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When a national agency was upstaged over the weekend in the crucial area of media credit that drives many employees of government, was a board member being merely petulant when she staged a public tantrum?
Or was there a more prosaic explanation behind the page one foot-stomping at the Chatsworth train crash, as reported this morning by the Los Angeles Times?
The most underplayed story in America over the weekend was the Metrolink commuter/freight train crash that killed 25.
At first, Friday afternoon’s tragedy sounded like a headline ripped from a newspaper in the 1940s, given the relative disappearance of trains as a popular mode of travel in many sections of the country.
For the past 41 years, the National Transportation Safety Board has been charged by Congress with investigating major accidents on the road and in the air.
Sometimes with a flourish, NTSB, a fairly familiar acronym to newspaper readers, conducts investigations of major commuter tragedies, and then dashes to the nearest mic and camera to interpret and take a bow.
Not this time, however.
Just hours after the collision, a Metrolink public relations person, Denise Tyrell — remember the name — knocked boys and girls who worship the Hierarchy of Credit ladder back on their heels.
Stunningly, in the person of Ms. Tyrell, Metrolink identified itself as the culprit even as bodies were being identified.
Our fault, Ms. Tyrell declared with unblinking candor.
Our engineer erred, she said. He blew the warning signals. Evidently, he was too busy text messaging.
The shock did not just walk across the country. It galloped.
Credit-mongers were horrified. This is not how media-oriented tragedies, scrupulously following an exquisitely precise script, have been dramatically programmed to play out.
Only one party takes bows after a tragedy, the National Transportation Safety Board. The policy is irrevocable.
A Case of ‘Me, Too, Me, Too’?
Enter sassy Kathryn O’Leary Higgins, a chubby Democratic member of the board of the NTSB. Kitty, as she is known, sometimes has difficulty keeping her boiling Irish temper tucked beneath her collar.
Formerly the acting chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, Ms. Higgins is a lady very conscious of her status as an outspoken Democrat. She was a deputy secretary of labor under President Clinton.
Upon hearing that Metrolink was shouldering the blame, the sharply outflanked Ms. Higgins yesterday snapped at the Times:
“I don’t know on what basis Metrolink made that statement. We really work very hard not to jump to conclusions.”
According to Ms. Tyrell, here is what happened, against a Metrolink background that may suggest, unsurprisingly, a power struggle between CEO David Solow and board chair Ron Roberts.
On Saturday, Mr. Solow directed her to publicly announce the engineer’s massively fatal gaffe, even as emotions and grief were at their rawest, so that there was no question about what happened.
The next day, the power-conscious Mr. Roberts gave out a statement contradicting what Ms. Tyrell said.
Only One Course Available
Declaring that she had no choice, Ms. Tyrell told the Times’ Steve Hymon online this morning that she has resigned from Metrolink to preserve her honor and reputation.
She further told Mr. Hymon: “I believe that David Solow's decision to allow us to go public without waiting for the NTSB to point the finger was a brave and honorable thing to do. We have a basic difference here that can't be resolved. I see no way I can represent them and maintain my own standards. They are free to conduct their own business as they see fit.”
But Ms. Tyrell and Metrolink were nailed in followup stories that asserted the commuter train was ducking its own responsibility by blaming the dead engineer.
The media wanted corporate scalps, not an honorable person from one of America’s working families.
Did Media Hijack the Story?
And so Ms. Tyrell this morning threw blame for the breakdown of the story back upon the Times and others, not her bosses, telling Mr. Hymon:
“The media got on top of this story, apparently so unaccustomed to a public agency telling the truth (that) they started to spin it that we were trying to throw all the blame on the engineer. Metrolink is responsible for the engineer. They are responsible for overseeing the contractor. Talking about the human error aspect of this is not a way to shift blame from Metrolink — Metrolink is still the responsible party to oversee the contract with the engineer and the conductors.”
To touchy liberal sensibilities across the media, it seemed cruel to fault one decent person for so many deaths, especially since he, too, was among the victims. Stay tuned.
