The Culture of Fear (32 page)

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

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 average, when a company is inspected by OSHA and slapped with a penalty, the injury rate at the firm declines by 20 percent over the following three years. But with only 2,000 inspectors to oversee 6 million workplaces, OSHA was in a position to inspect the average American work site once a century.
⁴¹

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

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 wrecks compelling, why don’t reporters flock to other sites where those elements are present? (Understaffed emergency rooms in public hospitals come to mind, as do encampments of homeless women and children, and hazardous worksites.)
⁴⁶

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?”
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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.

It would be wrong to imply that the interests and experiences of those who oversee news organizations determine the content of the media. It would be equally wrong, however, to pretend that those interests and experiences have nothing to do with which hazards and categories of victims are favored by the news media. As media consumers, we are well advised to take note of those interests and apply a correction factor. K. C. Cole, a science writer for the Los Angeles Times, made the crucial point. When President Clinton gave $1 billion to improve airport security following the TWA Flight 800 crash, Cole found herself cheering. “As a fearful flier myself, I figure I can use all the help I can get,” she wrote. “But I also know that dozens of 747s worth of children throughout the world die every day due to easily preventable causes like hunger and disease. The price of lives lost on airlines is clearly higher—according to the powers that be—than lives lost to simple hunger.”
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I
n the course of my research, as I read frightening stories in newspapers and magazines or watched them on TV, periodically I thought to myself,
it’s
1938
all over again.

To be sure, there are major differences between the instances of fear mongering I have discussed and the CBS radio broadcast on Halloween night that year. Orson Welles’s adaptation of War of the Worlds, the H. G. Wells novel about an invasion from Mars, was entirely fictional, and although it generated what newspapers later described as a “tidal wave of terror that swept the nation,” the scare was short-lived. Within hours anyone who had been taken in by the performance learned the truth from friends or from announcements on the radio.
¹

Still, resemblances to latter-day scares are striking. The invaders in “War of the Worlds” were barely more alien, fictitious, or threatening than the “bio-underclass” of crack babies we were told would decimate the nation’s schools and urban neighborhoods. Or the legions of “illegitimate” children said to represent “a national security issue” (Washington Post). Or teen “superpredators” for whom “life means nothing” (
Newsweek
) and against whom our president warned we had better act promptly “or our country is going to be living with chaos.” Or for that matter, young black men, the very thought of whom terrifies many Americans and motivates them to support the building of more and bigger prisons.
²

The pressing question is the same now as it was in 1938: Why do people embrace improbable pronouncements? How did listeners to “War of the Worlds” manage to disregard four announcements during the broadcast that identified the program as a radio play? Why do people today believe in the existence of mysterious new illnesses even when medical scientists say they do not exist? Why do we entertain
preposterous claims about husband abuse, granny dumping, or the middle-class romance with heroin?