The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [110]
The way some journalists see it, air safety objectively deserves a high level of coverage, not just on account of the drama surrounding plane crashes but because plane wrecks produce lasting effects on people’s psyches and on the U.S. economy. “Why does the prospect of a plane crash frighten us so much—when the risk of drowning in the bathtub is 10 times higher?” Melinda Beck asked in a cover article on aviation safety in Newsweek in 1995. Her reply: “Because the statistics don’t reflect the powerful emotional impact that an air disaster has or the ripples it sends through the economy. The crash of Flight 427 in Pittsburgh not only killed all 132 people on board and disrupted their families forever, it also cost USAir $40 million in canceled bookings and half of its stock price. The company, which employs 44,328, may yet go bankrupt, its accounting firm warned last week. Each plane crash also vividly reminds us of how vulnerable we are, hurtling at 500 miles per hour, 7 miles above the earth, sealed in a pressurized metal can.”47
Once again, the argument is accurate but conspicuously incomplete. Beck might as well explain an arson fire without mentioning the arsonist. A plane wreck does not, in itself, cause canceled bookings or “vividly remind” people of anything. Both of these are effects of how the media cover a crash. It is reporters who implant images of “hurtling ... in a pressurized metal can” and who, erroneously taking a string of accidents as indicative of bad safety management, draw dubious ties between the carnage of a crash and an airline’s balance sheets. USAir would have lost far fewer bookings after the Pittsburgh crash had there not been articles like the one that came out in Time, which began with lurid descriptions of rescue workers pulling charred body parts out of trees and then told readers what to make of the spectacle. “Such ghastly scenes,” the author instructed, “raise again questions the U.S. had almost forgotten: Can air travel maintain its recent glowing safety record? Or are financially troubled airlines—USAir in particular—skimping dangerously on maintenance and crew training to cut losses?”48
In news coverage of aviation hazards, as of other dangers the media blow out of proportion, a self-justifying, perpetual-motion machinery operates. Incessant reporting and pronouncements by reporters generate financial crises and crises in public confidence, which in turn justify more hysterical coverage. Perhaps the real question here is why no one interrupts the cycle—why editors, producers, and management fail to put on brakes. Why, in many news organizations, doesn’t anyone step in when the quantity or irrationality of the reporting starts getting out of hand?
A veteran reporter at the Los Angeles Times (who prefers I not use her name) provided me with at least part of the answer to this question when I asked her, over lunch a couple of weeks after the Valujet crash, why her paper had been devoting so much space to this event. I had anticipated one or both of the replies I’d been getting elsewhere—“crashes make for compelling copy” or “crashes are profound psycho-economic events”—but she had a different take. “There’s an expression around the newsroom,” she responded. “News is what happens to your editors.”
She did not mean, of course, that her editors had been on the Valujet flight that went down. She meant that her editors—and their bosses, the executive editors and senior management at Times Mirror Corporation—fly a lot. So do their families, friends, and business associates. They are more likely than many people to know someone who has been in a plane crash or narrowly avoided one. They can imagine as well that unless greater attention is paid to airline safety, they will know victims in the future or could end up on a fatality list themselves.
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