Earlier this year, after the U.S. House of Representatives
passed the Cruise Vessel Safety and Security Act, a
congresswoman proclaimed that the legislation would make
Americans safer.
"For far too long, American families and particularly young
women have unknowingly been at risk when signing up for cruise
vacations," its sponsor, Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Calif.), said in
a statement. "The passage of this legislation will not only
help recent victims of cruise crimes and offer them enhanced
protection, but will help [prevent] further crimes from
happening."
It took several years of Senate hearings on cruise ship safety
and negotiations with cruise victims rights groups and CLIA to
reach the final wording of the bill, which requires cruise
lines to be more transparent in reporting crime and to comply
with new security and surveillance measures.
It came after what many Americans had come to believe was a
rash of missing cruise passengers, sexual assaults and
cover-ups by the cruise lines. It's an impression created and
nurtured by the news media.
A prime example was the disappearance of George Smith, the
honeymooner who went missing from a Royal Caribbean
International ship in May 2006. It served as fodder for weeks
of sensational reporting and outraged opining by
journalists.
"Doesn't that bother you, as a lawyer, that your client is part
of an industry that has gotten so out of control with crime
they've got to have congressional hearings?" CNN Headline News
host Nancy Grace asked a corporate legal counsel for Royal
Caribbean during a live, on-air interview.
Indeed, if one were to base personal knowledge of the cruise
industry solely on the news and talk programs that have devoted
hundreds of hours to cruisers going overboard and to reports
that dubbed the gastrointestinal norovirus the "cruise ship
virus," cruise ships would seem little more than iniquitous
vessels festering with disease and delinquents.
Frequent cruisers and journalists familiar with the cruise
industry know this is not the case. But only 19% of the
American public has ever cruised, so most people know more
about cruising from the nightly news and 24-hour cable news
networks than from personal experience.
Their ignorance is shared by most reporters, as well.
"A lot of the people doing the coverage don't have direct
experience with cruising," said Brittany Duff, an assistant
professor of advertising at the University of Illinois College
of Media who specializes in consumer behavior. "They employ
selective attention to any information they see and go on
self-perpetuating what they have seen."
Nor do they apply standard qualifiers to their news
reports.
"When people cover the airline industry's problems, they will
still add something like 'It's actually safer to fly than to
drive,' because they have experience on airplanes," Duff said.
"Once you have experience, you rely on it."
Yet, by almost any standard, crime on cruise ships is extremely
low.
In a 2007 congressional hearing, the chairman of the House
Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, Elijah
Cummings (D-Md.), cited written FBI testimony that there had
been a total of 207 incidents reported by cruise lines that
year during a period in which nearly 4.4 million passengers had
cruised on CLIA-member lines.
Fewer than .01% of passengers reported any kind of crime,
numbers that were so low as to cause suspicions that the cruise
lines were failing to report some crimes.
Yet, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Wayne Justice told the
committee, "From the Coast Guard's overall maritime security
perspective, we have no evidence to suggest that there is
significantly more [crime] or more serious crimes affecting
U.S. nationals onboard cruise ships than indicated by the
reporting data."
In Las Vegas, the second most-visited tourist destination in
the U.S., 147 crimes are committed per every 1,000 people. In
Orlando, home to Walt Disney World, 112 crimes are committed
for every 1,000 people. In contrast, the 207 crimes per 4.4
million passengers cited by the committee amounted to one crime
per every 21,256 passengers.
Or consider that despite the fact that Las Vegas suffers the
highest suicide numbers in the nation, Nancy Grace hasn't
sounded the alarm about the dangers of staying in Las Vegas
hotels -- or, for that matter, the likelihood that young adults
will be sexually assaulted during spring-break getaways.
"Thirteen million people cruise every year without falling
off," said Anita Dunham-Potter, a cruise journalist and
MSNBC.com's cruise ombudsman. "There's a 99.99% chance that [a
cruiser] will be fine. ... There is far more rape during spring
break in hotels, and they don't go after the bars that serve
them. There's a double standard."
So why the bad rap? Some media experts argue that cruise is but
one of many industries and businesses that get picked on.
"When an outrageous story happens, it gets a disproportionate
amount of coverage compared to the many cruises that go off
without a hitch," said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier
Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse
University. "But it is also not that often that airplanes sit
on the tarmac for hours and hours, but it happens and it
started legislation."
Thompson noted that every day, news editors choose from among
thousands of possible stories to cover. There are countless
crimes committed in America, and generally a missing child or
report of spousal abuse is too mundane to make the cut.
In fact, it is possible that the relative scarcity of crime on
cruises makes the crimes that do occur an appealing
story.
"Anything that breaks through and makes national news has to
have a couple notches of the strange," Thompson said. "Someone
at a luxury hotel who is despondent and jumps off, and someone
on a cruise ship who is despondent and jumps off, if I'm a news
editor, the cruise makes it a more interesting story. People
commit suicide a lot. A hotel is a building, and it's high.
Jumping off a ship you don't hear about every day.
"That's privileging one story over the other, but in a
relatively predictable way. That's what the news is all
about."
This is true even for news organizations that cover the cruise
industry in depth, because the fact is that sensational
sells.
At this publication, for example, the Most Read article on
TravelWeekly.com on Jan. 15 was not about the travel industry's
efforts to help Haiti but a short, week-old story headlined
"Employee's wife jumps off Royal Caribbean ship."
"When you cover something so overtly negative, you get a lot
readers," said Carolyn Spencer Brown, editor in chief of Cruise
Critic. "But media outlets do a disservice not just to the
industry but more importantly to travelers when they don't
offer the whole story. And I think that's a problem,
often."
The mission of Bob Sharak, CLIA's executive vice president of
marketing and distribution, is simply to shine a positive
public light on cruising. And, in fact, Sharak says, most
coverage of the cruise industry is positive.
"Quantitatively, as we track press clippings, the tonality of
the media that writes about us overall is positive," he said.
"That positive message is focusing on things such as the new
ships, the innovations, destinations, value and the
experience."
But that coverage, he said, tends to be what the industry gets
from travel journalists. It's the broadcast news programs and
A-sections of the newspapers that tend to focus more on the
critical and negative issues in cruising.
"We receive disproportionate attention of both positive and
negative news," he said. "If you look at cruise as a percentage
of travel, we are pretty small. But we garner a big chunk of
the news attention.
"That's because of our product and what we're doing -- our
growth, the new ships and the excitement that we generate about
the product."
Journalists who focus on cruise agree that cruising gets more
than its fair share of negative coverage because so few people
in the U.S. media have ever actually been on a cruise.
"Ninety-eight percent of the mainstream consumer media wouldn't
know a cruise from a hole in the ground," said Spud Hilton, the
travel editor at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Hilton said cruising makes news when there's a "biggest ship in
the world" introduction, or when negative things occur, such as
someone falling off a ship, an outbreak of norovirus or
relatively minor disasters like a fire or a rogue wave.
"Since a superlative ship only shows up once every couple of
years and those other things, combined, happen at least twice a
year, the collective public memory is always going to retain
the bad news," he said.
The result of that, he said, is that people with no context
think those negative occurrences are common.
"I cringe sometimes when I see stories about the cruise
industry on television, in particular," said Gene Sloan, who
covers cruising for USA Today and oversees the paper's Cruise
Log website. "There definitely is a lot of misinformation out
there on such things as norovirus outbreaks on ships. Readers
often are left with the impression that outbreaks of stomach
illness on ships are quite common, when they're actually quite
rare. Ditto with major crimes such as a murder."
Sloan said that part of the problem is how few mainstream news
outlets have reporters who cover cruising as a regular beat.
USA Today might be the only one, he said. And as the number of
reporters covering travel in general keeps falling to
cost-cutting, he said, this is only becoming truer.
"The result is that context is missing in many stories on
cruising and, more generally, the travel industry," Sloan said.
"The people writing the stories don't know enough of the
background and big picture to put events in perspective. And
it's perspective that's key."
Sloan argued that there are legitimate news reports concerning
outbreaks of norovirus on ships, such as a recent severe case
on a British cruise ship that he said "raised serious questions
about the operations at the line as it spread unchecked to an
almost unprecedented level, with more than 35% of passengers
falling ill." (Sloan noted that there have been just a handful
of illness outbreaks in recent years that have spread beyond
10% of passengers.)
"That's legitimate news," he said. "But it's important to place
the outbreak in context. ... Outbreaks actually are at their
lowest level in nearly a decade. That's something you don't see
mentioned in nearly any of the stories on norovirus
outbreaks."
Moreover, there is an even more perplexing truth about
norovirus that almost never gets mentioned in news reports: Not
only are norovirus incidents on ships down, they were never as
prevalent as on land to begin with.
Data gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
show that nine out of 10 outbreaks occur in land-based
locations such as schools, hospitals and nursing homes.
Paradoxically, cruise ships are disproportionately associated
with the disease because they are the only entity required to
report outbreaks to the CDC.
The cruise industry is not an entirely innocent victim of bad
reporting. Its history also makes it a target, and perceptions
last.
As recently as 2001, Carnival Corp. was fined $18 million for
criminal charges related to falsifying records about dumping
bilge during the 1990s. Two years before that, Royal Caribbean
International admitted to rigging the pipes on its ships in
order to bypass pollution equipment and illegally discharging
dry-cleaning chemicals and other toxic wastes into the waters
off the U.S. coast.
In 1993, Princess Cruises paid a $500,000 fine for illegal
dumping after cruisers filmed crew members on the Regal
Princess throwing plastic bags of garbage into the ocean near
the Florida Keys.
But in fact, the industry says it has gone to extremes to undo
these blots on its reputation.
"We are leaders in the maritime world," Terry Dale, CEO of
CLIA, said at last week's State of the Cruise Industry press
conference. "We invest millions in new technology, from exhaust
scrubbers to advanced wastewater purification systems to LED
bulbs and hangers that are recyclable. All of this collectively
is part of our desire to minimize and mitigate our
footprint."
CLIA contends that nowadays, cruise line waste management and
recycling programs are more stringent than those in most cities
and ports. Cruise executives have gone to great lengths to
prove this, even drinking the clear liquid that was once sewage
that ships now discharge into the ocean.
In many ways, the industry no longer has a choice. In 1993, the
footage captured on the Princess ship was rare. These days,
there is little information that a cruise ship could keep under
wraps.
"Everybody has a cellphone, a computer linkup, they have
Twitter, and the lines have to deal with whatever comes out,"
Dunham-Potter said. "There is no containment. People on the
ship are relaying information as it happens."
When George Smith went missing in 2006, Royal Caribbean
famously flubbed the investigation and was not forthcoming with
the news media, creating a vacuum that sensationalist reporters
were quick to fill. Since then, the lines have learned to
quickly address incidents as soon as they occur.
Cruise lines are also targeted because their ships fly foreign
flags and adhere to international maritime law. This creates an
image of lawlessness that becomes part of the way the ships are
covered.
"Here's an industry that is able to operate all these different
ways on the high seas," said Syracuse's Thompson. "Any serious
writer covering the cruise industry is going to focus on this.
It's one of the principal realities of how this industry
works."
Then there is the cruise industry's reputation, formed when it
was less a family-friendly vacation than a party boat, or from
memories of the TV series "The Love Boat." These images have
been difficult to overcome when a small percentage of the
public cruises.
"It's a subtle thing," Thompson said. "A cruise is a dream
vacation for many, but there is also a strong strain in popular
culture of cruise being the ultimate cheesiness. It's not just
news reporters. When a big problem happens, there are comedians
and writers and others who have taken shots at the cruise
industry in funny ways."
Duff said that cruise companies have a lot of room to use good
public relations and that current advertising is dispelling
some myths that still persist.
"Those ads push cruising as more of an adventure and a way to
explore other places, which starts hitting at stereotypes about
cruising," she said. "People can question previously held
attitudes about cruising."
Of course, ads only go so far. People need to hear from peers
that cruising is a good way to spend their vacation
dollars.
"The ad would have a lot less effect than an ad for cereal,"
Duff said. "I can go to the store and grab a box of cereal, and
there's not a lot of risk involved. But you can't ignore
something that doesn't have positive associations, and they
have to do things that will change those attitudes.
"The ads will tell you, 'Maybe you thought cruising was like
this, but actually here's the reality,'?" Duff said. "It might
become part of your consideration set. If not, you might never
type in 'cruising' to see what the peer reviews say."