The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [107]
Stories about the pilot were affecting on other grounds. One of the nation’s few female airline captains, Candi Kubeck, age thirty-five, had already logged almost 9,000 hours of flying and maintained a nearly flawless safety record. “Flying,” the New York Times wrote, “was not really work to her. It was a lifelong labor of love.” Her husband, a pilot for America West, told reporters that Candi was meticulous about safety. She checked out everything, he said, and saw to it that flights were delayed or canceled if necessary. Both the Times and USA Today ended their stories with him saying, “We planned on growing old together.” 32
There was a rather pathetic irony, though, in the tender treatment accorded Candi Kubeck after her death. For the previous few years the media had been critical of airline pilots, and especially of pilots at commuter and discount airlines. Anecdotes and adverbs ruled the day in those earlier accounts. “Pilots routinely report falling asleep in the cockpit and making mistakes while landing, taking off and navigating their planes,” U.S. News & World Report had written, neither bothering to define routinely nor to cite any evidence apart from tales told to their reporters by some unnamed pilots. “Alcohol and drug abuse is a real problem,” Gareth Cook claimed in an article in the Washington Monthly. His sole evidence? “One pilot who was found dead at the controls of a plane that crashed had a blood alcohol level of .16 percent, the rough equivalent of downing seven drinks in an hour.” Candi Kubeck made a different kind of good copy, and for that she was lionized.33
Say Something Often Enough ...
How do the news media minimize the excellent safety record of America’s airlines? The same way discount appliance stores bring down prices on VCRs. It is a commonplace that retailers need not make a large profit per sale if they make a lot of sales. Likewise, reporters need not scare the daylights out of us in individual stories if they run lots of stories.
In the ValuJet crash 110 people died. Yet USA Today alone ran more than 110 stories about the crash. Just in the first two weeks after the plane went down USA Today published seventy-one pieces. The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and CBS and NBC evening newscasts each ran about fifty articles during that fortnight. By the one-month anniversary of the accident coverage of the crash had faded to an average of less than one story per day in most of the major media, but the reprieve was short-lived. When the results came out from an FAA investigation launched just after the crash, a whole new frenzy ensued. Over a thirty-day period the FAA had brought in sixty inspectors and carried out two thousand inspections of Valujet’s fifty-one planes. That they turned up enough irregularities to shut down Valujet is hardly surprising; the company’s president was probably right when he said that almost any airline would come up short under that unprecedented level of scrutiny.34
Whether reporters were justified in dubbing as “serious” the half dozen accidents that the FAA uncovered in Valujet’s history is arguable. One of the accidents consisted of a flight attendant breaking her ankle when a plane hit turbulence; another resulted from a tow bar breaking while a plane was being pushed back from a gate. In total, the FAA listed thirty-four safety violations, nearly all of them minor, and investigators later determined that the probable cause of the Valujet crash, a cargo fire, was the result of an error not by Valujet but by SabreTech, a subcontractor whose employees mistakenly labeled 144 oxygen generators as empty.35
Arguably more newsworthy than what the FAA found were the human consequences of the action they took. In grounding Valujet the FAA put 4,000 people