In today’s Salon, Patrick”Ask the pilot” Smith had a blistering commentary on the media coverage of aviation:
“On Dec. 20 I awoke to a front-page story in the Boston Globe about a Midwest Airlines jetliner that had returned to Boston’s Logan Airport the previous evening after a minor problem. To my astonishment, I learned that the landing had garnered live coverage on both CNN and MSNBC.
The incident was described — in the Globe and many other places — as an ’emergency landing.’ It was not. The Midwest crew never declared an emergency and requested no special attention from airport authorities. Massport, the landlord for Logan, dispatched vehicles on its own behest, just in case. […]
From a pilot’s point of view, the Midwest ballyhoo was irritatingly similar to the one involving JetBlue three months prior. In both cases, chances of the aircraft failing to land safely were negligible. No matter, it is quickly becoming a phenomenon that any time an aircraft makes an unscheduled touchdown, regardless of how insignificant the trouble, it is carried live on network TV and splashed across the front page.
Last I checked, humanity has been flying for more than a century now, yet we seem to affect a Dark Ages mentality any time we get around airplanes. The how and why of this ignorance falls on several shoulders, but clearly the media, for its part, has lost all grip, spinning situations that present little threat of serious injury as real-time dramas of impending calamity.”
I think it’s quite clear where this “Dark Ages mentality” actually comes from. It’s from the confluence of two characteristics which permeate western society: an obsessive voyeurism, and a love-hate relationship with fear.
The voyeur aspect is easy to understand. Television has turned us all into obsessive voyeurs. It used to be about entertainment: about a relaxing and enjoyable distraction from everyday life. These days, we need to cut out the middle-man – the author, playwright, or actor – and experience Everything. Life. Reality. We can’t bear the thought of missing anything. It’s almost a competitive things: we judge ourselves on the speed of our lives, and the rapidity with which we can acquire information and sensations. We want to be the people telling the story, not hearing it. So we disintermediate the world and watch it.
And this is obviously related to our attitude to fear. FDR may have talked about the fear of “fear itself”, but today we seem to embrace fear, in a horrified fascination. No matter how distant or unlikely some incident might be, we import it into our lives. A child falls down a drain: all drains must be dangerous. A bomb goes off in a distant city, and every small town goes on alert. And if there’s not a real source of fear, we manufacture one, and call it a “reality” TV show.
When we obsess about fear, our judgement is distorted. We look for sources of reassurance. TV knows this, which is why broadcasters seek to create compelling opportunities for fearful voyeurism. It sells. Politicians know this too: witness the cynical manipulation of the “threat level” by Bush and Blair.
There have always been “I remember where I was” incidents. The Kennedy assassinations. Neil Armstrong’s giant step. Princess Di. 9/11. We are coming to anticipate them, to live our lives as rehearsals for those grand punctuations. And the logical conclusion of this is that we want to be there – or at least to be a voyeur.
I fear that it comes down to this. We have become convinced that we live in a horribly dangerous and unpredictable world. We cannot distance ourselves from it, we are convinced that it will touch us. We know that somewhere, some time, an unsuspecting group of people is going to die – suddenly, violently. Of course we don’t want it to happen, but we are convinced that it will. And when it happens, we want to watch it live, on TV.
