The Culture of Fear (30 page)

Another error journalists sometimes make is to report a statistic out of context.
U.S. News & World Report,
in a cover story in June 1995, reported that “last year alone ... 269 people lost their lives,” thereby implying that the nation’s skies were becoming more dangerous. Yet just three years earlier, in 1992, only thirty-three people had died in air crashes, and three years later, in 1998, no one would die.
⁴

Foul-ups like these are exceptions, however. By and large the news media, the Post and U.S. News included, make sure their readers know that, overall, the safety statistics for America’s airlines are impressive. Yet amazingly enough, the media promote fears of flying nonetheless. They acknowledge that a person is ten times more likely to die in his or her bathtub than in an airplane accident and yet run stories titled “Air Safety—Under a Cloud” (Time) and “High Anxiety in the Skies” (
USA Today
). Many times, in the very same article or TV news segment a reporter will note the minuscule risk of injury or death in air travel
and
proclaim there is serious reason to worry should we dare to step aboard an airplane.
⁵

This chapter is about how journalists and the people they quote accomplish this extraordinary feat of illogic. I reviewed the coverage of airline safety in the nation’s major newspapers, magazines, and television networks over a recent three-year period—1994 through 1996—and found journalists grouping together isolated incidents, depicting them as dangerous trends, and allowing those pseudotrends to overshadow the larger reality of the safety of air travel.

Air travel may be safe in general, but journalists would like you to believe that particular categories of airlines, or individual carriers, are hazardous to your health. Unfortunately, that message casts doubt over
all
air travel.

Prior to fall 1994 few fretted over the airworthiness of USAir, a leading carrier that had flown several million flights with only a handful of crashes. Yet after one of its jets went down near Pittsburgh, killing all 132 people onboard, numerous reporters depicted the accident as “the airline’s fifth crash in as many years” and observed that all three of the most recent fatal air crashes of regularly scheduled airlines were USAir flights.
⁶

To regain consumer confidence USAir eventually had to appoint a former Air Force general as “Vice President for Safety” and spend more than $1 million in advertising. Yet the succession of accidents was probably a chance occurrence, as Gina Kolata wrote in the
New
York Times. Kolata used as a main source for her article a professor of statistics at MIT named Arnold Barnett. By comparing the safety records of major airlines during three ten-year periods (1973—1983, 1978-1988, and 1983—1993), Barnett had determined that differences in safety records between airlines are statistically insignificant. “The first-ranked airline was different in all three periods and, strikingly, the airline that was best in one period always fell in the bottom half of the rankings in the other two,” Barnett had written in an article in the journal Technology
Review.
⁷

Barnett scolded the International Airline Passengers Association (IAPA), an advocacy organization that frequently received favorable attention from the media, when it issued alerts about the hazards of air travel. (Never mind that the IAPA sold flight insurance to passengers and had a stake in fostering their unease.) A rating system the IAPA devised in 1993, which divided up the airlines according to their accident records, was practically worthless, Barnett suggested. The data the association used “provide a pitifully tenuous basis for putting airlines into two distinct categories—a point that was overlooked both by IAPA’s analysts and by the newspapers that publicized their results,” wrote Barnett.
⁸

Yet criticism from Barnett and other aviation safety experts failed to dissuade the news media from taking IAPA pronouncements seriously. When the association spread another scare in late 1994 it received even greater attention. Here’s how
USA
Today began its front-page story: “Steer clear of commuter planes with fewer than 30 seats and ‘don’t
even consider flying them at night or in bad weather,’ warns a consumer group.” The IAPA’s alarmist recommendation, coming on the heels of several commuter airline crashes, made its way into other major newspapers as well and was the lead story on the CBS evening news.
⁹

No sooner had the unmerited uproar over USAir died down than this new panic began. Now, not just one airline, but an entire sector of the nation’s air transport system was deemed unsafe—and, again, for no good reason. As Federal Aviation Administration officials quickly pointed out, accident rates for commuter airlines were almost identical to those of the major carriers once you remove Alaskan bush flights, air taxis, and helicopters from the IAPA’s analysis.

Some news organizations in the coming days and weeks did report this fact and include comments from critics of the IAPA. They did so, however, while continuing to monger fears about commuter air travel. “It’s not against [IAPA’s] financial interests to make people worried,” Time quoted a transportation expert at Northwestern University saying. “But,” the article went on to say, “government officials were also becoming increasingly concerned” about commuter air safety—this in spite of unambiguous statements from FAA officials to the contrary. Accident rates for commuter aircraft, FAA data showed, had remained steady in the past three years; a praiseworthy accomplishment considering that the number of passengers traveling on small planes had increased by about 40 percent during that time.
¹⁰

To come up with evidence of unsafety at commuter airlines reporters had to dig deep. Richard Newman of
U.S. News & World Report,
for instance, in a cover article titled “How Safe Are Small Planes?” warned of something he dubbed “pay-your-way piloting.” “More than a dozen regional airlines require would-be pilots to pay for their own training, which can cost up to about $9,000,” Newman revealed. According to the head of a pilots’ union quoted in the article, “Little Lord Fauntleroy can get a job as a pilot, while more skilled candidates may not have $9,000 for training.”
¹¹

Many surgeons of course pay for their own training too, and no one questions them on that account or opts to be operated on only by those
who received scholarships. But ‘pay-your-way piloting’ was just one in an unending barrage of pseudoshocking realities about commuter airlines the news media tossed out in late 1994. During the final three months of that year exposes by the dozens came out in newspapers and magazines, and network TV newsmagazines ran sixteen segments on the presumed perils of commuter air travel. “From the news coverage of recent aviation accidents,” Stephen Chapman, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune suggested in December, “most Americans presumably now believe that traveling by commuter airliner is roughly as hazardous as jumping out of a 25th floor window into a toxic waste tank full of crocodiles while smoking an unfiltered cigarette.”
¹²

At least in 1994 reporters were responding to actual domestic air disasters. In the following year the only fatal crash of a U.S. airliner occurred late in December, when an American Airlines jet smashed into a mountain in Colombia. Yet the media managed to find a pretense for keeping the fear of flying alive in 1995. They wrote exposes about the government agency charged with safeguarding air travel. The FAA, journalists repeatedly asserted, operates with a “tombstone mentality.” Its officials agree to tighten safety standards only when forced to do so by the publicity surrounding fatal accidents.
¹³

In reality the FAA had mandated scores of safety requirements over the years, only a small proportion of which were in response to pressures following particular accidents. True enough, before putting a new rule in place the FAA conducted a cost-benefit analysis to assess whether enough lives and property would be saved to justify the cost of the regulation. Described in a certain way such reasoning can sound almost immoral. Instead of immediately mandating a reform they know will prevent fatalities, officials look at ten or twenty years’ worth of accident data and extrapolate the number of lives likely to be lost in the future. They then multiply that number by the government’s estimated value of a life ($2.6 million last I checked), add the expected dollar figure for property loss, and compare the result to the price tag for the
new regulation. If the safety rule costs more than the value of the lives and property it will save, the agency may opt to let some people die.

Reporters could not avoid the temptation to juxtapose this impersonal process with poignant comments from actual women and men who had lost loved ones in crashes that could have been averted had the FAA not engaged in cost-benefit analysis. Not surprisingly, the agency did not come out looking good. But it makes no sense to impose every regulation that might save a life, regardless of cost. For one thing, each time the FAA institutes a new requirement the money has to come from somewhere. Mostly it comes from higher airline ticket prices, which in turn may prevent some people from traveling at all and push others to take to the highways, where they face greater risk of death or injury.
¹⁴

Consider child safety seats, one of the media’s poster children for the evils of cost-benefit analysis. “When it comes to federal regulation of the airlines, safety experts have known for years that child safety seats could help save lives. Yet even today the airlines have more safety rules about your luggage than about your child. How could this be?” demanded Connie Chung on CBS’s “Evening News.” “You can’t hold your laptop computer on your lap, but we’ve seen in accidents, a 33-pound child allowed to be loose in the cabin,” someone from the National Transportation Safety Board declared in the report that followed, which included no rejoinder from FAA officials. “Requiring safety seats is too costly, says the FAA” is all that CBS presented of the other side of what is actually a legitimate dispute. Regulations to require safety seats would have cost about $1 billion to implement—an amount that almost certainly would save more lives if spent on other airline safety measures.
¹⁵

Reports on CBS and elsewhere in the media centered on the tragic deaths of two babies—one in an airplane accident in 1990, the other in 1994—and gave the impression that these deaths were merely two among many. In fact, as near as I can determine, they were about the only fatalities in the past several years that experts believe would have been prevented had safety seats been required. Indeed, a rule mandating child seats might well have resulted in a greater number of deaths.
Were passengers forced to buy separate tickets for their children rather than carry them on their laps, some parents, unable or unwilling to bear the additional cost, would have driven rather than flown. And while proponents of safety seats are correct to point out that people who have children in their cars tend to drive more safely than the average motorist, even for careful drivers the risk of death is greater in a car than in a plane.
¹⁶

A second major scare the media promoted in 1995 likewise lacked a sense of proportion and got pinned on the FAA. Each year 26 million airplane parts are replaced, and every part must, by law, carry paperwork certifying that it has been manufactured in accordance with strict FAA standards. With such volume of activity it would be extraordinary if no corruption entered into the production and certification process, particularly given the fact that fakes of many of the simpler parts, such as bolts and blades, can be produced for a few bucks and sold for ten to one hundred times as much. And sure enough, reporters got great copy from self-described “aircraft parts consultants” who regaled them with accounts of machinists who shine up old parts and sell them back to airlines. Strip-and-dip operations, as they are colorfully called.

Mary Schiavo, the inspector general of the Department of Transportation (of which the FAA is a part), also served up some choice quotes. “We shouldn’t have to wait for another plane to drop out of the sky for the FAA to take action,” she is fond of saying. Having made something of a professional fetish out of spare airline parts since her arrival in 1990—sometimes devoting more than half of her staff of investigators to the matter—Schiavo brought scads of shocking stories and bogus parts with her when she testified before Congress or the news media.
¹⁷

Only one major crash had been attributed to a counterfeit part. In 1989 a Norwegian charter flight with fifty-five people aboard ended up in the North Sea after bolts in its tail section broke apart. Pictures of
that airplane, which had been recovered in pieces and painstakingly reassembled in a hanger, served as the principal illustrations for several scare stories, including ABC’s newsmagazine, “Primetime.” Brian Ross, identified on screen as “ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent,” flew to Norway and had himself filmed beside the plane. There were, said Ross, many more defective parts in the aviation pipeline, “parts that could be putting thousands of lives at risk, raising serious questions about just how good a job the FAA is doing on a critical safety issue.”
¹⁸

Ross’s report was enough to make you reach for a life jacket, but the operative word is
could
Thousands of lives might have been put at risk. The FAA may have been doing a lousy job. But apparently, neither is the case. Were the problem as serious as Ross and Schiavo suggest, how come more than a half million flights are completed every week without incident?
¹⁹

The level of illogic was high in news coverage of the bogus parts issue, but the story had legs. In June 1996, a year and a half after the “Primetime” segment aired, the reconstructed Norwegian plane appeared in the U.S. press again. A photo of it filled nearly half a page in a Business Week cover story titled, “Warning! Bogus parts have turned up in commercial jets. Where’s the FAA?” Largely a rehash of material contained in earlier TV and print reports, the article did have a new hook. A Valujet airliner had crashed a few weeks earlier in Florida, killing 110 people. By means of some fancy word work, Business
Week’s
reporter, Willy Stern, connected the bogus parts issue to that crash.