Have a Safe Flight
             The average passenger would have to take a flight every day for thousands of years before he would be involved a plane crash (Bryant New York Times). Many Americans would disagree with this statement because our society has been scared into believing that air travel is a dangerous and risky business. In reality, aviation is one of the safest modes of transportation and does not deserve the enormous amounts of attention that it receives. Yet, the media and other fear mongers have succeeded in convincing society that traveling by air can be detrimental to your health. All of the misinformation and exaggerations that fear mongers have presented about aviation has fabricated a social misconception that is deeply rooted in society. Although airline accidents are not a significant threat to one's life, fear mongers have used distortions of the truth to cause society to believe in the social misconception that aviation is dangerous.
             So it is understandable that the public should be afraid of flying, but especially because of the overwhelming amounts of coverage that each crash receives. News reporters, insurance agents, political lobbyists and other fear mongers have used several specific tactics to cause Americans to misplace their fear in flying. They first instill fear by bombarding society with superfluous amounts of news stories and articles on individual events. By doing this, fear mongers insinuate that a problem is bigger than it is in actuality. If everyone you know is telling you that a disease can kill you, you don't have to know all the details about the disease to be afraid of it. Or as Barry Glassner, sociologist and author of The Culture of Fear put it, "reporters need not scare the daylights out of us in individual stories, if they run lots of stories" (195). Large amounts of news reports can greatly increase the efficacy of any message. For example, in the case of the Valu...