The radio said, “What happened in the terrifying last minutes of Germanwings…” I don’t know how it went from there, because I turned it off.
The media coverage of the latest air disaster, like the many that preceded it, is all wrapped up in an unspoken contract: this is stuff of serious interest. This is important reporting. Even the usually staid NPR dispatched a reporter to the gliding club where the co-pilot who took 150 unwilling participants on his suicide ride first learned to fly. How many of us are really interested in what people might have to say there? Is this truly important or useful reporting? Would an anecdote or two provide the route to understanding the man’s psyche, or comprehending just how awful it would be to find yourself among those unfortunate souls?
Because that’s what all the media coverage does in the end: we hear about the terrible scenario that unfolded, and we imagine ourselves in it. Maybe we don’t all do that, but I’ll wager nearly all of us do.
Me, I do it really, really well. I’m not a white-knuckle flyer. For years, I’ve been more of a “if St. Brendan really crossed the Atlantic in a leather boat, surely I can get to Europe without a plane” non-flyer. I have, all the same, signed on for a flight to Ireland in April. I don’t want to hear about anybody’s last-minute terror. I’m hardly alone in my anxiety. By some estimates, as many as one out of three airline passengers experiences anxiety around flying. That’s a lot of people.
The media shouldn’t arrange its reporting in order to avoid triggering anxious flyers, of course, but reporters should, at the very least, have some idea what they’re talking about and avoid getting caught up in speculation and extracting stories from barely relevant minutiae.
What can we really know about the last minutes of passengers aboard that Germanwings flight? The co-pilot didn’t announce his intentions, and the plane wasn’t doing anything particularly unusual for most of its descent. All we know is what a cockpit recorder can tell us: some passengers eventually knew what was happening. Reporting anything beyond that limited window into the reality is irresponsible speculation that doesn’t add anything to the conversation except an unhealthy dose of vicarious horror. Do any of us really need that?
Talk to Capt. Tom Bunn, a 30-year airline pilot, former fighter pilot, and psychologist who runs a Connecticut-based fear of flying program called SOAR, and you understand what happens once we’ve heard enough crash stories: our database of easily imagined scenes of horror can get too big to manage.
“The media causes great unnecessary distress,” Bunn says. “First, few people in the media know enough about aviation to report factually. Second, sensationalized reporting gets more attention than factual information.”
Speculation and misinformation don’t just make for poor stories. “When [people] run through a scenario in imagination and imagine it as life-threatening, they teach the amygdala to regard that situation as life-threatening. The person may, depending upon how vivid their imagination is, produce ‘vicarious traumatization’ such that when they later are in a similar situation, they may have trained the amygdala to react to a benign situation and release stress hormones unnecessarily, as though it were life-threatening,” Bunn says. “That may prevent them from doing something that is quite safe, as flying, of course, is.”
He’s right. Flying really is safe. It’s much safer than driving. For some of us, it just doesn’t feel safe to fly. Then again, there’s no international media frenzy around the steady click of everyday highway fatalities. There are no reports with shaky interviewees who almost got in the passenger seat of the doomed grocery store drive.
There are well-informed voices in the media. Capt. Bunn and other pilots have lately shown up in national coverage. But the driving force of too many stories of the Germanwings disaster hasn’t been the imparting of sober information; stories have instead focused on the human drama. It makes for gripping reading, but it distorts the context and leaves aside the clear reality. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people take flights and don’t die horrifically. Flying, particularly in Europe and the U.S., is the safest it’s ever been.
Next time I hear a story about the terrifying last minutes of a flight, I’ll turn that one off, too. There’s something Tom Bunn likes to point out to anxious flyers like me. It’s the one I’ll be thinking of when I buckle in to go to Europe: Flying, no matter what happens in inevitable, over-hyped tragedies, is safer than sleeping in your bed. Really.
Media coverage of disasters, even disasters that push a lot of people’s internal panic buttons, really can be useful. Shining a light on incompetence, corporate misbehavior, or problems in need of fixing is a worthy undertaking. But breathless, hyperbolic, and speculative reporting? That, too, is incompetence, corporate misbehavior, and a problem in need of fixing.•
James Heflin can be contacted at jheflin@valleyadvocate.com
