The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [105]
1996: UH-OH! DISCOUNT TICKETS
When it comes to aviation safety, some editors and reporters seem to suppress no speculation, however disparate from their publication’s larger outlook or from the facts. An article in Time during this same period announced, “The fatal crash of a ValuJet plane with 109 people aboard raises questions about no-frills flying,” even though the Valujet accident represented the first-ever fatal crash of a low-cost airline. In the eighteen years since deregulation several dozen discount airlines had come into existence and flown billions of miles without a fatality. Far from raising safety concerns, by stimulating people to fly instead of drive, cut-rate airlines saved lives—approximately 190 to 275 per year, according to a study in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention.21
Still, Time was far from alone in implying that price reductions and reduced safety may go hand in hand. Scores of newspapers and every major TV network ran stories proffering this theory. Prominent among them was a story in the Chicago Tribune, widely referenced by other news outlets, which leaked a draft of a forthcoming report from the FAA. Low-cost carriers have significantly higher accident rates than full-fare airlines, the report seemed to suggest. In point of fact, however, as FAA officials promptly demonstrated by releasing the final version of the report and the data on which it was based, no such trend exists. On the contrary, ten of the fourteen discount carriers had no serious accidents in a recent five-year period, and the largest of them, Southwest, had not had a fatality in its entire twenty-four years of operation. A couple of the carriers, Valujet being one, had higher-than-average accident rates, but as a group, the safety record for the discounters was about the same as that of the major airlines.22
FAA administrators, besides releasing the report, stated decisively that there is no relationship between ticket prices and safety standards. But reporters had already left a different impression. A poll conducted during this period found that while most Americans had confidence in the safety of the major airlines, 57 percent had concerns about the discounters. The results of the poll, conducted by CNN and Time, were widely publicized, further legitimating fears about budget carriers by giving the impression that such fears are normal and provoking significant decreases in business at many small and low-priced airlines for months.23
Even while she still worked as inspector general, Mary Schiavo bolstered those fears in an alarmist article she wrote for Newsweek. Pumping up her own celebrity and in the same breath public concern, Schiavo boasted of taking her first flight at age ten and getting her pilot’s license at eighteen, then declared that of late, she was afraid to fly. In particular, she wrote, she stayed away from commuter planes, “marginal airlines,” and particular carriers she considered problematic, including Valujet. There’s “reason enough to worry” about the safety of commercial air travel, Schiavo cautioned.24
Two months later, following criticism from FAA officials, other aviation safety experts, and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, each of whom objected to Schiavo’s tendency to make incendiary comments in the press that undermined confidence in air safety, she resigned. But reporters continued to seek her out for comments in the months and years that followed. After TWA Flight 800, bound for Paris, went down shortly after takeoff from JFK in July, Schiavo became something of a fixture in TV and print news coverage. There, as well as in Flying Blind, Flying Safe, a best-selling book she published the next year, Schiavo tossed out a range of reasons to worry about air travel. She could no longer monger precisely the same scares she had been pushing—TWA was a long-established, full-price airline—but she suggested nonetheless that Flight 800 might have gone