Now that this has quietened down a little, I thought I might make some observations on the media and its relationship to aviation accidents, and to pprune. I have played both sides of the street, having been a newsdesk executive on several Fleet Street newspapers as well as being a pilot. I have never been a commercial pilot, but have worked as a helicopter instructor.
It is no use railing at the foolishness of the media, or expecting it not to speculate on the causes of accidents. With precious few exceptions, broadcast and print media are profoundly ignorant not just of aviation, but of all specialist subjects. The halcyon days of the air correspondent gave way in the 1960s and 70s to the ‘aviation correspondent’ whose brief was largely to cover the emerging package holiday industry; a survey in the mid 1990s showed that not a single aviation correspondent in Fleet Street could fly a plane.
Newspapers must be filled, and broadcast journalists must avoid the nightmare of ‘dead air’. A major incident is meat and drink; in 35 years in the business I can remember only one instance in a newsroom where journalists were personally affected by the story they were writing, and that was Dunblane. The media will go mob-handed to the scene, it will trawl the cuttings library for previous similar events, and it will speculate. Every hack has a contacts book of honest-to-goodness experts who will stand up on their hind legs at a moment’s notice and pronounce on any given subject, not always for money. As a rule of thumb, whenever you read the word ‘expert’ in a newspaper or hear it on TV, reach for your revolver.
There are honourable exceptions, but few. Everyone in Fleet Street has David Learmount’s number. He does an excellent job of fulfilling the requirement for a talking head while avoiding speculation and leaving few hostages to fortune. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk, but if he were not on air, they would find someone less qualified. If you really want to improve matters, then you need good to drive out bad; I’ve often thought BALPA might provide such a service, having someone with media savvy to satisfy the cravings of the beast, while making it plain that the only certainty in an aircraft accident is that the initial speculation will be wrong.
Those who want the media to ‘clean up its act’ must first reflect on the difficulty of cleaning up pprune. After the media, the prattling poster is the target in most accident threads. Much can be done here. I think the lumping together of ‘rumours’ and ‘news’ is unconscionable. You can’t expect newspapers to separate the two when pprune blatantly treats them as one. I also believe that anonymity is a profound mistake. There may be occasional instances where it is justified, but they are few and far between. Anonymity encourages those who know least but have most to say. Every one of us can take action to improve pprune on that score.