Good News at the Airports

It's holiday time, and that means that at least two in five of you (okay, I'm making up that statistic, but humor me) are reading this on the way to or from an airport. Or, you are sitting in the Red Carpet Club or the members-only club of some other flat-broke airline, reading this online (indulge my wild imagination, please). Or, if you're really devoted to the column (I told you I have a wild imagination), you've carried a copy of the paper with you and are reading this while safely buckled up on the plane, perhaps about to land, making a connection but with a layover that will keep you at the airport for a while.

So be forewarned: With all of the talk this year about who controls and influences the media (Liberals? Conservatives? The gay mafia? Wealthy female golfers? Barbra Streisand and Sean Penn?) and what is and is not reported, I feel it is my duty to point out that the truly dangerous censorship is beginning at our nation's airports.

That's right. It happens soon after you enter that hermetically sealed, security-crazed, Disneyfied world, glide onto the Jetsons walkways, past the chain souvenir stores and head to your gate lounge to sit down and watch one of those tv monitors overhead. You may think you're watching CNN. You're not.

The "news" that is piped in actually comes from a sort of CNN shadow network, one that carefully screens out "sensitive" information and images, as Lauren Hammann, a chipper and extraordinarily helpful CNN public relations person in Atlanta told me recently.

CNN's Airport Network, as it is called, has an exclusive contract with 43 airports in the U.S., which includes just about every major airport. Fox News Channel may be number-one on cable, but some of you might be thrilled to know that it's banned within a several mile radius of your gate of departure. Ditto ABC, NBC, CBS. As far as news goes, only the carefully screened and controlled Airport Network may be shown inside those airports?otherwise, it's breach of contract.

Airport Network boasts three cheerful honey-blonde female anchors who look quite like one another. They "dip in" to regular CNN news and weather, and programming like Inside Politics, throughout the day, and "dip out," as Hammann giddily describes the process. I guess I always noticed this; I just never thought about it much.

That is, not until I was sitting in the Detroit Metro Airport on the day that Sen. Paul Wellstone's plane went down. The cool new Northwest terminal there is Disney gone absolutely mad, by the way, with a sleek and silent monorail inside the terminal, taking you from gate to gate, and massive flat-screen monitors everywhere, showing?what else??Airport Network.

Anyway, colleagues were calling me on my cell to tell me about the crash while they were watching the reports on the news at home and at work. But all I saw on Airport Network was one of the honey-blonde clones smiling from ear to ear, letting me know that all was supposedly well in the world as I embarked on my journey. Airport Network did "dip in" and out of regular CNN a few times while I sat there, but mysteriously didn't cover the crash, at least not for the 40 minutes or so that I waited to board my flight.

A few weeks later, while I was in the Chicago O'Hare airport, there was another aviation incident?but nothing about it on Airport Network. I started asking friends who travel a lot about this, and they said they'd noticed similar omissions of the news at the airport regarding plane crashes and the like. That's when I decided to call CNN to get the scoop.

"Oh, yes, Airport Network programming is sensitive to travelers," the cheerful Ms. Hammann told me when I asked if in fact they do cut out disturbing airline-related news. She sounded just like one of the on-air honey blondes, warm and overwhelmingly reassuring.

"So, we don't show sensitive materials like that," she continued. "We use our discretion. If it is something that is specific to the airline industry, something that is particularly upsetting or disturbing to travelers, then it's not shown. That's always been our policy, and we make that known to the airports and the airlines and they're fully in agreement with that policy."

Well, okay, perhaps that seems reasonable to some on the surface. Many travelers, after all, probably would not want to view a report about a jet exploding on takeoff just as they're at the boarding gate for their own flight.

But when you think about it, it's pretty interesting, to say the least, that a media organization like AOL Time Warner, in association with airlines and the government-owned airports, would make its overriding priority the creation of a safe and protected environment?rather than the reporting of news, disturbing as the news might be. Call it my wild imagination again, but it seems like the modern airport, more and more, is John Ashcroft's wet dream for how the entire society should become, everywhere: identification checks, massive security, machine-gun toting military guys, x-ray machines, surveillance cameras and, now, controlled media.

Curiously, a couple of hours after we first spoke, Ms. Hammann called me back, still cheery but with an urgency that betrayed a slight anxiety of some sort. She needed to "clarify" what she said, because she'd "inquired" about some of the things I'd asked about. Translation: I told my boss that some guy was asking about Airport Network's reporting policies and alarm bells went off. Immediately, she brought up the "c" word: "Airport network does not censor the news," she said. "I got that wrong when I implied that stories aren't covered. We don't show sensitive footage, but I want to be clear that we do cover those stories on our air. Our official policy is not to air graphic video of airline crashes of commercial or private aircrafts. And the airlines and the airports are aware of the policy and agree with it."

She also stated that Airport Network did in fact report on the Wellstone crash?"However, we did not show the video of the crash." (Actually, there really was no video of that crash?the plane went down deep in the woods.) And on 9/11, she stressed, when many travelers were trapped in airports overnight and desperate for information, Airport Network did switch to regular CNN.

It's encouraging to know that during a grave national emergency they'll abandon the everything-is-wonderful tone. As far as the "clarification" that certain stories aren't omitted, well, I'll have to think about that one for a while (and hope to hear from others about it too). Maybe the Wellstone story was eventually reported on, far later than it was everywhere else?I had a flight to catch, and can't vouch for that. But even a policy of not showing certain footage because it's too "sensitive" strikes me as a tad Ashcroftian.

Happy, happy holiday flying.

Michelangelo Signorile can be reached at [www.signorile.com](http://www.signorile.com)