Clueless in the Capital.

• Author: KETTL, DONALD F.
• Position: Media, Congress lag in facts about disasters, accidents

Reporters get the right story wrong--and academics tune out.

In May 1996, ValuJet Flight 592, Its cabin full of smoke and its crew struggling to maintain control, spiraled out of the sky and into the Everglades. The crash claimed 110 lives and sparked intense soul-searching: How could such a thing have happened?

"Dateline NBC," after a three-month investigation, devoted much of its May 9, 1997 show to providing an answer. Reporter Chris Hansen concluded "our government did not do enough to protect us. It failed to implement the recommendations of its safety experts. It failed to warn us about dangers it knew of well before the crash. And one year after Flight 592 crashed here in the Florida everglades, it has failed to make sure that a similar accident cannot happen again?" The segment then presented an interview with a former FAA official who bluntly argued, "I would probably favor listing the FAA as directly causing the accident."

That, however, was far from the whole story. ValuJet had long been a troubled airline. It had flown with broken or missing equipment, and it had suffered a string of mishaps, including an engine that burst into flames before takeoff and planes that overran runways on three separate occasions. In the case of Flight 592, the fire was caused by highly volatile oxygen generators--canisters that supply oxygen to passengers "in the unlikely event of a loss of cabin pressure," as the boarding announcements say. The airline's maintenance contractor had mislabeled them as empty, had failed to install required safety caps, and then failed to pack them properly for shipment. A spark started a fire, and the oxygen generators quickly turned it into a smoky inferno that brought down the plane. The immediate cause of the crash, in other words, was the failure of both a private-sector airline and its private-sector contractor to follow government rules already on the books.

The same thing happened when "CBS This Morning" investigated the 1993 outbreak of food poisoning in Oregon "Jack-in-the-Box" hamburger restaurants. Co-host Paula Zahn asked, "So who is to blame for this food poisoning?" Her guest, Tom Devine from the Government Accountability Project, replied simply, "For the last decade, the Department of Agriculture has been gutting its food-inspection program and the bureaucrats have been asking for it." In fact, however, the outbreak occurred because the restaurants failed to cook the burgers thoroughly.

In both cases, the government surely could have done a much better job. Post-crash investigations pointed to the FAA's problems in regulating the safety of start-up airlines. The USDA has struggled for years to improve its "sniff-and-poke" meat inspection system. Turning up the heat improves the odds that government will focus more on such important issues. In both cases, though, it made a better television story to pin the entire blame on the government. The "gotcha" got the air time, and in the process an important part of the story was lost: the difficulty of equipping government to deal with fast-changing conditions in the private sector, and the private sector's reluctance to abide by the rules.

Switch to the academic side of the street. The Clinton administration has been trying to reinvent the federal government since early in 1993. New ideas, from customer service to employee empowerment, have flooded out of Vice President Gore's office. When asked about which academics they relied on for insights, though, Elaine Kamarck, Gore's senior domestic policy adviser, paused, thought carefully, and replied, "Well, really--none?"

These vignettes sketch a recurring problem. When it comes to what government really does, the news media often latch onto exactly the right story in precisely the wrong way. The real stories are often far more complex, much more textured, and infinitely more interesting than what television, in particular, can easily capture. Academics, especially those whose job it is to think about how to make government work better, often miss what government is really doing. In their search for academic respectability and career-enhancing breakthroughs, they tend to write for each other and to avoid the hot-button stories altogether. As a result, when a story like the ValuJet crash breaks, the full explanation sometimes never emerges--and the underlying causes of the problem are that much more likely to linger.

The Scandal Chase

"It's all consistent with covering politics as a game, a forum for celebrity life, and a place for scandal," explains Thomas Mann, director of the Brookings Institution's Governmental Studies Program. Journalists seldom produce stories about government working well, he notes, unless it's a lonely bureaucrat battling the system. The media, both broadcast and print, are far more likely to produce stories about screwups and scandal than in-depth reports about how things work and how they could work better.

For example, when The Washington Post poked around the FDA's drug-approval process in a March 23 article, it led with the tale of Jo Ann Ottmers. She eagerly took a new diabetes medicine, but the drug made her nauseated and weak before damaging her liver. Ms. Ottmers underwent a liver transplant and sued Warner-Lambert, the drug's manufacturer. Such tales, the Post suggested, underlined a "debate that is raging over the safety of medicines that millions of Americans take every day" Yet the story later revealed that the FDA was approving more drugs than ever before, in half the time as before, at the same historic rate of 2 to 3 percent of drugs later withdrawn for problems. Thus, the scandal served to obscure another, larger story: The FDA had managed to speed up its drug approval process dramatically without increasing the rate of problem drugs.

Stephen Hess, longtime observer of the Washington media, is fond of quoting Dame Rebecca West: "Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space" The space has expanded, the challenge has grown, and the lure of "gotcha" stories has exploded. With TV newsmagazine shows airing virtually every night of the week, the rise of 24-hour-a-day cable news, and the print media struggling to find their way in the electronic information age, there is far more space to fill. In the heat of tough competition, viewers and readers are hamer to attract and keep. That's fueled personality-based "gotcha" stories, grounded in scandal--the "up-close-and-personal" approach designed to grab headlines.

It's not that the private sector doesn't also suffer from bureaucracy problems--after all, "bureaucracy" is a generic term for how large organizations, public and private, behave. But private companies can hide their mistakes far more easily than the government can, because they aren't subject to the same legal requirements for openness. Where the government's...