The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [102]
Yet criticism from Barnett and other aviation safety experts failed to dissuade the news media from taking IAPA pronouncements seriously. When the association spread another scare in late 1994 it received even greater attention. Here’s how USA Today began its front-page story: “Steer clear of commuter planes with fewer than 30 seats and ‘don’t even consider flying them at night or in bad weather,’ warns a consumer group.” The IAPA’s alarmist recommendation, coming on the heels of several commuter airline crashes, made its way into other major newspapers as well and was the lead story on the CBS evening news.9
No sooner had the unmerited uproar over USAir died down than this new panic began. Now, not just one airline, but an entire sector of the nation’s air transport system was deemed unsafe—and, again, for no good reason. As Federal Aviation Administration officials quickly pointed out, accident rates for commuter airlines were almost identical to those of the major carriers once you remove Alaskan bush flights, air taxis, and helicopters from the IAPA’s analysis.
Some news organizations in the coming days and weeks did report this fact and include comments from critics of the IAPA. They did so, however, while continuing to monger fears about commuter air travel. “It’s not against [IAPA’s] financial interests to make people worried,” Time quoted a transportation expert at Northwestern University saying. “But,” the article went on to say, “government officials were also becoming increasingly concerned” about commuter air safety—this in spite of unambiguous statements from FAA officials to the contrary. Accident rates for commuter aircraft, FAA data showed, had remained steady in the past three years; a praiseworthy accomplishment considering that the number of passengers traveling on small planes had increased by about 40 percent during that time.10
To come up with evidence of unsafety at commuter airlines reporters had to dig deep. Richard Newman of U.S. News & World Report, for instance, in a cover article titled “How Safe Are Small Planes?” warned of something he dubbed “pay-your-way piloting.” “More than a dozen regional airlines require would-be pilots to pay for their own training, which can cost up to about $9,000,” Newman revealed. According to the head of a pilots’ union quoted in the article, “Little Lord Fauntleroy can get a job as a pilot, while more skilled candidates may not have $9,000 for training.”11
Many surgeons of course pay for their own training too, and no one questions them on that account or opts to be operated on only by those who received scholarships. But ‘pay-your-way piloting’ was just one in an unending barrage of pseudoshocking realities about commuter airlines the news media tossed out in late 1994. During the final three months of that year exposes by the dozens came out in newspapers and magazines, and network TV newsmagazines ran sixteen segments on the presumed perils of commuter air travel. “From the news coverage of recent aviation accidents,” Stephen Chapman, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune suggested in December, “most Americans presumably now believe that traveling by commuter airliner is roughly as hazardous as jumping out of a 25th floor window into a toxic waste tank full of crocodiles while smoking an unfiltered cigarette.”12
1995: CAUTION! UNSAFE SAFETY AGENCY
At least in 1994 reporters were responding to actual domestic air disasters. In the following year the only fatal crash of a U.S. airliner occurred late in December, when an American Airlines jet smashed into a mountain in Colombia. Yet the media managed to find a pretense for keeping the fear of flying alive in 1995. They wrote exposes about the government agency charged with safeguarding air travel. The FAA, journalists repeatedly asserted, operates with a “tombstone mentality.” Its officials agree to tighten safety standards only when forced to