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  • 2016-07-27 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Bill Clinton Hold Up LAX Air Traffic for a Haircut? (en)
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  • Portraying one's opponents as elitist, out-of-touch hypocrites with little or no concern for others is an old and common practice in U.S. politics, and there is perhaps no better modern example of the application of that concept than the infamous runway haircut received by President Bill Clinton in 1993. The story, as commonly reported back in May 1993, was that President Bill Clinton hubristically had Air Force One held idle on the tarmac at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) so that his personal stylist could board the plane and perform a $200 presidential haircut — completely oblivious to (or unconcerned about) the fact that his action triggered the shutdown of half the airport's runways and caused incoming flights to be placed in holding patterns for the duration: The air traffic-diverting $200 haircut was one of the major news stories of its day, garnering front-page headlines in such major newspapers as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe. The Washington Post, who quipped that Clinton had received the most famous haircut since Samson, included the incident in nine front-page stories over the span of six weeks. Nearly two decades later, major news publications such as Time magazine were still referencing Hairgate and stating that the notorious runway haircut had resulted in a hold on air traffic that forced [flights] to circle and made Los Angeles air travelers hours late: And yet, outside of the fact that President Clinton did receive a haircut on Air Force One while the presidential plane sat on an LAX runway, virtually none of the oft-repeated details of Hairgate was true. By the end of the following month, news sources such as Newsday had already obtained and reported on Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records documenting that the haircut caused no significant delays of regularly scheduled passenger flights — no circling planes, no traffic jams on the runways. The single negative outcome of the event was that one unscheduled air taxi flight took off two minutes late: And yet, corrections to the story that had been featured so prominently and so often in major news publication articles and on television network news reports were scant and cursory: The Los Angeles Times, in a lengthy three-part series, hypothesized that the inaccurate reporting of Hairgate was driven by the press corps' resentment over their treatment by the White House, which led to overblown and hostile stories about Clinton: In fact, even the one true aspect of the Hairgate story was likely exaggerated. Later reports noted that Clinton's $200 haircut likely cost less than $150, perhaps far less (the hairdresser charged $150 for a first-time haircut, but Clinton was an established customers and thus paid less). (en)
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