Few events are more likely to produce competitive media frenzies than major airliner crashes.
Then come stories about the contents of the recorders and eerie transcripts of the last minutes of doomed flight crews. You'll undoubtedly hear many reports of what caused the crash of Flight 990. But because the flight recorder contained a cryptic phrase uttered by the Egyptian pilot just before the plane plunged, the coverage of the Flight 990 crash lurched suddenly into an immense controversy. This dustup involved U.S. and Egyptian officials, Muslims outraged over what they consider to be endless defamation in Western media, and the dueling stereotypes conveyed in American and Egyptian media. It would have been hard to predict the eventual acrimony based on the first wave of stories about the crash, which focused on human interest and ecumenical cooperation to comfort the families of the victims.