Better than most reporters, Michael Crichton knows how to do a clip job. He has made millions by cooking current affairs into best-selling potboilers like Rising Sun, Disclosure, and his latest, Airframe.

For such a good rewrite man, though, it is surprising how little Crichton knows about the media, which, according to the author himself, is what Airframe is really about.

Yes, the book by all appearances is about aviation safety, and how Casey Singleton, an attractive single mother on the rise at the fictional Norton Aircraft company, hunts for the reason one of its jets started porpoising during a Trans-Pacific flight, killing three passengers.

But, Crichton said in an interview, aviation safety was really just the vehicle he settled on in the fall of 1995 to tell a story about how the media work. And a pretty good vehicle it is -- there are few stories the public follows more closely than plane crashes. (He also has remarkable timing; he started researching the book before the ValuJet and TWA crashes last year that now make his book so timely.)

However tedious the litany, there are familiar complaints in Airframe that have some merit, particularly when one recalls the guessperts who showed up on CNN within hours after the TWA crash to theorize not only that the 747 was brought down by a bomb, but also about who probably planted it. (The latest theories lean toward mechanical failure.) "Modern journalism," Singleton thinks to herself, "was intensely subjective -- 'interpretive' -- and speculation was its lifeblood."

To flesh out his point, Crichton creates the character of Jennifer Malone, an ambitious twenty-nine-year-old segment producer for a television news show called -- attention, Ted Koppel -- Newsline. We find Malone in a jam: Al Pacino has just balked at doing an extended interview. She now has seventy-two hours to find and produce a story that will be strong enough to fill twelve minutes of airtime.

 A news assistant then hands her a gift from heaven: a press release about Norton Aircraft that piques her interest. After a few hasty phone calls gathering tantalizing facts about the company's aircraft, Malone is back on top. She has her story -- a big company putting profits over safety. "DEATHTRAP," she scribbles in her notebook.

She keeps reporting, though, and her anger builds as other facts start getting in the way of her story. Malone has just about given up on her deathtrap angle when she sees footage from a passenger's camera that was apparently running during the TransPacific flight, showing bodies tossed about like rag dolls. Her story is on again; after all, with visuals like that, who needs context? "Because when you cut out all the sanctimonious bullshit," Malone thinks, "context was just spin."

Meanwhile, Singleton, the upstanding Norton Aircraft executive, is launched on a mission: to learn what upset one of her company's jets in mid-flight. This is the righteous stuff of modern-day heroes, in fiction and in real life. The work of investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board, for example, has been highlighted in coverage of the TWA and ValuJet disasters, as well as in a lengthy article last year in The New Yorker and in a four-hour special on The Learning Channel.

But Singleton is distracted by her other mission: handling the nosy news media, in particular Malone, who Singleton quickly surmises is intent on committing drive-by journalism.

 Reporters were not always like Malone, Singleton muses. "There was a time when reporters wanted information, their questions directed to an underlying event. They wanted an accurate picture of a situation, and to do that they had to make the effort to see things your way, to understand how you were thinking about it."

Those reporters have apparently gone the way of full meals in coach class. "But now reporters came to the story with the lead fixed in their minds; they saw their job as proving what they already knew. They didn't want information so much as evidence of villainy."

Airframe builds to a kind of showdown, orchestrated by Singleton, between the integrity of Norton's aircraft and Malone's jerry-built journalism. You'll have to spend the twenty-six bucks, or wait for the movie (yes, rights have already been sold) to learn whether good triumphs over evil in the end.

Crichton has clearly done some exhaustive (and, for the reader, exhausting) research on how planes fly and how they falter, and he's received pretty high marks from aviation experts who have read Airframe. But his cartoonish portrayal of the media isn't likely to get him good grades from anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom.

Journalists, however, may be the only ones complaining. Crichton, who has been vilified before for the naivetŽ of the ideas underlying his novels on international trade, sexual harassment, and the like, said that this unflattering portrait of the media is generating the least controversy of all his books.

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