By ANN Senior Editor Pete Combs

They did it again. Even after Congress heard expert testimony and government officials outright admitted that general aviation poses little, if any, threat to national security, CBS News went over the top Monday night in describing that very threat -- closely followed by NBC. It was the second time in just over a year CBS made the same grievous mistake. In fact, Correspondent Bob Orr even compounded it by referring back to the original, offending, story.

I have, in the past, counseled friends in aviation who see uneducated, sensationalistic reports in the general media, not to shoot the messenger. But in this case, perhaps a warning shot is in order. As often as the aviation community tries to educate the general media about issues that reach beyond our own community and into the American public at large, they still sometimes refuse to get it.

At issue in Monday's stories on both CBS and NBC was a 24-page secret report developed by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. The report focused on aviation as both a target and a platform for al Qaeda terrorists.

In all of those 24-pages, only one paragraph mentioned -- in an almost passing way -- that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda gang appear to manifest a continuing interest in business aviation (fixed-wing charters and helicopters) as possible terror platforms, either for direct suicide attacks or, in the case of helicopters, for spreading biochemical agents across wide areas.

But whereas the information about GA contained in the report took up all of one paragraph, it constituted more than half of Correspondent Bob Orr's piece on the CBS Evening News Monday night. In it, he stated:

...[T]he worry doesn't end with big jets. Confirming a danger CBS News revealed a year ago, the report says terrorists may also find small aircraft attractive, because of their availability and destructive potential.

In January, 2004, Orr did a story on aviation communities, where you can taxi out from your own garage and fly away. The point of the story was that "fly-in" communities and thousands of airports across the US aren't fenced in. Planes are fairly easy to steal, he contended and that makes them easy pickins' for terrorists. He asked whether pilots in such communities screen their passengers or their bags, completely ignoring the obvious in his report: just as most drivers don't pick up strangers in their cars, most pilots don't fly strangers around in their planes.

Is there anyone else here who thinks that, since the risk Orr outlined in his story a year ago hasn't come to fruition, it might not be that big a risk after all?

Since Orr's story broke more than a year ago, even the Department of Homeland Security has said general aviation is not a threat to national security. But in his story Monday night, Orr touted that one paragraph in the FBI/DHS report as vindication for his reporting more than a year ago.

NBC's report was, on its face, more balanced. But reporter Tom Costello's selection of "aviation security analyst" Charles Slepian as a source in the story shows the conflict between good journalism and good soundbites.

Slepian, a former New York City bureaucrat, security company owner and now the personality behind an organization called the Foreseeable Risk Analysis Center, told NBC News, "Two hundred pounds of fertilizer in a Cessna, flying into a building, gives us an Oklahoma City situation."

That's silly. The truck bomb that destroyed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City ten years ago contained more than two tons of fertilizer. But it sure did make for a sexy soundbite, didn't it?

The truth is simple, as stated by Phil Boyer -- president of AOPA and, more importantly, a former journalist himself: "I would say a small plane puts no more opportunity before a terrorist than a car or a boat or anything that has that size and weight."

It would seem prudent to consider those words for a moment. How easy is it to steal a car, fill it with explosives and blow it up? It would be much easier, one would think, to steal a boat and do the same thing. In fact, stealing a car or boat and guiding it to a target would be a lot more low-key than stealing an airplane -- cars and boats are much more commonplace than airplanes.

In the end, it's good to know that guys like DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff have what appears to be the proper perspective: "[N]o one mode of transportation should get attention to the exclusion of everything else." The same goes for the amount of attention -- sensational or otherwise -- afforded by our colleagues in the general media.

FMI: www.dhs.gov