The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [109]
Unsurprisingly, the rate of occupational injuries in the United States was rising. Making matters worse, a group of openly anti-OSHA Republicans had been elected to Congress in 1994 partly with money from corporations that wanted to weaken the agency still further. Yet among the leading major news organizations only the Washington Post ran major investigative pieces about OSHA. As a rule, media coverage of workplace health and safety issues was, as journalist Frank Swoboda described it in Nieman Reports (a journalism review published by Harvard), “sporadic and most often nonexistent.” News organizations do not have reporters whose “beat” is worker safety. There is no one like the New York Times’s Adam Bryant and his colleague Matthew Wald, who between them published an average of one story on airline safety every week from 1994 through 1996.42
During that period, when news stories mentioned OSHA or work site safety they were seldom about dangerous equipment or illnesses caused by unhealthy working conditions. Instead the focus was on a couple of red herrings. One of these, workplace violence, I addressed earlier. The other, allegations of excessive regulation by OSHA, consisted of little more than Republican-planted anecdotes. Particularly popular were tales of dentists who wouldn’t let kids take their baby teeth home because OSHA forbade it. (There was no such OSHA ruling, of course. The regulations in question were designed to protect the public against the spread of AIDS, hepatitis, and other serious illnesses and did not prohibit dentists from abetting the tooth fairy.)43
Had reporters chosen to look they would have found plenty of genuine stories waiting to be written about OSHA. On the one hand, the agency had pulled off some amazing feats in the recent past that had gone largely unreported. For instance, from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s they brought about a 95 percent reduction in brown lung disease among textile workers by instituting rules limiting exposure to cotton dust. On the other hand, some workplace hazards that should have been remedied long ago continue to kill and injure substantial numbers of workers. An example that OSHA officials themselves tried for years to get the press to write about: at least three hundred Americans die each year from silicosis, a lung disease caused by inhalation of dust. Largely preventable through controls on exposure at work sites, the disorder was recognized as far back as the first century A.D., when Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist, warned about it.44 “Enterprising editors and reporters might find a refreshing change of pace and a wealth of stories, if they ventured out to worksites in their area and took a look at the problems firsthand,” Swoboda recommended in his Nieman Reports article.45
Why Aviation?
Journalists tend to offer a couple of explanations for their preoccupation with airline safety. Some say that plane crashes are naturally newsworthy. “When a plane falls from the sky, the story is compelling, albeit morbidly so: the pictures of twisted metal, luggage hanging from trees, the screaming mother at the airport where the flight never arrives,” wrote Gareth Cook in the Washington Monthly—and he’s right, as far as he goes. Unquestionably, plane wrecks make compelling news stories, which explains the immediate eruption of coverage. Yet why do wrecks remain in the news for months—sometimes years—on end, well after the luggage has left the trees and the mothers have buried their children? How come, during periods in which there have been no crashes for long stretches of time, do the media continue to run scads of frightening stories about air safety? And if it is the availability of affecting photographs and screaming mothers that makes plane