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But even while they were covering the event, some at the networks were chary. This was not a child prodigy playing the violin at Carnegie Hall but a first-grader flying across the country. There was something queasy about the whole thing, a little girl going too far in pretending to be an adult. On Good Morning America, Forrest Sawyer asked Lloyd Dubroff, "[The flight] does raise the question...I mean, when we hear this, we're kind of shocked. Is it illegal or dangerous or anything like that?"
To its credit, ABC confronted the issue of whether television was complicit in the tragedy. On Nightline, Ted Koppel spoke for the network when he said, "We need to begin by acknowledging our own contribution...We feed one another: those of you looking for publicity and those of us looking for stories." Then he posed the question of "whether we in the media...by our ravenous attention contribute to this phenomenon," and answered it himself: "We did."
J. Mac McClellan, editor in chief of Flying magazine, agrees. "Jessica's flight is the kind of thing that, absent media coverage, would never have happened," he says. So-called flying records by youngsters, he maintains, are a bogus concept. "We've intentionally ignored attempts like this here at Flying because we didn't want to promote the activity. It has no validity from an aviation sense; the pilot in reality is the certified pilot." The FAA regulations that allow children "to fly" with a certified pilot at the other controls are intended to facilitate teaching, not to encourage stunts. In what seems a semantic distinction, the FAA says Jessica was technically a passenger; a pilot must be at least 16 and have a license.
The gruesome irony is that the crash proved to be the best television story of all. Jessica completing her journey would have been the spirit-lifting final story on the evening news, the tale of human triumph over which anchors could smile winsomely and then say good-night, leaving the viewer with the feeling that all was right with the world. But Jessica's plane crash led all three network news broadcasts and headlined the front pages of newspapers across the country.
That night and the next morning, TV viewers were treated to a spectacle almost as disturbing as the accident itself: Jessica's eerily composed mother saying that if she had to do it over again, she would have done nothing differently. In Falmouth, where she got the news while waiting for her daughter's arrival, she declared, "I would want all my children to die in a state of joy. I would prefer it was not at the age of seven." The next morning she appeared on the Today show and told Katie Couric, "I'd have her do it again in a second. You have no idea what this meant to Jess." She even vowed to make sure the FAA doesn't revise its rules: "I can't bear the thought of them changing anything. Talk about setting people back!" Even at the crash site in Cheyenne, where she arrived with flowers in the afternoon, she continued to explain her philosophy of life. When a small boy tried to give her a teddy bear, she refused it, explaining that her children do not play with toys.