One of Michael Crichton’s lesser known novels titled Airframe from 1996 is about an aircraft accident that turns out to be less obvious and more involved than it appears at first blush. Among other things in Airframe Crichton basically dramatizes the skewed perception and framing of complex events that a culture of spectacle promotes.

The fact that air travel is one of the safest mode of transportation doesn’t change the fact that it is regarded by most people as anything but—owing in large part of course to the absence of ground under our feet but also to the sensationalist reporting of accidents and incidents by the media that stoke anxieties and irrational fears about air travel.

The way Crichton describes the role of the media in shaping public perception of such multifactorial events as aviation incidents may actually be more resonant today than it was at the time of the writing of the novel (think of the more conservative voices in the culture or of scientists questioning the so called scientific consensus these days).

To wit:

Talking to a reporter these days was like a deadly chess match; you had to think several steps ahead; you had to imagine all the possible ways a reporter might distort your statement. The atmosphere was relentlessly adversarial.

It hadn’t always been that way. There was a time when reporters wanted information, their questions directed to an underlying event. They wanted an accurate picture of a situation, and to do that they had to make the effort to see things your way, to understand how you were thinking about it. They might not agree with you in the end, but it was a matter of pride that they could accurately state your view, before rejecting it. The interviewing process was not very personal, because the focus was on the event they were trying to understand.

But now reporters came to the story with the lead fixed in their minds; they saw their job as proving what they already knew. They didn’t want information so much as evidence of villainy. In this mode, they were openly skeptical of your point of view, since they assumed you were just being evasive. They proceeded from a presumption of universal guilt, in an atmosphere of muted hostility and suspicion. This new mode was intensely personal: they wanted to trip you up, to catch you in a small error, or in a foolish statement—or just a phrase that could be taken out of context and made to look silly or insensitive.

Because the focus was so personal, the reporters asked continuously for personal speculations. Do you think an event will be damaging? Do you think the company will suffer? Such speculation had been irrelevant to the earlier generation of reporters, who focused on the underlying events. Modem journalism was intensely subjective—”interpretive”— and speculation was its lifeblood.

That is how Crichton describes the challenges that the spokesperson for the aerospace company faces in doing an interview with an investigative journalist. And this is how he describes the MO of the producer of the TV segment about the damaged aircraft in question:

What she was looking for was a way to shape the story so that it unfolded now, in a pattern that the viewer could follow. The best frames engaged the viewer by presenting the story as a conflict between good and bad, a morality story. Because the audience got that. If you framed a story that way, you got instant acceptance. You were speaking their language.

Without a doubt, nowadays the morality tale is the main flavor of the day… Here is an example of what one ought not articulate 👇