A WWS Exclusive Opinion Piece

Last Tuesday morning, WomensWallStreet.com (WWS) published my first-person account of a recent Northwest Airlines flight that I took from Detroit to Los Angeles called "Terror in the Skies, Again?"  A heads up about this article went out in our Daily Cents email -- our subscriber newsletter which primarily features financial tips and information for women. 

On Wednesday morning, the WWS page views were unusually high, something like 10 times the normal amount.  Apparently our readers had been emailing the article to their friends, family and colleagues and everyone was reading it. 

By Thursday morning, that number had again multiplied ten-fold. It felt like the shampoo commercial from my youth: they told two friends, then they told two friends, then they told two friends.  We sat in the WWS offices reading through your emails, taking stock of what you had to say. As the afternoon went on, the number of people reading the article continued to increase and the telephone was ringing off the hook.

And then a powerful thing happened. The mainstream media started calling.

The following statement was made by Daniel Drezner, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, on his website danieldrezner.com:

"I received a mass email linking to this disturbing first-person account by Annie Jacobsen... I can say that the e-mail sent to me and other bloggers was cc-ed to movers and shakers in the mediaspere -- Bill Keller, David Ignatius, George Will, Anne Applebaum, and Nicholas D. Kristoff. So they're certainly aware of the story... I'd like to see real journalists dig deeper into this."

Dig they did. NBC was the first major news outlet to contact WomensWallStreet. The producer I spoke with on the telephone said the FBI had confirmed that 14 Syrians were on the flight, they confirmed the details about what happened upon landing in Los Angeles, and they said that the accounts from the flight attendants regarding what happened during the flight matched the accounts given by me and my husband to the FBI after we landed.

Then I spoke with a producer from ABC.  She explained that she could not get Dave Adams, Head of Public Affairs of the Federal Air Marshal Services (FAM), on the phone.  So she asked me some of the questions that she had wanted to ask him:  Where exactly did this band of 14 musicians play?  What was the name of the band?  Who booked the band and what kind of music did they play?  Did anyone follow up and actually witness these 14 men performing at their desert casino gig?  I had none of the answers, even though I had asked Adams these exact questions myself when we spoke last week. The ABC producer also asked me other questions which had crossed my mind after hanging up with Adams.  Did I know anything about their return flight on jetBlue? Did the men go back to Syria? Did I believe FAM's story?

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