There are certain media outlets one thinks provide good information, well documented and presented. Forbes magazine is normally one of them.
Just recently, though, they produced an ill-informed piece, actually blaming airports for high air fares. As if airports set the fare. Ridiculous. It is just terrible, completely misses the mark. We wrote a response to it, which is posted on the Forbes site and on ours.
This wouldn’t be so bad in and of itself if Forbes wasn’t a publication that so many people rely upon for good information. Indeed, some newspapers around the country have taken the article and made it the basis of pieces on their own community’s airports, exacerbating the problem and spreading misinformation.
This reminds me of a similarly misinformed, misguided, effort by the Business Travel Coalition last year during the height of the fuel crisis. I wrote about that report on this blog at the time, and many newspapers picked up on BTC’s predictions of communities losing all their air service (most of which were about as accurate as my prediction of the Tampa Rays winning the World Series).
It is incumbent on those in whom the public places trust to get their facts right. We have reached out to the authors of the article to try to educate them, but in the meantime, a number of communities around the country have begun reacting to the article in predictable ways. Airport managers in those communities are working to set the record straight.
It is frustrating to see so much misinformation out there, but we at ACI-NA will continue to work to combat it.
