• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 655 0

out of work, stranded scores of travelers, and made low-cost seats difficult to impossible to obtain between several East Coast cities during the summer vacation period. Few journalists were inclined to highlight the downsides of the grounding. After all, they had been haranguing FAA officials to get tough. In the days just after the crash whenever agency spokespeople dared to reassure the public about Valujet, journalists thrashed them. On ABC’s “Nightline,” Secretary of Transportation Federico Pena noted that the carrier had been responsive to FAA concerns and that he personally would have no hesitation about flying Valujet. To which Ted Koppel responded by lecturing Pena that he “owed a little more candor to the American people” and would do well to change his tune and fess up that Valujet wasn’t airworthy.36

Transportation officials couldn’t win. Once they capitulated by shutting down the airline, the story became “Valujet Shutdown Exposes Flaws of the FAA” (Wall Street Journal). “Nightline,” on the day the grounding was announced, devoted its entire half hour to attacks on Pena and the FAA. Early on, correspondent Brian Ross spoke of “a massive failure on the part of the agency in charge of enforcing airline safety ... another example of the FAA’s so-called tombstone mentality.” Then the anchor for the evening, Forrest Sawyer, gave FAA chief David Hinson a grilling. “What in the world took you so long,” Sawyer demanded. When Hinson responded that Valujet had been taking steps to correct deficiencies inspectors brought to its attention, and that a shutdown earlier would not have stood up in court, Sawyer would have none of it. “The airplane did go down, there were 110 people killed,” Sawyer said, pointedly accusing Hinson of having ignored complaints from Valujet’ own employees.37

A separate interview with the president of the flight attendants’ union seemed to back up Sawyer’s claim. “I hear a lot of concerns from the flight attendants about the safety of the airline,” she said. Asked for specifics, however, her answer suggested she was promoting a broader agenda. “I think safety comes in different forms. The way that Valujet treats its employees is one of the safety concerns, because it’s a direct reflection on how it maintains the aircraft,” she replied.38

While her reasoning may be specious (an airline certainly may treat its workers poorly and at the same time fly its customers safely), who can fault her for capitalizing on the crash to draw attention to the plight of her members? Valujet flight attendants were paid far less than their counterparts at major airlines, and their duties also included cleaning the cabin between flights. Yet what were the odds of “Nightline” devoting a program to the working conditions of low-level airline employees?39

Neglect Something Long Enough ...

The same questions I have raised about other scares beg to be answered about the colossal attention the media devote to airline safety: Are other hazards receiving less attention than they deserve, and if so, how do journalists justify, in their own minds, the disproportionate coverage?

The answer to the first question is a resounding yes. Hazards that kill and injure many more people receive much less attention. In the mid- 1990s, while the press obsessed over airline accidents—which resulted in fewer than a dozen deaths in the best years and a few hundred in the worst—more than 5,000 Americans died in work-related fatalities each year. Almost 7 million suffered injuries. An unconscionable number of these victims were under the age of eighteen; well in excess of 5,000 children and adolescents showed up in emergency rooms with work-related injuries each year. Reporters spewed out hundreds of stories about hypothetical gaps in oversight by the FAA at a time when profound gaps existed at the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), an agency created by an Act of Congress in 1970 “to assure so far as possible every working man and woman in the nation safe and healthful working conditions.”40

Studies find that, on