skies were becoming more dangerous. Yet just three years earlier, in 1992, only thirty-three people had died in air crashes, and three years later, in 1998, no one would die.4
Foul-ups like these are exceptions, however. By and large the news media, the Post and U.S. News included, make sure their readers know that, overall, the safety statistics for America’s airlines are impressive. Yet amazingly enough, the media promote fears of flying nonetheless. They acknowledge that a person is ten times more likely to die in his or her bathtub than in an airplane accident and yet run stories titled “Air Safety—Under a Cloud” (Time) and “High Anxiety in the Skies” (USA Today). Many times, in the very same article or TV news segment a reporter will note the minuscule risk of injury or death in air travel and proclaim there is serious reason to worry should we dare to step aboard an airplane.5
This chapter is about how journalists and the people they quote accomplish this extraordinary feat of illogic. I reviewed the coverage of airline safety in the nation’s major newspapers, magazines, and television networks over a recent three-year period—1994 through 1996—and found journalists grouping together isolated incidents, depicting them as dangerous trends, and allowing those pseudotrends to overshadow the larger reality of the safety of air travel.
1994: BEWARE USAir! STAY CLEAR OF SMALL PLANES!
Air travel may be safe in general, but journalists would like you to believe that particular categories of airlines, or individual carriers, are hazardous to your health. Unfortunately, that message casts doubt over all air travel.
Prior to fall 1994 few fretted over the airworthiness of USAir, a leading carrier that had flown several million flights with only a handful of crashes. Yet after one of its jets went down near Pittsburgh, killing all 132 people onboard, numerous reporters depicted the accident as “the airline’s fifth crash in as many years” and observed that all three of the most recent fatal air crashes of regularly scheduled airlines were USAir flights.6
To regain consumer confidence USAir eventually had to appoint a former Air Force general as “Vice President for Safety” and spend more than $1 million in advertising. Yet the succession of accidents was probably a chance occurrence, as Gina Kolata wrote in the New York Times. Kolata used as a main source for her article a professor of statistics at MIT named Arnold Barnett. By comparing the safety records of major airlines during three ten-year periods (1973—1983, 1978-1988, and 1983—1993), Barnett had determined that differences in safety records between airlines are statistically insignificant. “The first-ranked airline was different in all three periods and, strikingly, the airline that was best in one period always fell in the bottom half of the rankings in the other two,” Barnett had written in an article in the journal Technology Review.7
Barnett scolded the International Airline Passengers Association (IAPA), an advocacy organization that frequently received favorable attention from the media, when it issued alerts about the hazards of air travel. (Never mind that the IAPA sold flight insurance to passengers and had a stake in fostering their unease.) A rating system the IAPA devised in 1993, which divided up the airlines according to their accident records, was practically worthless, Barnett suggested. The data the association used “provide a pitifully tenuous basis for putting