Public Thoughts on Airliners Are Heavily Influenced By The Media, Though They Remain Relatively Unaware of Media Influence; This Can Be Fixed With Education on Aircraft

• People's images of flight and its safety are heavily influenced by the images shown in the media after plane crashes.
• Despite the heavy influence of these images, most people believe that the images shown in the media have little to no effect on their perception of aircraft.
• This influence is easily reduced or done away with by education on the aircraft and the amount of thought and math that goes into keeping them safely in the air.

Images Shown in the Media Stick in People's Minds, Influencing Their Thoughts on the Safety of Aircraft

When shown images of crashed aircraft, people tend to respond emotionally. The media has become very good at selecting images carefully to remind people of the passengers inside the plane, and more importantly, making it seem like this is the norm, rather than an extremely rare occurrence. They generate images specifically designed to stay with you all day, and to influence your opinion of the topic. As seen in the video to the right, these images are often quite graphic, and even using the dead or injured to increase their effect. 

Even when people can escape the effects of these particular images, the stories themselves stay with the viewer, and can cause people to think of planes as less safe than they are. While The Guardian says that planes average about one crash in 2.4 million flights (as comparison, this is less than the odds of dying from an asteroid strike), especially when, as that article discusses, several crashes happen within a short period of time. Additionally, even without these particular graphic images, the first examples people think of when they think of aircraft, and particularly crashes, are always the images shown in the media of the crashed airplanes, or the airplanes that are on their way to crashing. The increasing amount of data about a given crash available to the media has only increased their ability to show these emotionally charged and influential data, and to maximize that impact. 

One interviewee references the "dash cam footage," or footage from a camera that sees what the pilot is seeing, of the plane as it crashed into a river. The media now has the power to make people feel as if they themselves are in the cockpit of an aircraft as it crashes, which only increases the emotional power of the images they're displaying. Additionally, access to the cockpit recorders gives them the ability to let the public know what the pilots were thinking before crashes. Pilots sometimes panic before a crash, and the audio from this, when added to dash cam footage, can produce the image of pilots, people who often hold our lives in their hands, as people who panic in dangerous situations or even people who deliberately crash or nearly crash planes. Additionally, they often run stories about pilots who try to fly drunk, something that doesn't occur very often, but shows up in the news every time it occurs. These images of airplanes as frequently crashing death traps, and of pilots as suicidal and incompetent drunkards, can combine to make people fear for their safety when flying. Despite all data pointing to the opposite, people retain these images, and 16 of 104 people surveyed reported their fear levels as a five or above on a scale from zero to 10 (my survey). Clearly, the media is manipulating the public opinion of aircraft very effectively.

People Still Believe That Their Opinions Remain Uninfluenced by The Media 

Perspective Change (Scale: 0-10)

Even though the media has heavily influenced people's opinions of aircraft, people remain relatively oblivious when it comes to this influence. The same survey from above revealed that half of those surveyed believed that, on a scale from zero to 10, media coverage of aircraft, their perspective change rated a zero or a one (little to no change), and only seven people rated it higher than a five. No one at all thought their change was a nine or 10, despite the videos above indicating that their perspectives were clearly heavily influenced by the media. People clearly indicated that they were following media coverage of theses crashes fairly carefully, and more than half indicated that their knowledge of a recent crash was a five or higher. 

Knowledge of Crashes (0-10)

While this knowledge is certainly good (the right to know is useless if it is not exercised) this exposes them to far greater influence from the media, whether from the photos they choose to show, the audio clips they play, even just the particular words they use to describe a particular incident, everything is being used to make an audience see things the way the given media source wants the viewers to see them. Especially when people use social media such as Facebook and Twitter to get their news, even slightly biased coverage can heavily shape a viewer's opinion of the events, or people involved in the given events. Unfortunately, while people are quite good at exercising their right to know about any given event that affects them, this exercise leaves them open to the media's influence, and as we've shown, people are not good at telling when they're being influenced by the media.

This Influence Can Be Countered Effectively With Education

While people are very easily influenced, education about aircraft and how they work counters this influence very effectively. An interview (to the left) with an Aerospace Engineering Major at the University of Maryland reveals why this is the case. When people learn about the planes, they realize that planes are not the death traps that the media makes them out to be, and the entire narrative that the media constructs begins to unravel. When they realize just how safe planes are, the narrative itself falls apart. They realize that it's not, in the interviewee's words "dragon-like flight," but rather, carefully calculated, with safeguards and checklists built in at every point in a flight to make sure that nothing goes wrong, and that if something does,  there are procedures to cover virtually every possible occurrence.

Overall, while people are exercising their right to know, they're doing so in a way that leaves them wide open to media manipulation. The media takes full advantage of this opening, and gives people information that, while not biased, is framed in the way they want to make people think what they want. People are often unable to see this, and are left further open to this manipulation. However, with proper education about aircraft, and their design process, this influence can be mitigated. If we are to be informed media consumers, we must remain educated in the media we are consuming, or the  media will be able to control our opinions on everything they show.

Government Power to Exercise Prior Restraint on Materials Related to National Security Saves Lives

(Question #1)
On June 5, 2013, NSA contractor Edward Snowden gave classified documents revealing the size and abilities of the US and UK surveillance programs to The Guardian, a British newspaper. While he was widely hailed as a hero, Congressman Mike Rodgers, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee said he "would charge him for murder." When asked why, he elaborated that information Snowden had taken involved protection measures for US and UK soldiers, and that "it is more likely that one of those soldiers is going to get their legs blown off or killed because of his actions."

Snowden speaks at a ceremony in Russia (source: huffpost.com)

Releasing information that will result in people's deaths is no longer whistleblowing, and when those people are soldiers who are defending your country, you become, as Congressman Rodgers would later state in an interview "nothing less than a traitor." While the US and other countries are often unable to prevent leaks such as these from occurring, the government ability to prevent this information from reaching the public through the press, and even through social networking sites, enables them to save the lives that these reports would have cost.

The Public Right to Know Does Not Outweigh People's Lives

Data source: Huffpost.co.uk

Congressman Rodgers elaborated by stating that the vast majority of the intelligence that Snowden leaked was unrelated to surveillance programs, mostly to "tactical things, military plans and operations." He put the figure at "over 95%" unrelated information. However, by leaking all of it, he compromised those plans and operations, which meant that the enemy knew about them before they could be implemented. While the media does have its responsibility to work for the public's right to know, and it did have a source that gave it information for the public, revealing this data meant several things. Most importantly, it meant that all of these plans and operations were now known to the enemy, and for all intents and purposes, were useless. All of the suicide bombers who would have been captured, all of the bombs that would have been discovered, and all of the IED factories that would have been dismantled survived for longer simply because of this leak. It also meant that instead of spending its time searching for those who want to hurt and kill Americans, the NSA was forced to spend its time patching security leaks. Once again, that resulted in missed opportunities to both help America and defeat her enemies. Finally, it damaged peoples' confidence in the American intelligence apparatus, which results in reduced morale, and generally reduced feelings of security among the American populace.

The public does have the right to know what is going on in the world. Very few people will argue that this is not the case. But to say that the government should not have the power to regulate these releases when it comes to the matter of people's lives suggests that information is more important to the viewer than the lives of those who die or are injured by these releases. At that point it is no longer a question of rights but a question of ethics, and exposing information that will lead to deaths and life threatening injuries is at the very least unethical, and should be illegal.

The Public Right to Know is Not Compromised by Prior Restraint Exercise

Source: USMM.org

The Director of the NSA, General Keith Alexander, argued that this information must be kept from the public because if the information is given to the public, it is given to "the terrorists". He cited, as an example, the breaking of the German Enigma code in World War II. The Allies broke the Enigma code early in the war, but Karl Donitz, the German Naval Commander, added in extra security measures in1942. Over the next nine months, Allied codebreakers worked tirelessly to break the code, but in the meantime, German U boats were able to sink far more ships than at any other point in the war, killing many people, and destroying goods that could have saved many lives. When that extra security measure was finally broken, that fact was kept a closely guarded secret, because had the Germans known, far more people would have lost their lives.

General Alexander stated that "If there was a way to tell the American people without telling the terrorists, we would do it." This statement encapsulates the issue perfectly. This is a situation in which the right to know comes in direct conflict with others' right to life, and the only way to resolve that is to put the right to life ahead of the right to know, because to do anything else is to tell the dead that their lives were not worth living. This kind of prioritizing does not compromise the right to know, it simply places it below the right to life.

Overall, while the public does have a right to know, the government needs to be able to limit what the media can say with respect to national security in order to save lives, and as such, should certainly have more power to exercise prior restraint with respect to items of interest to national security. While this is often unpalatable, to do otherwise is to put our desire to know ahead of others' lives, and to do so would be unethical, immoral, and hopefully illegal. The right to know if an important foundation of any democratic society, but it does not override the most important right of all, that of life.

Media And Airplanes

Source: CNN.com

This image is by far the most explanatory. It has its primary element, the fire and smoke, which on its own tells us something bad is happening. Then we have the secondary element, which tells us that passengers of something are dead, which gives us clues that it's probably a plane crash, and finally, the tertiary element, on the bottom, tell us that action is being taken regarding the situation in the image. 

Source: CNN.com

The next image is a screenshot from a video that was widely circulated by the media after a plane crash in Taipei. This one tells us that a plane is flying extremely close to the ground as a primary element, while the secondary element, the buildings in the background, tell us that this is close to a city, we don't know for a fact that the plane is crashing, or where this is, or much else about what's going on, besides that a plane is sideways and flying over a street.

This final photo is the least explanatory. It has only one element, the plane, and doesn't even tell us what the plane is doing. It could be taking off, it could be landing. We know it's a Germanwings plane, but beyond that, we know basically nothing about it, who's on it, what it's doing, or if there's anything special about it.

I'm Josh, and I'm a freshman Aerospace Engineering Major at the University of Engineering. My interests include baseball, aircraft, the US Navy, and running. I enjoy speedsolving Rubik's Cubes in my free time, and hope to be able to solve one in less than 15 seconds by the end of the year. In this class, I hope to learn to effectively utilize social media to reach a wide audience with ideas and designs.