The traditional commercial media was quick to demonstrate a pro-industry bias in the coverage immediately after the Germanwings crash and their rush to hype the news, which is now routine, combined with their obvious bias had the inevitable result of inciting a large number of conspiracy theories.
However, like most potential conspiracy theories the most important thing might not be the most bizarre assumptions, but the obvious hype that demonstrates their bias, since the evidence for this is stronger and it can be confirmed by reviewing the news coverage of it.
It would be helpful to have records of the news as it is plying out and review them. This is available to those with adequate resources and would be good material for research into how the media covers the news and how their claims change in the immediate aftermath of dramatic events. Unfortunately most of us don't have access to these but I have noticed some of the coverage that happened before they had time to look into it too much; and it raises some major questions.
There should also be questions about whether or not antidepressants had an impact on the alleged suicide. There is an enormous amount of additional evidence to indicate that this could be counter productive. This includes some evidence cited by many researchers including those mentioned on "The Dark Side of a Pill" which explored a possible connection between violence and antidepressants which sometimes does the opposite of what it is supposed to, although they have been slow to warn people about that.
Whether it is a review of the immediate coverage after the crash or research into a possible connection to antidepressants there is much more evidence to indicate problems and some of it will also indicate why conspiracy theories have been so quick to come up and are virtually inevitable.
By hyping the news and blundering it so badly the media has practically invited conspiracy theories; and no more than two days after the crash France 24 News did an interview with someone they presented as an expert who said that he had major doubts about the conclusions that the judge was announcing and said that the only one that looked into it that didn't was the judge who, he said wasn't an expert.
Even before that the other news outlets where hyping it in favor of the airline industry to prevent people from panicking by warning them how unlikely it is statistically to have an accident in an airplane. Deutsche Welle Journal's newscaster emphasized the claim that people have a better chance of winning the lottery than they do of crashing in a plane and even one upped himself by saying people have a better chance of winning twice in one day, which I find quite astounding.
A hundred and fifty people died in that crash and it is one of many high profile crashes in the past couple of years, including two passenger flights in south East Asia, plus a smaller plane that had a very dramatic crash over a freeway that was played across the world over and over again and another passenger jet that was shot down in Ukraine, and more that I can't keep track of.
I can't think of one person who won the lottery twice in one day let alone a hundred and fifty, or enough to match all the other people that died in other flights.
They don't do the same thing when it comes to cops shooting unarmed people, or when it comes to many terrorist attacks that are used to scare the public for emotional reasons. Other media outlets have also been quick to claim that this is highly unlikely although most of them weren't quite so obvious; and they don't try to calm people about terrorism either by saying it is highly unlikely which it is.
It is hard to doubt this is blatant bias in favor of the airline industry.
French President François Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy were quick to arrive on the scene and declare what they called "solidarity" in their efforts to find out what happened. At this time they were telling people that they had no reason to believe that it was terrorism and the airline was making statements about how well their screening process was and that both pilots were highly qualified and unlikely to be involved.
This claim was quickly forgotten when they began to suspect the co-pilot.
The quick response to declare "solidarity" looks a lot like their claims of solidarity after the terrorist shooting of a cartoonists a couple of months ago; and it is similar to other public relations campaigns. It is starting to look like this might be a routine if they think the public will fall for it.
They don't seem inclined to research the potential contributing causes of this anymore than they're inclined to research the potential contributing causes of terrorism.
And when France 24 interviewed one of the so-called experts on TV no more than a day after they concluded that it was the co-pilot that crashed the plane intentionally and not much if any more than two days after the crash it should have raised major doubts about whether they're more concerned about finding the cause of the crash and addressing it or "solidarity" to defend the industry and avoid more than a token amount of accountability for them.
Unfortunately I don't know where to find the exact interview but it might be on their web site at France 24: Germanwings flight 4U9525. The titles don't clearly indicate the interview which I saw when it first aired; but he said that they didn't have enough data to come to conclusions since they still hadn't found the second black box. He claimed that they had no way of knowing if the co-pilot was alone in the cockpit, at that time, or if he had passed out or many other things.
Even if the evidence they found later supported their conclusions then it should still raise some legitimate doubts if they came to those conclusions before they had adequate information. It wouldn't be entirely irrational for some conspiracy theorists to speculate about the possibility that they created evidence to support their conclusions; it certainly wouldn't be the first time authorities did something like that.
This possibility was quickly dropped from the tr5aditional media which is typical once they come to their conclusions and the official version is repeated over and over again as if there is no doubt about it, which is a typical propaganda tactic they use.
Even if the official version is true, which I'm certainly not ruling out then more consideration should be given to the possibility that antidepressants might have something to do with as "The Dark Side of a Pill" seems to imply even though they didn't directly research this particular incident.
This documentary and other research articles, including the following, raises major doubts about whether antidepressants accomplish the goal they've been intended for or, in some cases it might do the opposite:
How Zoloft & Prozac are Linked to Child Suicides & Mass Shootings 04/29/2014
Every mass shooting over last 20 years has one thing in common... and it's not guns 04/2/2013
SSRI Antidepressants: The Gateway Drug to Mass Murder 04/24/2014
SSRI Stories: Antidepressant Nightmares
Pharmaceutical companies spend more on advertising than they do on research; that alone should raise major doubts about their integrity; but some of these studies raise many more questions, although they're rarely if ever addressed in the traditional media, or by the political establishment. Both these institution cater to the Pharmaceutical as well as the airline industry, which provides circumstantial evidence to the possibility that tehy might not want to hold either as accountable as those with much less political power.
There is some speculation that our entire economic system might be partially responsible for many disasters being more likely, and there is enormous amount of evidence to support this assumption. When I was taught about various economic systems decades ago in school they told us that there were three main types fiscal ideologies and three types of democratic control systems which were not necessarily synonymous, although there has always been an enormous amount of propaganda equating Communism with tyranny and Capitalism with democracy.
The three types of control systems were totalitarianism, where a country is controlled by one man, Authoritarianism, where a country is controlled by a relatively small and undemocratic group of people, and democracy where the people supposedly control the government, although I have found that is rarely the case even though many governments claim to be democratic. The three economic ideologies were Capitalism, Communism, and Socialism.
We were taught that we could never have an pure extreme version of any of these fiscal ideology since they wouldn't work and efforts to create them always failed so all the existing systems were actually compromises.
This was true; however since then we have been moving steadily in the wrong direction to create a more extreme version of capitalism than we had since the reforms put in place by FDR.
The media and political establishment haven't even tried to raise serious doubts about this, or at least they haven't done a good job at it; instead they've been providing propaganda that will escalate this process. Even though I don't think we should go to the opposite extreme I think that the so-called Marxists might have some major points including some to indicate a partial explanation how fiscal ideology could make these disasters more common as indicated in the following excerpts.
Germanwings crash in the Alps: sick pilot a symptom of a sick industry by Martin Swayne 04/02/2015
The news of the German pilot Andreas Lubitz flying the Germanwings Airbus 320 into a mountain in the French Alps came as a shock to the world. Although the official accident investigation is still in progress and will take months to complete, French authorities quickly made this into a criminal investigation and released certain information pointing the finger to the First Officer on board. ....
Nevertheless, it is not the first time pilot murder-suicide has occurred. In fact, less than two years ago almost exactly the same thing happened on Mozambique Airlines Flight 470, when an Embraer 190 began to lose altitude rapidly on a flight to Angola from Mozambique. The aircraft crashed in Bwabwata National Park in Namibia, with all 27 passengers and 6 crew members killed. According to the investigation report, Captain Herminio dos Santos Fernandes had a "clear intention" to crash the jet and changed its autopilot settings after the First Officer had been locked out of the cockpit.
Before that, in 1997 there was the case of SilkAir Flight 185, where the Captain nose-dived his aircraft into the Musi River in southern Sumatra, Indonesia. In 1999 all 217 passengers on board EgyptAir Flight 990 also died after a similar crash. Not all the causes of these events have been determined conclusively, but the primary theory is that they were murder-suicide, committed by one of the pilots. ....
The present author is a commercial pilot and takes great pride in flying his passengers safely to their destination. We are trained very thoroughly to deal with all kinds of emergencies and are well aware of the great responsibility on our shoulders. ....
The truth is, a cancer has been eating away for quite some time at the aviation industry as a whole. Low cost airlines have initiated a race to the bottom and through sheer market forces legacy carriers have been forced to follow suit. In order to understand how it came to this we have to go back a few decades.
In most of Western Europe most flying jobs were with national government-owned unionised flag carriers. They were the standard bearers, worldwide ambassadors and advertisers for their countries. Great pride was taken in them, by them and by their employees. It was a coveted position and very well paid.
Later came the charter/holiday carriers, some of whom survived, while many others went bankrupt or were taken over. In all aspects it was still a respected and well remunerated profession, with standards in services and terms and conditions that were well understood by all.
Then came privatisation and the governments sold their investments to public shareholders. Now profit was the only parameter. Lo and behold, it was discovered that this was a vocational industry; people would sell their grandmothers for a step on the ladder, and pay to do it. The accountants couldn't believe their luck and the cancer started to spread. This was at a time when the market was deregulated and anyone could start up an airline flying from anywhere in EU to anywhere in the EU. Cut price was the answer. Dog eat dog became the mentality. Pilots became commodities. Complete article
The news of the German pilot Andreas Lubitz flying the Germanwings Airbus 320 into a mountain in the French Alps came as a shock to the world. Although the official accident investigation is still in progress and will take months to complete, French authorities quickly made this into a criminal investigation and released certain information pointing the finger to the First Officer on board. ....
Nevertheless, it is not the first time pilot murder-suicide has occurred. In fact, less than two years ago almost exactly the same thing happened on Mozambique Airlines Flight 470, when an Embraer 190 began to lose altitude rapidly on a flight to Angola from Mozambique. The aircraft crashed in Bwabwata National Park in Namibia, with all 27 passengers and 6 crew members killed. According to the investigation report, Captain Herminio dos Santos Fernandes had a "clear intention" to crash the jet and changed its autopilot settings after the First Officer had been locked out of the cockpit.
Before that, in 1997 there was the case of SilkAir Flight 185, where the Captain nose-dived his aircraft into the Musi River in southern Sumatra, Indonesia. In 1999 all 217 passengers on board EgyptAir Flight 990 also died after a similar crash. Not all the causes of these events have been determined conclusively, but the primary theory is that they were murder-suicide, committed by one of the pilots. ....
The present author is a commercial pilot and takes great pride in flying his passengers safely to their destination. We are trained very thoroughly to deal with all kinds of emergencies and are well aware of the great responsibility on our shoulders. ....
The truth is, a cancer has been eating away for quite some time at the aviation industry as a whole. Low cost airlines have initiated a race to the bottom and through sheer market forces legacy carriers have been forced to follow suit. In order to understand how it came to this we have to go back a few decades.
In most of Western Europe most flying jobs were with national government-owned unionised flag carriers. They were the standard bearers, worldwide ambassadors and advertisers for their countries. Great pride was taken in them, by them and by their employees. It was a coveted position and very well paid.
Later came the charter/holiday carriers, some of whom survived, while many others went bankrupt or were taken over. In all aspects it was still a respected and well remunerated profession, with standards in services and terms and conditions that were well understood by all.
Then came privatisation and the governments sold their investments to public shareholders. Now profit was the only parameter. Lo and behold, it was discovered that this was a vocational industry; people would sell their grandmothers for a step on the ladder, and pay to do it. The accountants couldn't believe their luck and the cancer started to spread. This was at a time when the market was deregulated and anyone could start up an airline flying from anywhere in EU to anywhere in the EU. Cut price was the answer. Dog eat dog became the mentality. Pilots became commodities. Complete article
Martin Swayne doesn't go into possible conspiracy theories in order to review the problems with the airlines; instead he reviews problems that are well documented and legitimate concerns that should be addressed whether or not there is a conspiracy involved. The researchers about antidepressants do this as well, or at least the good researchers.
Both these problems should be addressed to the best of our ability; but the traditional media and political establishment are focusing on putting all the blame on the co-pilot, using this for entertainment purposes disguised as news, and sweeping it under the rug with minimal amounts of reforms to make this leas likely.
As usual the conclusive evidence should be a higher priority since we know that the solutions to this will improve things whether there are one or more conspiracies involved or not; but the way they use all this hype is a virtual invitation to believe in conspiracies, even some really bad ones that could distract from the more rational theories or the proven truth.
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