Embedded Files
Lots of organizations profit from other people's fear. They can be advocacy groups raising money, media companies boosting newspaper circulation, authors promoting books, businesses selling products in the name of public safety, lawyers preparing class action lawsuits, fringe religious organizations scaring disciples into joining, and most importantly, politicians that try to secure votes by stirring up strong emotions amongst the electorate.
As a result, we are often scared of the wrong things. Here's a comprehensive set of examples:
Falling Crime Statistics Not Reflected In People's Perception Of Risk
Falling Crime Statistics Not Reflected In People's Perception Of Risk
Crime rates have been falling for decades, yet two-thirds of Americans think the opposite. Similarly, even though "in the late 1990s, the number of drug users had decreased by half compared to a decade earlier, [...] nine out of ten believed the drug problem [was] out of control, and only one in six believed the country was making progress?"1
If It Bleeds, It Leads
If It Bleeds, It Leads
Why are people's perception of crime so out of whack with reality? Look no further than the local TV news:
Between 1990 and 1998, when the nation’s murder rate declined by 20 percent, the number of murder stories on network newscasts increased 600 percent. [...] In the early and mid-1990s 20 to 30 percent of news items in city newspapers concerned crime, and close to half of the news coverage on local television newscasts was about crime. [...] The leading cause of death, heart disease, received approximately the same amount of coverage as the eleventh-ranked cause of death, homicide. [In public polling,] interviewees identified the news media as both the source of their fears and the reason they believed those fears were valid.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Youth Crime
Youth Crime
Americans are often needlessly scared of young people:
Americans estimate that people under eighteen commit about half of all violent crimes when the actual number is 13 percent. [...] “We know we’ve got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around or our country is going to be living with chaos,” Bill Clinton asserted in 1997, [which is especially surprising] considering the steep downward trend in youth crime throughout the 1990s. Yet Time and U.S. News & World Report ran headlines in 1996 referring to “Teenage Time Bombs” [and] “Children Without Souls”. [Or] “children without consciences”. [...] Young people [were also called] ‘superpredators’. [...] Isolated incidents were taken as evidence of “an epidemic of seemingly depraved adolescent murderers” (Geraldo Rivera). [...] Today’s youths are “more likely to pull a gun than make a fist,” as Katie Couric declared on the “Today” show. [...] In Time, it [was not] “unusual for kids to get back at the world with live ammunition”.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Road Rage Is All The Rage
Road Rage Is All The Rage
According to "expert" testimony before a congressional hearing in 1997, half of Americans are afflicted with road range1. Likewise, news coverage of road rage has been equally hyperbolic and sensational:
Reporters turned to so-called experts such as Arnold Nerenberg, a psychologist who dubs himself “America’s road-rage therapist”. [...] “There’s a deep psychological urge,” he tells Newsweek, “to release aggression against an anonymous other.” Road rage is “a mental disorder that is contagious”.
These news reports all start with these types of foreshadowing anecdotes:
"They're all around you, everywhere you drive, waiting to explode," exclaimed an announcer at the beginning of ABC's newsmagazine "20/20" in 1996, devoted to what he called "a growing American danger-road rage." [...] Everywhere we go are “strangers in their cars, ready to snap, driven to violence by the wrong move,” the announcer on “20/20” cautioned. [...] A seemingly innocuous beep of the car horn can lead, Jarriel said, to "anger so explosive it pushes people over the edge; fist fights, even shootings, between perfect strangers." Out in the real world, people honk their horns all the time without getting socked or shot, but in the fluid logic of Jarriel's narrative stark imagery and atypical anecdotes eclipsed reality. "It happens without warning to ordinary people". [...] Oprah Winfrey, in a program on road rage in 1997, used the same approach. First she transmuted familiar occurrences into a huge new danger. [...] "This woman's biggest offense was pulling out of her driveway... countless millions of you have done that," she said in the course of introducing someone who had been attacked by another driver.
Context is frequently swept under the rug:
Only after wading through twenty-two paragraphs of alarming first-person accounts and warnings from authorities did the reader learn that a grand total of five drivers and passengers had died in road rage incidents in the region over the previous five years, [compared to the] 20 million motorists injured during that period [in traffic accidents].
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
News coverage amplifies the phenomenon:
The more talk there is about road rage, the more likely are newspaper reporters, police officers, and insurance agents to classify as examples of it incidents that they would have ignored altogether or catalogued differently in the past. [...] Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as the Pygmalion effect, in deference to George Bernard Shaw.
Consider one example where a "fatal accident had been caused by the driver going up an exit ramp in the wrong direction, but reporters and highway patrol officers labeled it 'another case of road rage.' Their justification? Witnesses reported the driver had been tailgating a van just moments earlier".1
It's no wonder that:
Polls taken on the eastern seaboard during the late 1990s found people more concerned about road rage than drunk driving. [But in reality] close to half of all fatal traffic crashes involve alcohol. [...] Three in five Americans will be involved in an alcohol-related crash at some point in their lives. [...] Pseudodangers represent further opportunities to avoid problems we do not want to confront, such as [...] drunk driving, a behavior that causes about eighty-five times as many deaths as road rage.
Elder Abuse
Elder Abuse
The media seems to paint a disturbing – yet in reality, far from widespread – portrait of today's society:
To hear the news media tell it, America’s youth make a sport of victimizing old folks. [As a Boston Globe article called it, the elderly are] “walking time bombs for crime, easy prey.” [Or in the] Los Angeles Times, “that a violent encounter—one that a younger person could easily survive—may end lethally for them: A purse-snatching becomes a homicide when an old woman falls to the pavement and dies in the hospital; an old man is brutalized and dies when he loses his will to live; an elderly couple are unable to flee their home during an arson fire, dying in the flames”. [Or as the] Washington Post talked of “weak and elderly citizens living at the mercy of street thugs.” [However],.
However, it is rarely mentioned that "violent crime against senior citizens [has] dropped by 60 percent in the previous twenty years". Unfortunately, scaring the elderly is hurting the very people the news media say they want to protect:
All of which is regrettable because in actuality people over sixty-five are less likely than any other age group to become victims of violent crime—about sixteen times less likely than people under twenty-five, according to statistics from the Justice Department. [Yet the misplaced fear causes] some to become so isolated, studies found, that they do not get enough exercise and their physical and mental health deteriorates. In the worst cases they actually suffer malnutrition as a consequence of media-induced fear of crime. Afraid to go out and buy groceries, they literally waste away in their homes.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
There's also the overblown phenomenon of "granny dumping". Media stories usually go like so:
“We found [evil caretakers] coast to coast in the best of places. Thugs, rapists, suspected thieves,” blares the announcer at the beginning of an edition of ABC’s “20/20”.
The media will point to examples they say are part of a larger trend, which is a tenuous leap to make:
"John Kingery is no isolated case”. [...] In point of fact, however, John Kingery was a relatively isolated case. [...] Like Halloween sadism, workplace violence, gay-pedophile mass murder, and so many other crimes nouveaux, granny dumping was considerably less common, sensational, or pressing than the media made out.
The root cause isn't as interesting:
“Most nursing home owners are not a bit careful about who they hire,” someone identified as a former nursing home inspector says. [...] Only in passing does Crier note that the pay nursing home aides receive “is notoriously low” for a job that is “difficult and often unpleasant.”
Availability Of Guns In America
Availability Of Guns In America
Americans have a lot of guns, and owners keep adding to their collections.
The love of guns has become a fetish. [Yet] only 15 percent of us now say we ever hunt, less than half as many as in the 1970s. [...] In fact, fewer of us now own any kind of gun for any reason—even as the number of guns has increased phenomenally. In the 1970s about half of Americans had a gun, and it was almost always just a gun, one on average. Today only about a quarter of Americans own guns—but the average owner has three or four. Fewer than eight million people, only 3 percent of all American adults, own roughly half the guns.
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
But this freedom comes at a cost. Not enacting sensible gun laws kills people. For example, legislation that requires gun owners to lock their guns or keep them in locked containers "had reduced the number of deaths among children in those states by 23 percent"1. Or consider that a 1996 Australian round-up of guns substantially reduced gun deaths there5.
In the United States, where private citizens own a quarter-billion guns, around 15,000 people are killed, 18,000 commit suicide, and another 1,500 die accidentally from firearms. American children are twelve times more liked to die from gun injuries than are youngsters in other industrialized nations.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
The self-defense argument doesn't hold water:
About one in six thousand Americans displays or fires a gun in self-defense during an attempted robbery or assault. [...] Among the million-plus Americans interviewed in ten years of Crime Victimization Surveys, exactly one sexual assault victim used a gun in self-defense.
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
That being said, even if you are worried about accidental gun deaths, it isn't the most dangerous thing commonly found in a home:
In a given year, there is one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States. (In a country with 6 million pools, this means that roughly 550 children under the age of ten drown each year.) Meanwhile, there is 1 child killed by a gun for every 1 million plus guns. (In a country with an estimated 200 million guns, this means that roughly 175 children under ten die each year from guns.) The likelihood of death by pool (1 in 11,000) versus death by gun (1 in 1 million-plus) isn’t even close: Molly is roughly 100 times more likely to die in a swimming accident at Imani’s house than in gunplay at Amy’s.
Source: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. United States, HarperCollins, 2006. [B049]
TV Violence As A Trigger
TV Violence As A Trigger
TV is a red hearing for gun violence:
At these levels of [TV] exposure, [journalist Daniel] Schorr contended, young people “no longer know the difference between the bang-bang they grow up with on the television screen and the bang-bang that snuffs out real lives.” [...] One widely quoted researcher who has made cross-national comparisons is Brandon Centerwall, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington, who has estimated that there would be 10,000 fewer murders each year in the United States and 700,000 fewer assaults had TV never been invented. [Yet, some] correctly pointed out that viewers in Detroit, Michigan, see the same TV shows as viewers in Windsor, Ontario, just across the river. Yet the murder rate in Detroit has been thirty times that in Windsor. [...] It is the unregulated possession of guns, more than any other factor, that accounts for the disparity in fatality rates from violent crime in the United States compared to most of the world.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Misleading Statistics On Health Risks
Misleading Statistics On Health Risks
Even if some people have more than 1 condition, estimates of various health conditions seem chronically inflated:
In 1996 Bob Garfield, a magazine writer, reviewed articles about serious diseases published over the course of a year in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and USA Today. He learned that, in addition to 59 million Americans with heart disease, 53 million with migraines, 25 million with osteoporosis, 16 million with obesity, and 3 million with cancer, many Americans suffer from more obscure ailments such as temporomandibular joint disorders (10 million) and brain injuries (2 million). Adding up the estimates, Garfield determined that 543 million Americans are seriously sick—a shocking number in a nation of 266 million inhabitants. “Either as a society we are doomed, or someone is seriously doubledipping,” he suggested.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
But these exaggerations have a negative impact on people's health. For example, in the case of cancer:
Women in their forties believe they have a 1 in 10 chance of dying from breast cancer, a Dartmouth study found. Their real lifetime odds are more like 1 in 250. [...] The greater a daughter’s fear of the disease the less frequent her breast self-examination. Studies of the general population—both men and women—find that large numbers of people who believe they have symptoms of cancer delay going to a doctor, often for several months.
Superbugs & Flesh Eating Bacteria
Superbugs & Flesh Eating Bacteria
Isolated cases are often portrayed as a widespread trend:
Some still worry, for instance, about “flesh-eating bacteria,” a bug first rammed into our consciousness in 1994 when the U.S. news media picked up on a screamer headline in a British tabloid, “Killer Bug Ate My Face.” [A reporter added that a] “deadly strain” of bacteria [...] “can spread at a rate of up to one inch per hour.” [...] In point of fact, however, we were not “terribly vulnerable” to these “superbugs,” nor were they “medicine’s worst nightmares,” as voices in the media warned. [A common refrain is] “Don’t miss Dateline tonight or YOU could be the next victim!” American is fifty-five times more likely to be struck by lightning than die of the suddenly celebrated microbe. Yet TV journalists brushed this fact aside with remarks like, “whatever the statistics, it’s devastating to the victims” (Catherine Crier on “20/20”), accompanied by stomach-turning videos of disfigured patients.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
By far, the best stories are mostly written about freak accidents. Take this one about the risk that hospital oxygen will catch fire while you are hooked up to a ventilator:
It can happen in a flash. Fire breaks out on the operating table. The patient is surrounded by flames,” Barbara Walters exclaimed on ABC’s “20/20” in 1998. [It] occurs “more often than you might think”. [Omitted from the report was that] out of 27 million surgeries each year, the situation arises only about a hundred times.
Ebola Scare
Ebola Scare
As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in The New Republic:
An Ebola strain that is both virulent to humans and airborne is unlikely to emerge and would mutate rapidly if it did, becoming far less potent before it had a chance to infect large numbers of people on a single continent, much less throughout the globe. “It is one of the ironies of the analysis of alarmists such as Preston that they are all too willing to point out the limitations of human beings, but they neglect to point out the limitations of microscopic life forms”. [Yet] a report by Dateline NBC on deaths in Zaire, for instance, interspersed clips from Outbreak, a movie whose plot involves a lethal virus that threatens to kill the entire U.S. population.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Asbestos Kills, Just Not The Way You Think!
Asbestos Kills, Just Not The Way You Think!
Removing asbestos is often more dangerous than leaving it where it is, and yet:
In the first half of the 1990s U.S. cities spent at least $10 billion to purge asbestos from public schools, even though removing asbestos from buildings posed a greater health hazard than leaving it in place. [...] By directing our worries and dollars at asbestos we express outrage [at the wrong things]. By failing to provide adequate education, nutrition, housing, parenting, medical services, and child care over the past couple of decades we have done the nation’s children immense harm.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Satanic Cults That Didn't Exist
Satanic Cults That Didn't Exist
A particular shameful period of collective fear occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the news media started reporting that children were being raped and tortured in satanic rituals. Even though "seven out of ten Americans believed that satanic cults were committing these atrocities, few of the incidents had actually occurred. [...] The ghastly tales of abuse, it turns out, typically came from the parents themselves, usually the mothers, who had convinced themselves they were true". 1 The stories coming out in the press were utterly unbelievable:
Americans suddenly imagined that children—by the tens or hundreds of thousands—were being abducted and tortured and kidnapped and murdered every year. [...] The psychiatry and especially the clinical psychology professions were essential enablers.[...] Richard McNally, a psychologist with his own research lab at Harvard, says [that] ‘Recovered memory therapy’ [is] the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era. [For] “the flashback, in which a whole childhood trauma is suddenly recalled,” is a fictional device that makes the fictional idea of repressed memory seem real. [Instead, most] research says that strong emotional experiences leave emotionally strong memories.
The Courage to Heal included a checklist of seventy-four possible symptoms of forgotten sexual abuse, including “You feel that there’s something wrong with you deep down inside; that if people really knew you, they would leave,” “You have no sense of your own interests, talents or goals,” and “You have trouble feeling motivated.” Even if a patient in whom suspicions of forgotten memories have been aroused “sometimes doubts it,” the authors advised counselors and therapists that they “must believe that your client was abused…to stay steady in the belief that she was abused.” [...] From a standard checklist of dozens of “symptoms characterizing satanic ritual abuse” created by a San Fernando Valley clinical psychologist [were] “Preoccupation with passing gas” “Fear of ghosts and monsters,” and “References to television characters as real people.”
A child had never mentioned nudity or photographs, but an interviewer asked, “Can you remember the naked pictures?” Nope. “Can’t remember that part?” Again, no. “Why don’t you think about that for a while, okay? Your memory might come back to you.” And when another child refused to say the teachers had done anything untoward, the interviewer asked, “Are you going to be stupid, or are you going to be smart and help us here?”
Local law enforcement guessed that thirty babies had been sacrificially slaughtered. No babies had been reported missing. [...] Children testified that a satanic cult operating a daycare center had ritually abused them—and taken them in hot-air balloons to outer space and on a boat into the Atlantic where newborns were fed to sharks; several people were sentenced to long prison terms and served time before their convictions were overturned or charges dismissed.
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
Pseudodangers matter because:
Instead of uncovering, for instance, the widespread sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests, a story that wouldn’t break until the 2000s, in the 1980s and ’90s we focused instead on a terrifying but imaginary crime spree by demonic anti-Christians.
Mass hysteria can feed on itself longer in a modern society:
The Salem witch hunt was brief and local; just months after it began, the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony regretted and then ended the prosecutions and punishments. [With satanic cults,] dozens of people were charged, of whom twenty-eight went to prison, some for more than twenty years. [In the McMartin case], the trial lasted three years, the longest criminal trial in U.S. history, and the two defendants, who between them spent seven years in jail, were found not guilty.
The absence of proof didn't seem to deter people:
When the FBI and other investigators failed to find any evidence whatsoever for the belief that the nation had been infiltrated by Satanic cults that were ritually slaughtering babies, believers in these cults were unfazed. The absence of evidence, they said, was confirmation of how clever and evil the cult leaders were.
Source: Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. Mistakes were made (but not by me): Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. [B140]
Imagined Mass Kidnappings
Imagined Mass Kidnappings
The fear of satanic cults was closely related to another exaggerated phenomenon at the time:
In the early 1980s, following the disappearances and murders of Etan Patz in New York City, Adam Walsh in South Florida, and two dozen children in Atlanta, a national missing-children panic ignited. Congress passed a federal Missing Children’s Act, and milk cartons were plastered with photographs of missing children. News media pegged the number of abductions at between 20,000 and 50,000 a year, with estimates up to the hundreds of thousands.
Denver Post reporters established that the vast majority of missing children were actually runaways or involved in parental custody disputes, and that the standard statistics were indeed exaggerated by orders of magnitude. They won a Pulitzer Prize. And indeed, a decade later the FBI estimated that the number of true kidnapping victims was no more than three hundred a year, most of whom were not murdered. The standard high-end figure of fifty thousand a year had been invented by Adam Walsh’s father, who later admitted it was just his “guesstimate.”
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
Fake Abortion Statistic
Fake Abortion Statistic
Always beware of the source. Sometimes, stats are intentionally misleading. Consider this chilling example:
More than one thousand advertisements appeared in buses and subway stations around Washington and Baltimore alluding to a scary statistic: “Women who choose abortion suffer more and deadlier breast cancer.” In Louisiana and Mississippi legislators passed laws that require doctors to inform women twenty-four hours before an abortion that the procedure can increase their risk of breast cancer. [In 1994], the Journal of the National Cancer Institute published an article in which researchers estimated that having an abortion might raise a woman’s risk of breast cancer by 50 percent. [One of the author’s] is an antiabortion activist who [...] had conducted the study specifically to provide legislators with justification for requiring doctors to warn women about a cancer risk. [Nevermind that] heavy smoking, by comparison, increases the risk of developing lung cancer by 3,000 percent. [Of course, later] scientists were able to compare 281,000 women who had had abortions with 1.2 million others who had not. They determined that neither group was more likely to develop breast cancer.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Going Postal Isn't A Real Thing
Going Postal Isn't A Real Thing
The media focused on workplace violence for a while:
More than five hundred stories about workplace violence appeared in newspapers alone just during 1994 and 1995, and many included some seriously scary statistics: 2.2 million people attacked on the job each year, murder the leading cause of work-related death for women, the number-three cause for men. “How can you be sure,” asked a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, “the person sitting next to you at work won’t go over the edge and bring an Uzi to the office tomorrow?” Her answer was, “You can’t”. [...] Of about 121 million working people, about 1,000 are murdered on the job each year, a rate of just 1 in 114,000. Police, security guards, taxi drivers, and other particularly vulnerable workers account for a large portion of these deaths. [...] Yet postal employees are actually about two and a half times less likely than the average worker to be killed on the job. [...] All in all fewer than one in twenty homicides occurs at a workplace. [...] About 90 percent of murders at workplaces are committed by outsiders who come to rob. The odds of being killed by someone you work with or employ are less than 1 in 2 million; you are several times more likely to be hit by lightning.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Razorblades In Halloween Apples
Razorblades In Halloween Apples
Urban legends can also take a life of their own:
“Those Halloween goodies that children collect this weekend on their rounds of ‘trick or treating’ may bring them more horror than happiness,” began a story in the Times in October 1970 that launched a long-running crime panic. “Take, for example,” the reporter continued, “that plump red apple that Junior gets from a kindly old woman down the block. It may have a razor blade hidden inside. [...] In 1975 Newsweek reported in its edition that hit newsstands at the end of October, “If this year’s Halloween follows form, a few children will return home with something more than an upset tummy: in recent years, several children have died and hundreds have narrowly escaped injury from razor blades, sewing needles and shards of glass purposefully put into their goodies by adults.” [These article] reinforced the moral of having parents examine treats—ironically, because in both cases family members were responsible for the children’s deaths!"
In her columns of the mid- and late 1980s even “Dear Abby” was reminding parents around trick-or-treat time that “somebody’s child will become violently ill or die after eating poisoned candy or an apple containing a razor blade.” [...] An ABC News/Washington Post poll in 1985 showed that 60 percent of parents feared their kids could become victims. [Yet] A scholarly article in 1985 [showed] that there has not been a single death or serious injury [from razorblades in apples]. [And as author] Jan Harold Brunvand [noted] “it’s hard to imagine how someone could shove a blade into a fruit without injuring himself. And wouldn’t the damage done to the apple by such a process make it obvious that something was wrong with it?”
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Online Dangers
Online Dangers
New technology can sometimes spur some scare-inducing stories:
A report on NBC News in 1977 let it be known that “as many as two million American youngsters are involved in the fast-growing, multi-million dollar child-pornography business” [...] Unlike other pornographers, whose exploits raise tricky First Amendment issues, child pornographers made for good, simple, attention-grabbing copy. [...] About the kids they said, on the one hand, “Internet-savvy children can also easily access on-line pornography” (New York Times). On the other hand, reporters depicted computer-proficient kids as precisely the opposite of savvy. They described them as defenseless against pedophiles and child pornographers in cyberspace. “Depraved people are reaching right into your home and touching your child,” Hugh Downs told viewers of ABC’s “20/20.” Defined in the media as the work of a “Cyber Psycho” (New York Post headline) [...] an advocacy group [called the Internet] “a playground for pedophiles”. [...] According to the Los Angeles Times reporter: “Such are the frightening new frontiers of cyberspace, a place where the child thought safely tucked away in his or her own room may be in greater danger than anyone could imagine.”
In reality though:
It is poor children—few of whom have America Online connections—who are disproportionately abused, and it is in children’s own homes and those of close relatives that sexual abuse commonly occurs.
Another common misconception promotes prejudice:
Homophobia is a recurring element in journalists’ coverage. [Yet] the medical journal Pediatrics indicates that a child is about a hundred times more likely to be molested by the heterosexual partner of a close relative than by a homosexual.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Pornography, whether it is people's moral objection to it, or as a danger to teenagers, always makes for good copy:
Time magazine’s July 3, 1995, issue, […] “CYBERPORN,” read the huge headline below the child’s chin, and below that, “EXCLUSIVE : A new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids—and free speech?” [It] anchored to seemingly solid scientific evidence. “A research team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has conducted an exhaustive study of online porn,” Time reported. [...] Time opted instead for the kids-at-risk hook. [...] The Time article identified Marty Rimm as “the study’s principal investigator,” a rather reverential way of referring to him, considering that Rimm conducted the research as an undergraduate student and some of the people he listed as members of his research “team” renounced the study. [...] Rimm’s exclusivity agreement with Time ensured that true experts on computer networks could neither see nor comment on his study until the magazine hit the stands. [...] Of the 917,410 files Rimm says he found, only 3 percent actually contained potentially pornographic images. The images were not readily available to children in any event, because they were on bulletin boards that required membership fees.
Is Your Child In Danger?
Is Your Child In Danger?
Whether it is teenage suicide (trending downwards over the last several decades), or drug use (also on the decline), or gambling (where long-lasting damage is rare), the media likes to stroke fears among parents:
Reporters told us [the suicides] were “a reminder of how astonishingly fraught with danger the teenage years have become in America” (Time). [...] Reading this stuff, most parents undoubtedly think my child could be next. [Rather] nine out of ten teens who kill themselves are clinically depressed, abusing drugs or alcohol, or coping with severe family traumas.
[Regarding teenage drug use] reporters maximize claims about youthful drug abuse rather than contextualizing them. [For instance,] schoolchildren “can get marijuana faster than a Popsicle” [according to a news anchor]. [However,] some journalists do make a point, of course, of combating exaggerations with facts. [One] noted, alcohol still retained its title as the drug of choice among the nation’s high school and college students. [In fact] the great majority of adolescents never or hardly ever use drugs. [...] The only substance most users do not give up in early adulthood, the study found, is cigarettes.
USA Today ran a headline “Teen Gambling: An Epidemic” [calling it] “the invisible addiction.” [Or as U.S. News & World Report] deemed: “the latest peril for America’s troubled teenagers”. [...] Conjuring up [an] images of clandestine casinos in the basements of high schools, with boys whose voices have yet to change serving as croupiers. [...] Actual studies show that the vast majority of kids who gamble engage in nothing more serious than buying Lotto tickets or betting on the Super Bowl with their pals. [...] Most will lose interest in gambling as they get older and settle into work and family roles. [...] Kids who do become problem gamblers almost always have other problems, drug and alcohol abuse, delinquency, depression, and relationship troubles being the most common. [...] Often when their troubles eased, so did their gambling. [...] Among the best predictors is having parents who gamble heavily. [...] You wouldn’t know any of this from stories in the media. Front-page articles in 1998 went on about a nineteen-year-old from Long Island named Moshe Pergament, “a teenager who saw no way out of his gambling debt” (Seattle Times) and “decided to end his gambling and his life” (New York Times) after going $6,000 in the hole.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
In the end, protecting children comes down to dollars and cents. Efforts spent on countering overblown risks are not applied where they are most needed.
Most innovations in the field of child safety are affiliated with— shock of shocks—a new product to be marketed. [Some] far noisier crusades: child-resistant packaging (an estimated fifty lives a year), flame-retardant pajamas (ten lives), keeping children away from airbags in cars (fewer than five young children a year have been killed by airbags since their introduction), and safety drawstrings on children’s clothing (two lives).
Source: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. United States, HarperCollins, 2006. [B049]
Runaways & Pedophile Predators
Runaways & Pedophile Predators
The media loves to frame their stories as though child trafficking happens without warning, which in the majority of cases isn't true:
In the context of reporting that as many as a dozen children had been lured on-line by child molesters, the magazine informed us that “more than 800,000 children are reported missing every year in the U.S. [...] John Walsh, father of Adam Walsh, whose abduction and murder in 1981 at a shopping mall in Hollywood, Florida, got the country focused on missing children in the first place, proclaimed the country “littered with mutilated, decapitated, raped, strangled children.” [...] CBS News ran a story in which they showed an excerpt from a commercial for one of the many products being marketed to worried parents at the time—a warning buzzer that attached to a child’s clothes. [...] Ident-AKid, a Florida firm, sold more than 3 million child-identification cards a year at $5 each through a nationwide network of salespeople who visit schools.
In national surveys conducted in recent years three out of four parents say they fear that their child will be kidnapped by a stranger. [...] When Safe Kids Campaign conducts its own surveys of parents’ concerns the results confirm what other researchers find: kidnapping remains at the top of the list. [...] “Don’t let your guard down for a minute,” the Buffalo News quoted [a so-called expert]. “It can happen anywhere. These creeps are all over the place. They’re mobile. They’re so violent and remorseless, they think nothing of killing someone for twenty-five dollars or a car stereo.” [...] In another program in 1997 devoted to child abductions Rivera effused to the camera, “This isn’t a commentary, this is reality: [...] There are sickos out there”.
What the public doesn’t hear often or clearly enough is that the majority of missing children are runaways fleeing from physically or emotionally abusive parents. Most of the remaining number of missing children are “throw aways” rejected by their parents, or kids abducted by estranged parents. According to criminal justice experts, a total of 200 to 300 children a year are abducted by nonfamily members and kept for long periods of time or murdered. Another 4,600 of America’s 64 million children (.001 percent) are seized by nonfamily members and later returned.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Youth Violence
Youth Violence
Tough on crime is always a winning campaign strategy because:
The more fearful people are of crime, the more punitive their attitudes toward juvenile criminals, studies show, and politicians capitalize on this correlation to build more and meaner prisons. “We must shift the focus of the juvenile justice system from rehabilitation to punishment,” [said] Bob Dole [pushing for an expanded] prison-industrial complex. [...] In nearly half of the states ten-year-olds can be tried as adults. [Yet] some of the worst conditions in juvenile facilities nationally are found among privately operated prisons. [...] Prison companies will go to lobby for harsher sentences and other criminal-justice policies that guarantee high occupancy when crime rates are down. [...] Studies find that young people incarcerated with adults are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted and fifty times more likely to be attacked by a weapon than youth in juvenile facilities. [However] in a Gallup poll in 1994 60 percent of people said they favor the death penalty for teenage killers. [That's despite] a preponderance of evidence that such harsh penalties fail to deter other kids from committing crimes. [...] Nor do longer or more severe sentences appear to deter those kids who receive them. [Boot camps are] great photo opportunities for tough-on-crime politicians. Studies show that graduates of boot camps were just as likely to commit future crimes as parolees from regular detention facilities.
In actuality, violent youth have always been with us. “A new army of six million men are being mobilized against us, an army of delinquents. Juvenile delinquency has increased at an alarming rate and is eating at the heart of America,” a juvenile court judge warned in 1946. [...] Earlier still, in 1786, a Connecticut girl murdered a baby in her care. Twelve years old, she holds the distinction of being the youngest American ever to receive the death penalty.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Schools Are Still Safe
Schools Are Still Safe
School shootings make national news for their tragic nature, but the media misses the bigger picture: "Public schools are safer, studies show, than other locations where kids hang out, such as cars and homes. [...] When teachers have been asked about the biggest problems in their schools, they responded with items such as parent apathy, lack of financial support, absenteeism, fighting, and too few textbooks".1
As David McRaney points out: "A typical schoolkid is three times more likely to get hit by lightning than to be shot by a classmate. […] School shootings were considered to be a dangerous new phenomenon after Columbine. [But] during the time when Columbine and other school shootings got major media attention, violence in schools was down over 30 percent".4 The availability bias causes people to think in examples, not statistics. That's why it's easy to think of winning the lottery, than dying in a mundane car crash on the way to the store, even though "you are far more likely to die in a car crash on the way to buy the ticket than you are to win".
Medicated Kids
Medicated Kids
Overprescribing is a serious especially in kids:
Based on the DSM, a child qualifies for the label “oppositional deficit disorder” and is a prime candidate for hospitalization if he or she often does any five of the following: argues with adults, defies adults’ requests, does things that annoy others, loses his or her temper, becomes easily annoyed, acts spiteful, blames others for his or her own mistakes, gets angry and resentful, or swears. How many of us made it out of adolescence without going through periods in which we acted like that? [...] This country uses five times as much Ritalin as the rest of the world. [The] reliance on Ritalin relieves all sorts of adults—doctors, parents, teachers, and policy makers alike—from having to pay attention to children’s social environments. [Yet] ads explicitly ruled out any parental culpability. “Studies indicate that anti-social behaviors in adolescents usually are not ‘reactions’ to home, school or community involvements. They, more often than not, are disorders of neurological development".
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Teenage Pregnancy
Teenage Pregnancy
The decay of traditional family values is a subjective one at best. Consider this example:
Teen motherhood [was termed] America’s “most serious social problem” [according to] Bill Clinton. [...] Journalists, joining the chorus, referred to adolescent motherhood as a “cancer,” warned that they “breed criminals faster than society can jail them”. [...] [The media tried to imply that teen moms were responsible] for America’s declining position in the world economy. [...] Newspaper and magazine columnists called illegitimacy “the smoking gun in a sickening array of pathologies—crime, drug abuse, mental and physical illness, welfare dependency” (Joe Klein in Newsweek) and “an unprecedented national catastrophe” (David Broder in the Washington Post). Richard Cohen, also of the Post, asserted that “before we can have crime control, we need to have birth control” and deemed illegitimacy “a national security issue.” [In reality] the teenage birth rate reached its highest level in the 1950s, not the current era. Indeed, between 1991 and 1996 the rate declined by nearly 12 percent.
Teen pregnancy was largely a response to the nation’s educational and economic decline, not the other way around. [...] In 1994 at least 80 percent of teenage moms were already poor before they became pregnant. [Consider] the oft-cited finding that 70 percent of men in prison were born to teenage mothers. [In fact] the age at which a woman gives birth appears to be far less consequential for how her child turns out than are factors such as her level of income and education, and whether she suffered physical and emotional abuse in her own youth. [However, an interesting] factor came out in experiments where teachers were shown videotapes and told that particular children came from one-parent families and others from two-parent families. The teachers tended to rate the “illegitimate” children less favorably. [...] Studies find [that children from single-parent families] are more likely to be arrested than are children from two-parent households who commit similar offenses.
“Father absence is the engine driving our biggest social problems” [an expert said on] CBS’s Evening News, [adding] “Our national crime problem,” he said, “is not driven by young black males. It is driven by boys who are growing up with no fathers.” [...] A front-page story in the New York Times posed the fatherlessness menace no less sweepingly: “Over all, children in homes without fathers are more likely to be poor, to drop out of high school and to end up in foster care or juvenile-justice programs than are those living with their fathers.” [...] Men’s mere presence is apparently adequate to save their children and the nation from ruin. [...] Literature on divorce shows that the main negative impacts on children are conflicts between the parents before the divorce and loss of the father’s income afterward, rather than absence of the father per se. [...] Most advocates are too sophisticated to offer sound bites such as that given by Wade Horn, president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, to the Washington Post: “Growing up without a father is like being in a car with a drunk driver”. [...] In fact studies find that kids reared by lesbians have no greater academic, emotional, or behavioral difficulties than other children—aside from those caused by discrimination against homosexuals.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Killer Moms
Killer Moms
The news can shift the blame away from things that matter to convenient scapegoats:
The New York Times article about the Queens woman [...] who, despondent after an argument with her husband, shot her two-year-old and six-year-old in the head, killing them both [...] includes another common journalistic gambit: implying that behind any door may reside a would-be murderous mom. [...] “Some Mothers Are Simply Evil” read a headline in the New York Post. [...]
The coverage [of Awilda Lopez and Susan Smith] can leave the impression that it is not so much social policies or collective irresponsibility that endanger many children in this country but rather an overabundance of infanticidal women. [...] On the contrary, wifeless fathers are practically revered.
Media tales about monster moms serve a parallel purpose for adults. They say that we—or our wives, sisters, daughters, or friends—are good mothers by comparison.
Domestic Abuse Numbers In Context
Domestic Abuse Numbers In Context
The Washington Post ran a story in 1993 claiming that husband abuse is “Far More Widespread Than People Think”. Similar articles started proliferating:
According to a headline in USA Today in 1994, “Husbands Are Battered as Often as Wives.” [...] In an article the following year a writer for the National Review cited a study showing that “54 per cent of all severe domestic violence is committed by women.” [...] U.S. News & World Report revealed that “children are now more likely to see mommy hit daddy” than the other way around. Not only that, the whole thing has been covered up by “feminist scholars”. [...] “The statement that men and women hit one another in roughly equal numbers is true,” [scholar Richard] Gelles admits. “But it cannot be made in a vacuum without the qualifiers I always include in my writing: number one, women are seriously injured at seven times the rate of men”. [...] As Gelles puts it, “The most brutal, terrorizing, and continuing pattern of harmful intimate violence is carried out primarily by men.” [...] FBI data show that one in four female murder victims is killed by a husband or boyfriend, compared to just 3 percent of murdered men slain by wives or girlfriends.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Racial Bias In Crime Reporting
Racial Bias In Crime Reporting
Black men are more likely to be victims of violent crimes than to be the perpetrators. And yet:
Scores of studies document that when it comes to victims of crime, however, the media pay disproportionately more attention to whites and women. [...] Helen Benedict, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, has documented that rapes of white women by black men—which constitute a tiny proportion of all rapes —receive considerable media attention. [In the case of murders] the typical victim of crime in Florida, though largely invisible in the news, was young, local, and black or Hispanic. [...] The killing of innocent bystanders [gives it a] sense that it could happen to anybody, anywhere, like a plane crash. [For instance,] “Random Killings Hit a High—All Have ‘Realistic’ Chance of Being Victim, Says FBI,” read the headline in USA Today’s story in 1994.
About two out of one hundred homicides in New York City involved innocent bystanders, and most drug-related violence occurred between people connected to the drug trade itself. When innocent people did get hurt, Brownstein discovered, often they were roughed up or shot at not by drug users but by police officers in the course of ill-conceived raids and street busts. Drug violence, like almost every other category of violence, is not an equal opportunity danger. It principally afflicts young people from poor minority communities, and above all, young black men. [...] Who does stand a realistic chance of being murdered? You guessed it: minority males. A black man is about eighteen times more likely to be murdered than is a white woman. All told, the murder rate for black men is double that of American soldiers in World War II. And for black men between the ages of fifteen and thirty, violence is the single leading cause of death. [...] Everyone expects black crime victims, the argument goes, so their plight isn’t newsworthy. [...] Criminologists have documented that the amount of coverage a crime victim receives affects how much attention police devote to the case and the willingness of prosecutors to accept plea bargains.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Why Scaring People Hurts People
Why Scaring People Hurts People
Fear makes people take action, but the wrong type of action. Take 'tough-on-crime' criminal justice measures enacted by governments, and supported by politicians and the public alike:
Increases in the number of police and prison cells do not correlate consistently with reductions in the number of serious crimes committed. [More importantly however,] a larger proportion of Americans were poor than three decades earlier. One of the paradoxes of a culture of fear is that serious problems remain widely ignored even though they give rise to precisely the dangers that the populace most abhors. Poverty, for example, correlates strongly with child abuse, crime, and drug abuse. [...] The larger the gap between rich and poor in a society, the higher its overall death rates from heart disease, cancer, and murder.
Rap Music
Rap Music
The media can totally distort a topic by pointing to the wrong cause.
After two white boys opened fire on students and teachers at a schoolyard in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 1998 politicians, teachers, and assorted self-designated experts suggested—with utter seriousness—that black rap musicians had inspired one of them to commit the crime. [...] Never mind that, according to a minister who knew him, the Jonesboro lad also loved religious music and sang for elderly residents at local nursing homes. [...] Leaders of the antirap campaigns, have had no trouble finding antipolice and antiwomen lyrics to quote in support of their claim that “nothing less is at stake than civilization” if rappers are not rendered silent. [Though one of the leaders] opposed funding for the nation’s leader in quality children’s programming (the Public Broadcasting Corporation), he has urged that “illegitimate” babies be taken from their mothers and put in orphanages.
Newsweek columnist George Will, described the [album by 2 Live Crew] as “extreme infantilism and menace ... [a] slide into the sewer”. [...] Attacks on rap artists at once reflect and reinforce deep and enduring fears about the sexuality and physical strength of black men. [...] Schwarzenegger’s character [in the “wholesome” True Lies] kills dozens of people in sequences more graphically violent than a rapper could describe with mere words. [Or remember] the song “Run for Your Life,” in which a woman is stalked and threatened with death if she is caught with another man, was a Beatles hit. [Or that Johnny] Cash crows, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”
“Rap Performer Who Personified Violence, Dies,” read a headline in the New York Times. “‘What Goes ’Round ...’: Superstar Rapper Tupac Shakur Is Gunned Down in an Ugly Scene Straight Out of His Lyrics,” the headline in Time declared. [Actually, Shakur] had attended the High School of Performing Arts in Baltimore [and told an interviewer once] “I really like stuff like ‘Les Miserables’ and ‘Gospel at Colonus’”.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
War On Drugs
War On Drugs
Besides the expense (federal funding went from $6 million in the 1960s to $17 billion under Bill Clinton's presidency), the war on drugs has been an abject failure. It also didn't stop the opioid epidemic that started in the 2000s. Why? Because:
The money has been spent almost exclusively on curbing illegal drugs, a curious policy given that abuse of legal drugs is a huge problem. More Americans use legal drugs for nonmedical reasons than use cocaine or heroin; hundreds of millions of prescription pills are used illicitly each year. More than half of those who die of drug-related medical problems or seek treatment for those problems are abusing prescription drugs. [...] Yet less than 1 percent of the nation’s antidrug budget goes to stopping prescription drug abuse. [...] Unlike almost every other hazard, illicit drugs have no interest group to defend them. So they are safe fodder for winning elections and ratings. [...] Scares about heroin, cocaine, and marijuana issue forth continually from politicians and journalists.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Remember this egregious case of political theater from 1989:
At Bush’s request DEA agents tried to find crack in Lafayette Park but failed, Post reporters learned. There was little drug dealing of any sort in that park, and no one selling crack. With Bush’s speech already drafted to include the baggie prop, the agents improvised. In another part of town they recruited a young crack dealer to make a delivery across from the White House (a building he needed directions to find). When he delivered the crack the DEA agents, rather than “seizing” it, as Bush would report, purchased it for $2,400.
Crack's Double Standard
Crack's Double Standard
Adding baking soda to cocaine supposedly makes it much more dangerous. That's a dubious claim for many reasons.
Over the previous decade drug use in the United States had declined considerably. [Yet] journalists had been presenting crack as “the most addictive drug known to man... an epidemic …” (Newsweek, 1986). [Never mind that] studies showing that cigarettes addict 80 percent of people who try them for a length of time, while fewer than 33 percent of those who try crack become addicted. Never among the more popular drugs of abuse, at the height of its popularity crack was smoked heavily by only a small proportion of cocaine users. [...] Similarly, in the 1980s as poverty, homelessness, and associated urban ills increased noticeably, Presidents Reagan and Bush, along with much of the electorate, sidestepped the suffering of millions of their fellow citizens who had been harmed by policies favoring the wealthy. Rather than face up to their own culpability, they blamed a drug. “Crack is responsible for the fact that vast patches of the American urban landscape are rapidly deteriorating,” Bush’s drug czar, William Bennett, decreed.
A by-product of social and economic distress, crack became the explanation for that distress. [...] In the late 1980s Congress mandated prison sentences one hundred times as severe for possession of crack, the form of cocaine for which African Americans are disproportionately arrested, as compared to cocaine powder, the type commonly used by whites. Partly as a consequence of that legislation, by the mid-1990s three out of four people serving prison sentences for drug offenses were African American, even though several times as many whites as blacks use cocaine. In federal courts 94 percent of those tried for crack offenses were African American.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
A Winning Issue For Politicians
A Winning Issue For Politicians
Drug coverage in the media is filled with hyperbole that ultimately confuses the issue. For instance, the USA Today said that:
Smack has become “the pot of the ’90s ... as common as beer". [And] according to Peter Jennings on ABC’s “World News Tonight,” the “disturbing comeback” of heroin among the young is “almost impossible to exaggerate ... a cautionary tale for all parents and all children.” [...] Diane Sawyer effused: “The statistics are heartbreaking. In the last few years, hundreds and hundreds of young people have died from heroin. Some were among the best and the brightest—star athletes, honor students, kids with promise.” [However], with less than 1 percent of high school students trying heroin in a given year and the bulk of heroin use concentrated among inner-city adults.
Drug scares are promoted primarily by three means: presidential proclamations, selective statistics, and poster children. The first two posit a terrifying new trend, the last gives it a human face. [...] A “homecoming queen, cheerleader, and above-average student whose bags were packed for college” (Associated Press), Miki inexplicably became a crackhead and lost her life as a result, the media reported. [She was] from Williamson, West Virginia, a town of 4,300 straight out of a Jimmy Stewart movie (the drugstore still has a soda fountain). The villain of these pieces, Jerry Warren, a black man in his mid-forties, sold crack out of his home to the tune of $30,000 a month and enticed local white kids to get hooked. [...] The Rolling Stone piece, in line with other coverage of middle-class American kids undone by drugs, put much of the blame on the dealer. [...] Miki was not, in fact, a Tipper Gore-in-training debutante living the ideal life in a bucolic hamlet. Nor did she suddenly become a crack addict, thereby proving that the same could happen to any mother’s child before she realizes that something has gone awry. [Rather] Miki fought frequently with her mother and had two friends in jail. [...] Well before her death Miki was using drugs and alcohol, sometimes heavily, but, significantly, crack was not her drug of choice. Casting her as a crackhead allowed for well-turned headlines such as “A Crack in the All-American Dream” (Post- Gazette) and for pseudosociological subplots about the migration of a big-city drug to the countryside. [...] If Miki Koontz’s story illustrates anything, it is reporters’ penchant for chalking up drug deaths to whatever substance they’re on about at the moment.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Roofies
Roofies
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had a headline about Rohypnol that read: "Rape Is Only Thing That This Drug Is For". Not quite factually correct:
[Rohypnol] has been on the market since 1975. Two million people in eighty countries worldwide swallow one to two pills a day by prescription. But in the United States the drug is illegal. Does it truly seem likely that the only place experiencing an “epidemic” (Los Angeles Times)? [And yet, Rohypnol was] christened the “date-rape drug”. [...] Then senator Joseph Biden [presented it] to the American public as “a loaded gun ... a weapon used to facilitate sexual assault”). [...] Rohypnol represented, according to a story in the Dallas Morning News, “all the fears of parents whose daughters have hit dating age packed into one white pill the size of a dime.” [...] “Rohypnol has become a favorite tool of predators,” USA Today asserted in 1996. [...] Rape victims who believed they had been drugged were asked to provide a sample of their urine, which was sent to an independent laboratory for analysis. Of the 1,033 tests returned, only six contained Rohypnol.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
After Roofies faded from the headlines, "media attention shifted to gamma hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), promptly dubbed the 'new' date-rape drug. Used for almost two decades by partygoers for a high and by bodybuilders as an alternative to steroids, GHB suddenly [was] more dangerous than roofies. And so the cycle continued".1
First Gulf War
First Gulf War
Before the 'weapons of mass destruction' lie of the Second Gulf War, there was the First Gulf War. It also began with dubious justification:
A high-profile story and set of photographs about Iraqi soldiers destroying incubators in Kuwait hospitals and leaving babies to die, for instance, turned out to have been planted by the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. [...] They were fed to the media by an American public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton (headed by Bush’s former chief of staff), which the Kuwaitis paid $11.5 million. [...] American people were duped by publicists who recognized that we “would be more likely to fight because of atrocity stories than because one feudal fiefdom was invaded by another,” as Arthur Rowse, a former editor of U.S. News & World Report, put it.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Mysterious Illness
Mysterious Illness
Shortly after the war, the media started reporting the so-called Gulf War Syndrome. Debate raged as:
Thousands of news stories and commentaries appeared in the media, relaying a seemingly endless supply of anecdotes about sick veterans, illustrated with photos of them in wheelchairs or beside their deformed children. Some of the widely quoted anecdotes were subsequently discredited, including those from Michael Adcock, the first vet whose death was widely attributed to GWS. He said he came down with lymphoma in the Gulf—a medical improbability, since Adcock died within months of his return home, and lymphomas take years to develop. [...] A few months before the New England Journal study came out he published a piece “Gulf War Syndrome Feared to Be Contagious”. [Some wannabe experts] remain convinced that the cause of Gulf War illness is an infectious microbe. [...] The basic premise—that medical professionals contracted GWS from vets they treated. [Doubts were] raised about dangers to the nation’s blood supply from donations to the Red Cross by Gulf veterans.
When the Pentagon released studies showing that Gulf veterans were no more ill than would be expected by chance and that their ailments were similar to those that afflicted veterans of previous wars, the news media quoted “leading critics” saying “no one’s going to accept these studies,” and veterans claiming the Pentagon “lied ... every step of the way”. [...] Senator Jay Rockefeller accused the Pentagon of “reckless disregard for the health and well-being of U.S. servicemembers.” [...] Yet the nation’s journalists, happy to recast the Gulf War Syndrome story as “a good old-fashioned cover-up” rather than a “complicated ... medical mystery,” [...] The silence of major government figures from the war has added to the suspicion of ailing veterans that the Pentagon is withholding evidence. [...] The impression was bolstered by a TV movie in May 1998 advertised as “the movie the Government doesn’t want you to see.” [Its writer] referred to Gulf War Syndrome as “a neurological holocaust.”
Thousands of Gulf War vets have undergone countless medical exams rather than getting the psychological counseling they needed [because they were convinced that they had] a unique organic illness. [Chemical] exposure could not explain GWS. For one thing, if toxic exposure had been great, large numbers of veterans should have been hospitalized. Instead, their hospitalization and death rates were about the same as those of their peers who did not serve in the war. The range of symptoms veterans reported were also too diverse. [Besides] people exposed to nerve gases almost invariably exhibit symptoms immediately.
[Rather, as] Elaine Showalter [explained] “patients learn about diseases from the media, unconsciously develop the symptoms, and then attract media attention in an endless cycle.” [Just like] people who claim they were abducted by space aliens [...] are usually sincere and ordinary folks, and their accounts often have a great deal of consistency. [...] Parallel reports from large numbers of ordinary people do not necessarily add up to truth.
Plastic Surgery & Class Action Lawyers
Plastic Surgery & Class Action Lawyers
Laura Thorpe was a sad, but isolated, case. She "took a razor and cut out her own breast implants. [She was] portrayed as burdened with awful ailments caused by her implants but unable to afford surgery to have the implants removed".1 What got lost in that narrative was that Laura was a severely distressed woman and that breast implants were not the origin of her tragic health issues. Yet, time and time again, news coverage stressed anecdotes over science:
"We are the evidence. The study is us sitting here", a woman in the audience yelled out during an Oprah Winfrey Show in 1995, [rebutting] studies from the Mayo Clinic, Harvard, University of Michigan, and elsewhere. [...] Emotional accounts being the stuff of TV talk shows, it is probably unreasonable to expect medical expertise to prevail in these forums. [...] In the words of ABC News correspondent Cokie Roberts on “Nightline” in 1995, “There are the thousands upon thousands of women who have breast implants and complain of terrible pain. Can they all be wrong?”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned the use of silicone implants [in 1992]. [...] The American Medical Association denounced the ban. Rather, the FDA banned implants in the wake of congressional hearings and TV talk shows where implanted women spoke poignantly of a variety of ailments from chronic fatigue to rheumatoid arthritis to cancer, all attributed to their implants. [...] At the time of the ban the FDA issued alarmist projections that 75,000 women would develop major health problems as a result of their implants. [...] It is important to bear in mind that with a million women with silicone implants. [...] The general public can be excused for failing to appreciate this fact, [but not the FDA].
The sociologist Susan Zimmermann, author of Silicone Survivors, a book published in 1998, complains that “the medical community relies on research such as the Mayo Clinic study instead of trusting their patients’ accounts of their symptoms.” For Zimmermann and other feminists who have spoken out against them, implants represent the literal embodiment of male oppression. After all, the critics point out, prior to the FDA ban four out of five implant operations were for cosmetic purposes. (Read: in the service of male fantasies.) And when implanted women became ill, physicians—almost always males —dismissed them. [...] Feature writer with the Miami Herald Elinor] Brecher [explains it this way:] “The better story, the sexier story, was the one about women being disfigured by horrible diseases caused by greedy plastic surgeons”.
Manufacturers of silicone-containing devices such as artificial joints, heart valves, and jaw implants, and companies such as Dow and DuPont that supply raw materials for such devices, scaled back production or got out of the business entirely rather than fight lawsuits. [...] Dow Corning, subsequently declared bankruptcy. [...] By 1998, when Dow Corning reached an agreement to pay $3.2 billion to settle claims and emerge from bankruptcy, a rigorous review of more than one hundred studies, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, had concluded that implants do not cause breast cancer—the most serious disease the lawsuits alleged.
[Rather] research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggested that lifestyle choices, rather than implants, might be factors in some of the women’s ailments. [...] Those with implants tended to be heavier drinkers, have more sex partners, use hair dyes, and take birth control pills. [...] A commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine [said:] “Despite the lack of published epidemiologic studies, the accumulated weight of anecdotes was taken by judges and juries as tantamount to proof of causation.”
But anecdotes do not accumulate on their own. Enterprising attorneys aggressively solicited them. [Some doctors] ran what Gina Kolata and Barry Meier of the New York Times described in an investigative story as “assembly-line practices” for certifying plaintiffs as legitimately ill. One physician in Houston, whose income in 1994 was $2 million, told the Times he had seen 4,700 women with implants, at least 90 percent of whom came from referrals from lawyers. Law firms typically paid the lion’s share of his fee, and in turn, he authenticated percent of the women as ill, thus qualifying them to collect part of the multibillion-dollar settlement or to sue on their own.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
It's a shame the debate got so emotional. It didn't do justice to the complicated issue of proving whether breast implants were harmful in a scientific sense.
[Consider] Marcia Angell, a feminist physician and executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Alternately ignored and denounced by implant activists, Angell eventually acknowledged how much it hurt her personally to be told, “this is a women’s issue and if you don’t believe that breast implants cause connective tissue disease you are therefore anti-feminist or anti-women.”
In the case of breast implants, reporters merely repeated what the class action lawyers were spoon feeding them. And yet, on the issue of tort reform, the media collectively sandbagged the attorneys (the news portrayed the issue of lawsuit abuse as being out of control):
Reporters and commentators took the bait and told again and again anecdotes about a woman who spilled McDonald’s coffee in her lap and got $3 million, and a tricycle manufacturer ordered to pay $7.5 million in a suit over the color of its bikes, which the plaintiffs said concealed a dangerous flaw in a wire handbasket on the handlebars. [...] News organizations that bothered to check out the McDonald’s case discovered that a judge reduced the $3 million coffee award to $480,000, not an ungodly amount considering that the elderly woman had endured two hospitalizations and painful skin grafts, and McDonald’s had kept its coffee at a blistering 180°F to 190°F.
Anti-Vaccine Sentiment & Bogus Research
Anti-Vaccine Sentiment & Bogus Research
Even before the flawed autism study (see right) and the furor over public COVID-19 mandates, vaccines were a source of contention.
“What if” [Katie Couric] asked, “we told you that one of the shots designed to protect your children might actually hurt or cripple them? It’s frightening.” [...] By their own count, [the organisation Dissatisfied Parents Together] received more than 65,000 phone calls to their 800 number as a result of the broadcast. [...] A long piece in Money magazine in 1996 provocatively titled “The Lethal Dangers of the Billion-Dollar Vaccine Business” referred to [the founder] as an “expert.”
The problem with vaccines is that when they work, they do so invisibly, leaving the impression they aren't needed in the first place:
Prior to 1949, when the vaccine was introduced, 7,500 children died from whooping cough and another 265,000 came down with various of its symptoms. [However in] 1984, following media appearances, protest marches, and congressional testimony [...] and mammoth lawsuits, two of the three manufacturers of the DPT vaccine had gotten out of the market, creating a dangerous shortage of the vaccine. Fewer children were being vaccinated, and health officials forecast an epidemic of whooping cough. They pointed to Japan, where a decade earlier panic over the vaccine had resulted in a ban on the drug, a tenfold increase in cases of whooping cough, and a tripling of the number of whooping-cough-related deaths. In England as well, although vaccines were available, immunization rates fell by 40 percent during a scare, and over an eight-year period 100,000 Britons came down with the illness. [And] agitation over the old DPT vaccine may well have delayed introduction of the new one [and] compared to the old vaccine, it is less effective and more expensive.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
A new wave of anti-vaccination crusaders were emboldened in 1998, following the release of erroneous findings in a medical journal:
[A] paper in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet claimed that twelve normal children had become autistic after being given the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. […] It seemed that Wakefield’s research had been funded by a group of lawyers envisioning lucrative personal-injury lawsuits against doctors and pharmaceutical companies. Even more alarmingly, Wakefield himself was evidently planning to market an alternative vaccine that he could claim as safe. […] Of the nine children who Wakefield reported to have regressive autism, only one had actually been diagnosed as such, and three had no autism at all. Wakefield reported that the twelve children were “previously normal” before the MMR vaccine, but five of them had documented developmental problems. […] The Lancet retracted the article in 2010 [and] the UK General Medical Council barred Wakefield from practicing medicine in the UK. [Sadly though, the damage was done:] hundreds of unvaccinated children have died from measles, mumps, and rubella to date.
Source: Gary Smith. Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics. United States, Harry N. Abrams, 2015. [B038]
That infamous Lancet paper that set off a firestorm:
Not until a dozen years after publishing the original paper—after the doctor was stripped of his medical license and found to have acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly”—did The Lancet finally retract his study, calling it “utterly false.” [Yet] a year after the original study came out, they got U.S. health authorities and the American Academy of Pediatrics to recommend that the preservative be removed from vaccines, just to be safe, and manufacturers did so. [...] Among children born since thimerosal was removed from vaccines, autism-spectrum diagnoses continued rising.
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
In case it needs to be mentioned, this is why public perceptions of vaccines matter:
When I was little, a thousand American children died from polio every year, and thousands more were permanently paralyzed. [...] Back then, as many as a thousand American kids died every year from diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough. Several hundred Americans were dying every year from measles, and the disease rendered many hundreds more deaf or, as we said then, retarded. The false belief that vaccines cause autism and other terrible illnesses derives from familiar sources—a misplaced nostalgia for the past, excessive mistrust of experts, the conviction that some vicious conspiracy is behind everything bad, and the gatekeeper-free Internet.
A population’s “herd immunity” starts to collapse and permit infectious epidemics when as few as 6 percent forgo immunization. [...] U.S. cases of whooping cough had bottomed out at around 8,000 through the early 2000s; by 2012, we were up to 48,000—the 1955 level. [...] Twenty of the Americans who got whooping cough in 2012 died, most of them newborns. Measles cases increased tenfold within a few years.
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
Aircraft Hysteria
Aircraft Hysteria
Factually we know that flying is safe, but on a more primitive level, our minds still have trouble comprehending the idea of a heavy metal tube flying off the ground. So when accidents invariably happen, we are prone to pay attention.
In the entire history of commercial aviation, dating back to 1914, fewer than 13,000 people have died in airplane crashes. Three times that many Americans lose their lives in automobile accidents in a single year. The average person’s probability of dying in an air crash is about 1 in 4 million, or roughly the same as winning the jackpot in a state lottery. [...] The likelihood of dying in an airplane crash is roughly on a par with “the risk of being brained by a meteorite,” as one editorial in USA Today put it. “U.S. airlines are so safe now that accidents are largely random events. The average passenger would have to take a flight every day for thousands of years before he would be in a plane crash,” Adam Bryant of the New York Times has noted.
In 1988 the Washington Post ran the headline “Airline Accident Rate Is Highest in 13 Years,” even though the accident rate in fact had been declining for several years. The writers and editors had mistaken incidences for rates. [Journalists] acknowledge that a person is ten times more likely to die in his or her bathtub than in an airplane accident and yet run stories titled “Air Safety—Under a Cloud” (Time) and “High Anxiety in the Skies” (USA Today). [...] U.S. News & World Report [wrote] a cover article titled “How Safe Are Small Planes?” warned of something he dubbed “pay-your-way piloting.” [...] Many surgeons of course pay for their own training too.
Stephen Chapman, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune suggested in December, “most Americans presumably now believe that traveling by commuter airliner is roughly as hazardous as jumping out of a 25th floor window into a toxic waste tank full of crocodiles while smoking an unfiltered cigarette”.
It may seem cold, but the airline industry (including regulators) base their decisions on a cost-benefit analysis. Unfortunately, those callous – yet necessary – calculations are always received poorly by the public:
The FAA, journalists repeatedly asserted, operates with a “tombstone mentality.” Its officials agree to tighten safety standards only when forced to do so by the publicity surrounding fatal accidents. [...] True enough, before putting a new rule in place the FAA conducted a cost-benefit analysis to assess whether enough lives and property would be saved to justify the cost of the regulation. [...] They then multiply that number by the government’s estimated value of a life ($2.6 million last I checked). [...] If the safety rule costs more than the value of the lives and property it will save, the agency may opt to let some people die. Reporters could not avoid the temptation to juxtapose this impersonal process with poignant comments from actual women and men who had lost loved ones in crashes that could have been averted had the FAA not engaged in cost-benefit analysis. Not surprisingly, the agency did not come out looking good. [But being overly cautious costs lives too:] mostly it comes from higher airline ticket prices, which in turn may prevent some people from traveling at all and push others to take to the highways, where they face greater risk of death or injury.
Consider child safety seats, one of the media’s poster children for the evils of cost-benefit analysis. [...] “You can’t hold your laptop computer on your lap, but we’ve seen in accidents, a 33-pound child allowed to be loose in the cabin,” someone from the National Transportation Safety Board declared. [It's true that] the airlines have more safety rules about your luggage than about your child, [but unfortunately] regulations to require safety seats would have cost about $1 billion to implement. [...] K. C. Cole, a science writer for the Los Angeles Times, made the crucial point: [...] “Dozens of 747s worth of children throughout the world die every day due to easily preventable causes like hunger and disease. The price of lives lost on airlines is clearly higher—according to the powers that be—than lives lost to simple hunger.”
Aircraft safety stories prove popular with the public. For example, a U.S. News & World Report article read: “Pilots routinely report falling asleep in the cockpit and making mistakes while landing, taking off and navigating their planes” and “Alcohol and drug abuse is a real problem”. No evidence was presented, just unnamed sources.
No accident, no matter how remote, is off limits:
A second major scare the media promoted in 1995 [because] each year 26 million airplane parts are replaced [and] the fact that fakes of many of the simpler parts, such as bolts and blades, can be produced for a few bucks and sold for ten to one hundred times as much. [There are some] machinists who shine up old parts and sell them back to airlines. Strip-and-dip operations, as they are colorfully called. [...] Mary Schiavo, the inspector general of the Department of Transportation (of which the FAA is a part), also served up some choice quotes. “We shouldn’t have to wait for another plane to drop out of the sky for the FAA to take action”. [...] After TWA Flight 800, bound for Paris, went down shortly after takeoff from JFK in July, Schiavo [blamed] “a bogus part sold to the airline by shady dealers” or “an incompetent mechanic”.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
For some perspective on the risks:
Someone who takes one such flight every day would live twenty-seven thousand years before encountering a fatal crash. [Yet an analysis of] New York Times front-page stories [...] found 138 articles for every 1,000 plane crash deaths, but only 2 articles for every 1,000 homicides, and only 0.02 article for every 1,000 cancer deaths.
Source: Kaiser Fung. Numbers rule your world: the hidden influence of probability and statistics on everything you do. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010. [B039]
The fear of flying may have a simple psychological explanation:
[The] “control” principle might also explain why most people are more scared of flying in an airplane than driving a car. Their thinking goes like this: since I control the car, I am the one keeping myself safe; since I have no control of the airplane, I am at the mercy of myriad external factors. [Yet] more people die even in boating accidents each year than in airplane crashes. [...] The per-hour death rate of driving versus flying, however, is about equal.
Source: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. United States, HarperCollins, 2006. [B049]
The Safety Record At Discount Airlines
The Safety Record At Discount Airlines
Closely related to aircraft safety is the issue airline safety, specifically discount airlines.
An article in Time during this same period announced, “The fatal crash of a ValuJet plane with 109 people aboard raises questions about no-frills flying,” even though the Valujet accident represented the first-ever fatal crash of a low-cost airline. [...] Still, Time was far from alone in implying that price reductions and reduced safety may go hand in hand. [...] Far from raising safety concerns, by stimulating people to fly instead of drive, cut-rate airlines saved lives—approximately 190 to 275 per year, according to a study in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention. [...] A couple of the carriers, Valujet being one, had higher-than-average accident rates, but as a group, the safety record for the discounters was about the same as that of the major airlines.
Time magazine gave the impression that the scare mongering they and most of the rest of the media were doing about commuter air travel was in the service of saving lives. And they turned a tiny probability into a huge one. [They] go to airports and corner people they describe as “seasoned travelers,” who provide quotes like, “I fly constantly, but after this recent crash, even I have white knuckles”. [...] Following every major crash reporters single out a small number of sympathetic victims for profile pieces, [with quotes like] “they’ll never experience prom, or marriage, or babies. Their whole future has been taken away”.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Ignored Topics Like Workplace Safety
Ignored Topics Like Workplace Safety
There are plenty of hazards that garner less attention than they deserve. For instance, "understaffed emergency rooms in public hospitals come to mind, as do encampments of homeless women and children, and hazardous worksites".1
Regarding that last one:
More than 5,000 Americans died in work-related fatalities each year. Almost 7 million suffered injuries. [...] Studies find that, on average, when a company is inspected by OSHA and slapped with a penalty, the injury rate at the firm declines by 20 percent over the following three years. But with only 2,000 inspectors to oversee 6 million workplaces, OSHA was in a position to inspect the average American work site once a century. [...] Republicans had been elected to Congress in 1994 partly with money from corporations that wanted to weaken the agency still further. [...] Allegations of excessive regulation by OSHA, consisted of little more than Republican-planted anecdotes. Particularly popular were tales of dentists who wouldn’t let kids take their baby teeth home because OSHA forbade it. (There was no such OSHA ruling, of course. The regulations in question were designed to protect the public against the spread of AIDS, hepatitis, and other serious illnesses and did not prohibit dentists from abetting the tooth fairy).
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
But workplace safety stories do not sell magazines:
From the late 1970s through the mid-1980s [OSHA] brought about a 95 percent reduction in brown lung disease among textile workers by instituting rules limiting exposure to cotton dust. [...] An example that OSHA officials themselves tried for years to get the press to write about: at least three hundred Americans die each year from silicosis, a lung disease caused by inhalation of dust.
Shark Attacks
Shark Attacks
People are naturally scared of sharks, which is why the media does these types of stories every year. For example, shark reports were everywhere in 2001. And yet:
The headlines during the summer of 2001 might just as easily have read “Shark Attacks About Average This Year.” But that probably wouldn’t have sold many magazines. [...] More people are probably run over each year by TV news vans. Elephants, meanwhile, kill at least 200 people every year.
Source: Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt. SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. United States, HarperCollins, 2011. [B050]
David McRaney puts it succinctly: "If you see lots of shark attacks in the news, you think, 'Gosh, sharks are out of control.' What you should think is 'Gosh, the news loves to cover shark attacks'."4 As the authors of Freakonomics joke: "If sharks had any legal connections whatsoever, they surely would have sued for an injunction"3 against all this bad press. The facts don't support the amount of coverage sharks receive.
As John H. Johnson points out, you are “three times more likely to drown at the beach than die from a shark attack”.2 Or consider the following question:
Which is the more likely cause of death, being attacked and killed by a shark or getting struck by falling airplane parts? Most people don’t have any experience of either, fortunately, but when asked this question they more often than not decide that the shark is the more likely culprit. That’s wrong, however. In the United States, death from falling airplane parts is actually thirty times as probable as dying from a shark attack. […] Shark attacks, no matter how rare, receive considerable media attention and are horrifically easy to imagine, especially if you’ve seen the classic movie Jaws. But can you recall a media report about falling airplane parts? […] This is an example of the availability heuristic, which leads us to subconsciously give more weight to images that come readily to mind than those that are “fuzzier” to recall.
Source: David Dreman. Contrarian investment strategies: The psychological edge. Simon and Schuster, 2012. [B017]
One World Government & Other Conspiratorial Nonsense
One World Government & Other Conspiratorial Nonsense
Sometimes we are scared of things that aren't even threats, exaggerated or otherwise:
Communism was the main focus of American conspiracists for most of the century. [However] don’t be fooled by the Communist collapse —the omnipotent overlords have just reshuffled and rebranded. [...] Pat Buchanan [for instance] simply substituted New World Order and Davos for Communism and Moscow in his talking points. [...] Buchanan won 23 percent of the national GOP primary vote against the incumbent Republican president, and in his campaign during the next cycle carried four states.
By the 1990s, the fear of a UN military takeover of the United States was so widespread and impassioned that the Indiana Department of Transportation, for instance, was obliged to abandon its internal system for tracking the age of highway signs. Indianans had become convinced the colored dots on the backs of the signs were coded navigation instructions for the impending invasion by the UN’s armed foreigners.
The legislature in Oklahoma passed a bill demanding that Congress “cease any support of the establishment of a ‘new world order’…either under the United Nations or under any world body in any form of global government” because that “would mean the destruction of our Constitution and corruption of…our way of life.” Oklahoma wasn’t the only state to pass such a resolution around that time.
The Republican Party’s platform started depicting the UN as a bogeyman in 1996; the 2004 platform demanded that “American troops must never serve under United Nations command”. [...] The 2016 GOP platform calls for a constitutional amendment to protect homeschooling “from interference by states, the federal government, or…the United Nations.”
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
Two more examples from Fantasyland:
The antisharia movement lobbied states to pass statutes and constitutional amendments banning the use of sharia in their courts and legal systems, a fantasy solution to an imaginary problem, almost like a government plan to prevent a zombie apocalypse. Starting in 2010, nine states passed such measures.
Take Agenda 21, for instance. [...] Nobody outside the environmental do-good sector paid attention. From 1994 to 2006, there was exactly one reference to Agenda 21 in The New York Times. [Yet] a dozen state legislatures passed resolutions decrying it.
Conclusion
Conclusion
In his wonderful book The Culture Of Fear, Mr. Glassner describes our collective ability to ignore facts, common sense and reality:
How did listeners to “War of the Worlds” manage to disregard four announcements during the broadcast that identified the program as a radio play? [...] The invaders in “War of the Worlds” were barely more alien, fictitious, or threatening than the “bio-underclass” of crack babies we were told would decimate the nation’s schools and urban neighborhoods. Or the legions of “illegitimate” children said to represent “a national security issue” (Washington Post). Or teen “superpredators” for whom “life means nothing” (Newsweek) and against whom our president warned we had better act promptly “or our country is going to be living with chaos.” Or for that matter, young black men. [...] Take scares about so-called Internet addiction, a malady ludicrously alleged to afflict millions of people and sometimes cause death. [...] Why do people today believe in the existence of mysterious new illnesses even when medical scientists say they do not exist? Why do we entertain preposterous claims about husband abuse, granny dumping, or the middle-class romance with heroin?
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
Postscript: Why We May Like To Be Scared
Postscript: Why We May Like To Be Scared
This hypothesis may not be proven, but it is an interesting argument:
From a psychological point of view extreme fear and outrage are often projections. [So] we project our guilt onto a cavalcade of bogeypeople—pedophile preschool teachers, preteen mass murderers, and homicidal au pairs, to name only a few. [...] Our fear grows, I suggest, proportionate to our unacknowledged guilt. By slashing spending on educational, medical, and antipoverty programs for youths we adults have committed great violence against them. Yet rather than face up to our collective responsibility we project our violence onto young people themselves, and onto strangers we imagine will attack them.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
A more likely explanation revolves around the media's tendency to cover simple stories, like those involving severe weather events. Catastrophes are by definition more dramatic than long-term health issues: "When asked in a survey, people consistently rank tornadoes as a more common cause of death than asthma. In fact, asthma causes about seventy times more deaths. Deaths by asthma don’t stand out—and don’t make the news. Deaths by tornadoes do".6
Sources
Sources
1 : Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
2 : John H. Johnson. Everydata: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data You Consume Every Day, 2016 [B035]
3 : Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt. SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. United States, HarperCollins, 2011. [B050]
4 : David McRaney. You are not so smart. Oneworld, 2012. [B133]
5 : Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
6 : Seth Stephens-Davidowitz and Andrés Pabon. Everybody lies: Big data, new data, and what the internet can tell us about who we really are. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2017. [B135]
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