The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [106]
According to Graham Boynton in a page-one story in the New York Observer, “On Thursday, July 18, New Yorkers woke up to find that they were living in a different city. When a bomb—and it was surely a bomb—blew up TWA Flight 800 ... it also obliterated our sense of invulnerability.” The New York Post concurred. “IT WAS NO ACCIDENT,” their full-cover headline declared. Even the New York Times, while more cautious, tossed out heavy hints that the plane had been bombed. One story noted that “TWA’s connection to one of the world’s most turbulent regions, the Mideast, has been long and prominent.” Another spoke of “the lax scrutiny of air cargo loaded on passenger planes.” And a column by Clyde Haberman opened with, “This may seem to be jumping the gun, since so much is still not known about what brought down TWA Flight 800. But it is probably time for Americans to accept terrorism as a fact of life requiring certain impositions, like personal searches in public places, to preserve communal safety.”26
In the two years following the crash hundreds of thousands of person-hours and millions of dollars were spent searching for a cause, but federal investigators reached only two firm conclusions: a spark ignited the plane’s center fuel tank; and there had been no terrorist attack. These findings hardly put an end, needless to say, to hairy headlines that “A Missile Destroyed TWA Flight 800” (Village Voice).27
The lack of a simple, certain explanation itself provided fuel for fear mongering. “If TWA 800 was an accident—even a million-to-one freak accident—it could theoretically happen again,” a Newsweek article vacuously observed.28
Selling the Latest Air Scare
Absent statistical or scientific causes for concern about whatever air scare they are advancing at the moment, journalists rely on provocative statements of their own or from fear mongering officials and former officials such as Mary Schiavo. Or, at least as common, they quote people who possess no technical expertise whatsoever. They go to airports and corner people they describe as “seasoned travelers,” who provide quotes like, “I fly constantly, but after this recent crash, even I have white knuckles.”29
Or a journalist will seek out someone who saved her own life or the lives of loved ones by canceling a trip. “When Dawn O‘Day, a New York homemaker, saw a TV report last week on commuter-airline safety, she got worried—and then she got on the phone,” began an article in Time. It went on to explain that O’Day’s daughter, Misty, a college student in North Carolina, was booked on an American Eagle commuter flight for part of her trip home for the holidays. Fortunately, though, Misty’s mom had been following the news coverage about the dangers of commuter air travel and had her daughter take ground transportation instead of the American Eagle flight, which subsequently crashed and killed fifteen of its twenty passengers.30
By playing Misty’s story for us, Time effected two illusions. The magazine gave the impression that the scare mongering they and most of the rest of the media were doing about commuter air travel was in the service of saving lives. And they turned a tiny probability into a huge one. The average reader’s odds of dying on his or her next commuter flight are one in several million, but Misty’s appears to have been three out of four.
To dramatize the odds, journalists also use actual victims of airline accidents. Following every major crash reporters single out a small number of sympathetic victims for profile pieces. After the Valujet crash, for instance, a single family and one of the pilots got most of the attention. The photograph of the Neal and Judy McNitt family—Mom and Dad with the three kids on their laps, everyone smiling and happy—that went out from the Associated Press practically commands the copy that would accompany it. “They