The Culture of Fear (2 page)

Two years after Jessica’s Law was implemented, as California was reeling from a $42 billion budget deficit, investigative reporters at the
Los Angeles Times
looked into its cost. They discovered that more than $24 million had been paid to private psychologists in 2007 to evaluate the sex offenders. The state didn’t have enough staff psychologists or psychiatrists to meet the demand, so it had to hire outside evaluators. A few of them made more than a million dollars a year in their part-time gigs for the state. The result? Essentially no change in the number of sex offenders sent to mental hospitals. There were forty-one such cases in the eighteen months prior to Jessica’s Law, and forty-two in the eighteen months after it was implemented.
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Fear-driven legislation is good for politicians looking to arouse voters, for advocacy groups looking to attract donations, for ratings-hungry media, and for social scientists, attorneys, and other professionals who choose to cash in on them. Taxpayers foot the bill. And there is another, unintended consequence of fear-based legislation for the public: rather than reassure us, these laws further underscore the already-overhyped danger.

Before September 11, 2001, the toll taken by the culture of fear was not always obvious. Contrivances such as the “war on drugs” (which I deal with in chapter 6), specious menaces like sociopathic juveniles (chapter 3), and bogus medical scares such as “Vaccine Roulette” (chapter 7) were pricey and delusory, but limited. After the attacks of 9/11, exaggerated and unconfirmed scares had more serious and lasting consequences: invading other nations, relinquishing civil rights, censoring
ourselves, sanctioning the torture of prisoners, and other missteps I outline in the book’s new final chapter.

As the decade progressed, overblown fears about terrorism and, later, public unease about the Iraq war distracted us from domestic issues that were growing more urgent by the month. In addition to serious, long-standing dangers to Americans’ health and well-being, lax or nonexistent regulations on financial institutions set the stage for a major international economic collapse. Threats to the U.S. financial system, obscured from public view in part by endless attention to the “war on terror,” undermined America’s national security more than Osama bin Laden and his organization ever did. As I note in the first edition’s introduction, the serious problems people ignore often give rise to the very dangers they fear the most.
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When I give public talks about the culture of fear, I am frequently asked, “Well, what
should
I be afraid of?” My answer is not “nothing,” as some of my questioners assume. On the contrary, I point out dangerous trends that have been around for a while and are thus viewed as old news and unappealing to the media. Motor vehicle injuries, for example, are the leading cause of death in the U.S. for children ages one to fifteen. Drowning and fires are second and third. Youngsters’ head injuries from bicycle accidents account for nearly 140,000 visits to the emergency room each year. If a parent is concerned about his or her children, their money is best spent on car seats, smoke detectors, swimming lessons, and bike helmets as opposed to GPS locators and child identification kits. They would hardly know that, however, from watching their local TV news or listening to the hype from advocacy groups.
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Many of the fear-worthy items I mention in the book are everyday scares we can deal with sensibly as long as we have the facts. More dif ficult to grasp is an underlying problem that has worsened in the intervening years: the massive gap between rich and poor. The culture of fear contributes to this schism by portraying the poor as threatening and unsympathetic. Yet just as the financial crisis that began in 2008 jeopardized not only people who lost their jobs and homes but also Americans’ strategic foreign interests, the gap between rich and poor threatens not only poor people but all Americans. “Living in a society
with wide disparities—in health, in wealth, in education—is worse for all the society’s members, even the well-off,” wrote Elizabeth Gudrais, a journalist and associate editor of
Harvard Magazine,
reporting on a 2008 study about life expectancy in the United States. “Research indicates that high inequality reverberates through societies on multiple levels, correlating with, if not causing, more crime, less happiness, poorer mental and physical health, less racial harmony, and less civic and political participation.” Gudrais noted that in 2006 the disparity between rich and poor in the United States was at its highest point since 1928, with the top 1 percent of earners drawing 20.3 percent of the total national income.
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Gudrais’s article illustrates a positive role that journalists play in the culture of fear. While a major focus of this book is fear mongering by journalists and others, throughout the chapters that follow I take note as well of reporters who bring to light serious dangers about which the public hears little from politicians, corporations, and most of the media. Indeed, again and again I find that it is reporters, rather than government oversight organizations, academics, or other professional truth seekers, who debunk silly or exaggerated scares that other journalists irresponsibly promulgate.

Unfortunately, however, these correctives often occur long after whole sectors of the populace have been scared senseless. Take, for instance, the most public mea culpa I have found in the history of journalistic fear mongering. In 2006, on the twentieth anniversary of its infamous “Marriage Crunch” article, which had declared that a forty-year-old single woman was “more likely to be killed by a terrorist” than to marry,
Newsweek
magazine admitted that “states of unions aren’t what we predicted they’d be.... Beyond all the research studies and forecasts, the trend-spotting and fear mongering that are too often the stock in trade of both journalists and academics, the real story of this anniversary is the unexpected happily-ever-afters.”

So wrote Daniel McGinn, a national correspondent for the magazine. In a lengthy article, he noted that about 90 percent of baby boomers either have married or will marry, and that most single women over forty who want to wed eventually do so. McGinn also tracked down eleven of
the fourteen single women
Newsweek
had profiled in the original story. Only three remained single, and none had divorced.
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Another gloomy forecast that had been repeated across all media in the 1980s and ’90s—the fate of “crack babies”—has been soundly rebuffed by journalists as well. At the time, doctors had warned that the infants, “if they survive, are largely doomed to the underclass because of faulty cognitive and psychological development.” Headlines in the nation’s leading newspapers foretold a “bleak,” “joyless” future for such children, despite, as I discuss in chapter 3, considerable evidence at the time suggesting little cause to single out these children for special worry and stigmatization.

By 2009, journalists began to correct their publications’ earlier scare stories. That year, Susan Okie reported in the
New York Times
on the results of studies tracking the lives of these children for nearly fifteen years. “So far, these scientists say, the long-term effects of such [cocaine and opiate] exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small,” wrote Okie. Other media outlets picked up the story or ran their own.
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One can only hope that journalists—and public officials, advocates, and academics as well—will not wait so long in the future to question
scares du jour
as they arise.

Better still, one can hope for a future in which fear campaigns fail to sway the public in the first place, a prospect that the Presidential election of 2008 suggested may be more than mere fancy. The entry of Barack Obama early in the campaign provoked many of the racist scare tactics outlined in chapter 5 and added a layer of terrorist and anti-Muslim rhetoric to the mix, with Obama’s detractors repeatedly mentioning his middle name (Hussein) and accusing him of “palling around with terrorists.” Yet despite this, Obama captured the presidency with 52.4 percent of the popular vote. The final chapter of this new edition discusses the various attempts by both Republican and Democratic opponents to frighten voters away from Obama. That these tactics failed is an encouraging testament to Americans’ willingness to vote for—as the Obama campaign put it—hope over fear.

W
hy are so many fears in the air, and so many of them unfounded? Why, as crime rates plunged throughout the 1990s, did two-thirds of Americans believe they were soaring? How did it come about that by mid-decade 62 percent of us described ourselves as “truly desperate” about crime—almost twice as many as in the late 1980s, when crime rates were higher? Why, on a survey in 1997, when the crime rate had already fallen for a half dozen consecutive years, did more than half of us disagree with the statement “This country is finally beginning to make some progress in solving the crime problem”?
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In the late 1990s the number of drug users had decreased by half compared to a decade earlier; almost two-thirds of high school seniors had never used any illegal drugs, even marijuana. So why did a majority of adults rank drug abuse as the greatest danger to America’s youth? Why did nine out of ten believe the drug problem is out of control, and only one in six believe the country was making progress?
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Give us a happy ending and we write a new disaster story. In the late 1990s the unemployment rate was below 5 percent for the first time in a quarter century. People who had been pounding the pavement for years could finally get work. Yet pundits warned of imminent economic disaster. They predicted inflation would take off, just as they had a few years earlier—also erroneously—when the unemployment rate dipped below 6 percent.
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We compound our worries beyond all reason. Life expectancy in the United States has doubled during the twentieth century. We are better able to cure and control diseases than any other civilization in history. Yet we hear that phenomenal numbers of us are dreadfully ill. 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 double-dipping,” he suggested.
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Garfield appears to have underestimated one category of patients: for psychiatric ailments his figure was 53 million. Yet when Jim Windolf, an editor of the
New York Observer,
collated estimates for maladies ranging from borderline personality disorder (10 million) and sex addiction (11 million) to less well-known conditions such as restless leg syndrome (12 million) he came up with a figure of 152 million. “But give the experts a little time,” he advised. “With another new quantifiable disorder or two, everybody in the country will be officially nuts.”
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Indeed, Windolf omitted from his estimates new-fashioned afflictions that have yet to make it into the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ofMental Disorders
of the American Psychiatric Association: ailments such as road rage, which afflicts more than half of Americans, according to a psychologist’s testimony before a congressional hearing in 1997.
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The scope of our health fears seems limitless. Besides worrying disproportionately about legitimate ailments and prematurely about would-be diseases, we continue to fret over already refuted dangers. 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.” The bacteria, depicted as more brutal than anything seen in modern times, was said to be spreading faster than the pack of photographers
outside the home of its latest victim. 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.

Group A strep, a cyclical strain that has been around for ages, had been dormant for half a century or more before making a comeback. The British pseudoepidemic had resulted in a total of about a dozen deaths in the previous year. Medical experts roundly rebutted the scares by noting that of 20 to 30 million strep infections each year in the United States fewer than 1 in 1,000 involve serious strep A complications, and only 500 to 1,500 people suffer the flesh-eating syndrome, whose proper name is necrotizing fasciitis. Still the fear persisted. Years after the initial scare, horrifying news stories continued to appear, complete with grotesque pictures of victims. A United Press International story in 1998 typical of the genre told of a child in Texas who died of the “deadly strain” of bacteria that the reporter warned “can spread at a rate of up to one inch per hour.”
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When we are not worrying about deadly diseases we worry about homicidal strangers. Every few months for the past several years it seems we discover a new category of people to fear: government thugs in Waco, sadistic cops on Los Angeles freeways and in Brooklyn police stations, mass-murdering youths in small towns all over the country. A single anomalous event can provide us with multiple groups of people to fear. After the 1995 explosion at the federal building in Oklahoma City first we panicked about Arabs. “Knowing that the car bomb indicates Middle Eastern terrorists at work, it’s safe to assume that their goal is to promote free-floating fear and a measure of anarchy, thereby disrupting American life,” a
NewYork Post
editorial asserted. “Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief terrorist threat against Americans, has not been working,” wrote A. M. Rosenthal in the
New York Times.
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