Capturing the News: Three Decades of Reporting Crisis and Conflict

Chapter Thirteen: Down, Down

146 Chapter Thirteen Down, Down “As he whistled southeastward out of Oakland, Calif. in his T-33 jet one day last May, Air Force Lieut. David Steeves, like any pilot, could survey the earth beneath him . . .” So begins a stirring account in Time magazine in July 1957. It told the story of what sounded like an amazing adventure that was experienced by an Air Force pilot. “Suddenly Steeves felt a sharp explosion. The cockpit filled with smoke. . . . [H]e jettisoned his canopy, blew himself out by the ejection rig, pulled the cord on his parachute. Down, down he swayed toward the Sierra’s peaks. Up, up they came in sharpness, ruggedness, meanness.” In a novel this might be considered good if pulpy writing but in a news magazine it’s dreadful. It is purple prose that creates the impression of reality without the slightest bit of journalistic caution or detachment or uncertainty as to whether any of this really happened. There is no attribution, no statement to the reader as to who says this happened. Since the Time writer had not been in the cockpit with the pilot, the writer is getting these alleged details from an interview with Steeves or from a version handed out by Air Force public relations officers. Some parts of the story sound like embellishments based on the writer’s ability to imagine what it was like. The gushing Time account goes on to describe Steeves, crippled by sprained ankles, surviving on fish, snakes, and deer for fifty-four days in the wilderness. Time ends up calling him“a hero returned from the dead.”A photo of him with his wife is captioned,“Life with courage.”All of this might cause a reader to feel a lump in the throat and almost be on the verge of tears, so inspiring and patriotic is this story. There is only one problem. A month later, Steeves’s account of his crash and miraculous survival, relayed through Air Force press officers to the nation’s print and television media, seemed not to be true. The Saturday Evening Post Down, Down 147 magazine, having offered him ten thousand dollars for his exclusive story, canceled the contract when its writer found “discrepancies.” Air Force colleagues said they believed that Steeves had faked the survival story. There were rumors that he had sold his plane to the Communists. The Air Force investigated him. His wife left him. Time was forced to do a follow-up story that used remarkably less credulous prose: “Air Force Lieut. David Steeves got considerable mileage out of his dramatic story of a bail-out from his T-33 jet over California’s Sierra Nevada range and the ensuing 54 days during which he claims to have trekked (on sprained ankles) precariously through the wilderness.” Note the new word“claims.” Now Time is being careful to attribute anything that it cannot independently verify, something it should have done in the first place. Time goes on to write in its more cautious follow-up story: “Returning to civilization sporting a handsome beard (TIME, July 15), Steeves, 23, was taken in tow by Air Force press agents . . .” Now we learn that much of the earlier hype had been encouraged by Pentagon p.r., a fact that was missing from the first story. Time goes on to recount apparent discrepancies in Steeves’s story (“his boots seemed to be in remarkably good shape”) and, most damaging of all, “Air Force investigators could not find remnants of the jet plane that Lieutenant Steeves said he had abandoned at 33,000 ft.” Here is a key difference in wording compared to the first story. Now we are told that Steeves said he had abandoned the plane. Earlier Time had assumed that his claim was true, and did not bother to attribute any of his statements to him. This was at the height of the Cold War, and the Air Force, presumably eager to win more congressional appropriations for military spending, encouraged a hero cult of pilots. Time got swept along in the patriotic pride until the story soured. (Ironically, as it turned out much later, it’s possible that at least part of Steeves’s claim was true. What may have been his plane’s cockpit canopy was found twenty years later in the mountains. But at the time there was no evidence to back up his claim, and Time should never have let itself be manipulated by the Pentagon into writing...