The Culture of Fear (31 page)

There is no reason to believe that bad parts played a role in the Valujet crash. Stern forged the connection circuitously by relating the crash to an accident a year earlier. On that previous occasion, the engine in another Valujet aircraft had exploded prior to takeoff, possibly as the result of a mismanufactured part. “The accident,” Stern wrote, “caused no fatalities—unlike last month’s crash of Valujet Flight 592 into the Everglades. But in some ways, it was more ominous, because it highlights a safety issue that affects every carrier in the air: the growing stream of substandard or bogus parts that are finding their way into commercial aircraft.”
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If this seems like a weird claim—an accident in which no one died is more ominous than a crash that killed everyone onboard?—Stern’s pronouncement that the airline industry is “underregulated” is weirder still. Had he been writing in The Nation,
MotherJones,
or some other liberal or progressive publication, such a statement might be expected. But Business Week isn’t exactly noted for endorsing greater government regulation of big business. In fact, when I ran a Nexis search of the contents of Business Week for the previous five years to see if I could turn up other occurrences of the word
underregulate,
I could not. When I ran a search for the word watchdog, on the other hand, I discovered that it had appeared 115 times.

When it comes to aviation safety, some editors and reporters seem to suppress no speculation, however disparate from their publication’s larger outlook or from the facts. An article in Time during this same period announced, “The fatal crash of a ValuJet plane with 109 people aboard raises questions about no-frills flying,” even though the Valujet accident represented the first-ever fatal crash of a low-cost airline. In the eighteen years since deregulation several dozen discount airlines had come into existence and flown billions of miles without a fatality. Far from raising safety concerns, by stimulating people to fly instead of drive, cut-rate airlines saved lives—approximately 190 to 275 per year, according to a study in the journal Accident Analysis and
Prevention.
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Still, Time was far from alone in implying that price reductions and reduced safety may go hand in hand. Scores of newspapers and every major TV network ran stories proffering this theory. Prominent among them was a story in the
Chicago
Tribune, widely referenced by other news outlets, which leaked a draft of a forthcoming report from the FAA. Low-cost carriers have significantly higher accident rates than full-fare airlines, the report seemed to suggest. In point of fact, however, as FAA officials promptly demonstrated by releasing the final version of the report and the data on which it was based, no such trend exists. On the contrary, ten of the fourteen discount carriers had no
serious accidents in a recent five-year period, and the largest of them, Southwest, had not had a fatality in its entire twenty-four years of operation. A couple of the carriers, Valujet being one, had higher-than-average accident rates, but as a group, the safety record for the discounters was about the same as that of the major airlines.
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FAA administrators, besides releasing the report, stated decisively that there is no relationship between ticket prices and safety standards. But reporters had already left a different impression. A poll conducted during this period found that while most Americans had confidence in the safety of the major airlines, 57 percent had concerns about the discounters. The results of the poll, conducted by CNN and Time, were widely publicized, further legitimating fears about budget carriers by giving the impression that such fears are normal and provoking significant decreases in business at many small and low-priced airlines for months.
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Even while she still worked as inspector general, Mary Schiavo bolstered those fears in an alarmist article she wrote for
Newsweek.
Pumping up her own celebrity and in the same breath public concern, Schiavo boasted of taking her first flight at age ten and getting her pilot’s license at eighteen, then declared that of late, she was afraid to fly. In particular, she wrote, she stayed away from commuter planes, “marginal airlines,” and particular carriers she considered problematic, including Valujet. There’s “reason enough to worry” about the safety of commercial air travel, Schiavo cautioned.
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Two months later, following criticism from FAA officials, other aviation safety experts, and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, each of whom objected to Schiavo’s tendency to make incendiary comments in the press that undermined confidence in air safety, she resigned. But reporters continued to seek her out for comments in the months and years that followed. After TWA Flight 800, bound for Paris, went down shortly after takeoff from JFK in July, Schiavo became something of a fixture in TV and print news coverage. There, as well as in
Flying
Blind,
Flying
Safe, a best-selling book she published the next year, Schiavo tossed out a range of reasons to worry about air travel. She could no longer monger precisely the same scares she had
been pushing—TWA was a long-established, full-price airline—but she suggested nonetheless that Flight 800 might have gone down owing to “a bogus part sold to the airline by shady dealers” or “an incompetent mechanic [who] missed something.” And Schiavo joined a cacophony of voices that speculated a bomb had caused the TWA disaster.
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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.”
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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)
.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 were one of those All-American families that we’re all going to miss,” a neighbor quoted in
USA
Today put it. “My God,” the children’s aunt exclaimed in the same heartrending article, “they’ll never experience prom, or marriage, or babies. Their whole future has been taken away.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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