The Culture of Fear (34 page)

Yet instead of a clear, focused discussion on keeping guns out of kids’ hands, in the wake of Columbine, the public was treated to scares about all sorts of peripheral things like the Internet, video games, movies, rap music, trench coats, and Marilyn Manson (who observed in Rolling Stone: “I think that the National Rifle Association is far too powerful to take on, so most people choose Doom, The
Basketball
Diaries or yours truly”).
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But post-9/11, it was no longer fashionable to disparage our popular culture. In stories about America’s war on terrorism, the culture was referenced not as an infectious agent that turns kids into killers but as a feature of our society that is wrongly reviled by our enemy. “We are battling a bunch of atavistic ascetics who hate TV, music, movies, the Internet (except when they’re planning atrocities), women, and Jews,”
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd put it.
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In the second half of this chapter, I’ll explore in some detail how responses to the attacks of 9/11 played out in—and further precipitated—the culture of fear. But first, let’s return to questionable scares I investigated from the 1990s that still live on. Given their shadiness, one might have expected them to vanish in an age of terror and economic turmoil, yet they persistently reappeared.

About the only dubious dangers that faded out for long periods of time were those for which fear mongers could find no incidents whatever from which to project a trend. In 2007 and 2008, for instance, there was hardly any talk about the topic of chapter 8 since not a single passenger died in an airline crash of a U.S. carrier during those two years.

It took but one fatal crash, however, for the hysteria to start up again. After a commuter plane went down in February 2009, the
New
York Times began its online story—“50 Killed as Plane Hits House Near Buffalo” —with a sentence that managed at once to suggest a trend of airline disasters in the region, and connect the incident to the planes that flew into the World Trade Center seven and a half years earlier. “All the people aboard the Continental flight, including the widow of a 9/11 victim
and one person in the house, were killed on Thursday, officials said, in the second major crash in a month in New York State,” the article began, even though no lives were lost in the previous crash. In the print edition two days after the crash, the Times devoted much of the front page to photos and profiles of victims, and two full inside pages of the first section to the accident.
⁴

Other reporters magnified the Continental crash by quoting doomsayers who claimed that airlines had become lax about safety, and by digging deep in their files for alarming accounts and frightening photos of planes that had veered off runways or had engine trouble over the previous several years. Of the major print and TV media, I could find only one that made plain the real and reassuring trend in airline safety over the previous years. The second paragraph of the lead story on
USA Today’s
website soon after the crash read: “The crash was the first fatal accident on a U.S. passenger flight since Aug. 27, 2006, ending the longest period on record without a death.” And in the print edition four days after the crash—when the cable networks were running scare stories about airline
safety—USA Today’s
lead, front page story appropriately began by reiterating that point, “Before Thursday, airlines had made more than 25 million flights in the United States during the past 2 1/2 years without a passenger being killed.”
⁵

Little evidence has been necessary to keep alive a whole array of specious scares I discussed in the previous chapters. Take road rage. In chapter 1, I selected road rage as a textbook example of an uncommon danger that was grossly overblown and that misdirected attention from more structural problems. Its appeal to fear-mongering journalists lay in its presumed randomness: anytime, anywhere, anyone could be a victim. Throughout the first decade of the new century, an average of about 100 magazine, newspaper, and television stories a month still featured the scare. To judge by those news stories, the definition of road rage expanded to include everything from honking to running someone over.
⁶

And road rage became a medical malady. “They’re the victims of a newly defined psychiatric disorder,” announced Richard Schlesinger on
CBSMorningNews
in June 2006. “Intermittent Explosive Disorder is
caused by improper functioning of a brain chemical.” Sixteen million Americans may be affected, he warned. “[They] each have an average of 43 attacks in their lifetime. Something to think about when you’re in heavy traffic.”
⁷

Call this the
neurologizing
of social problems, a common feature of popular discourse in the early twenty-first century. Ignoring societal conditions, this approach looks inward. At the time of the CBS story, nearly 10 million Americans had a round-trip commute of more than two hours, and soaring housing prices had driven people far from city centers to achieve the American dream of owning a home. Slower, more crowded roads, coupled with deficient investments in roads and public transportation, and high gas prices—and later in the decade, collapsing home values and record numbers of foreclosures in outlying areas—pre—dictably produced overheated drivers.

But the news media tended to focus on the besieged individual’s brain rather than the larger society. Rather than talking to experts on, say, telecommuting or transportation infrastructure, journalists quoted those who advise drivers to treat their road rage with Prozac, therapy, or by learning karate so they can be prepared when raging drivers leap from their vehicles and attack.
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Coverage of supposed dangers of the Internet suffered from tunnel vision as well. In a decade when the United States had the highest rates of childhood poverty in the developed world and the lowest rates of spending on social services, American journalists and politicians portrayed cyberspace as the scariest place a child can be, more menacing by far than anything young people face in a non-virtual world. “I’ve covered murders, grisly accidents, airplanes falling out of the sky and, occasionally, dirty politics. But in nearly two decades of journalism, nothing has made my insides churn like seeing what my 13-year-old daughter and her friends are up to on
MySpace.com
,” reporter Catherine Saillant warned in the Los Angeles Times in 2006. After nosing around on daughter Taylor’s MySpace page and finding a bulletin from
another girl urging Taylor to add a certain “hott guy” [
sic
] to her friends list, Saillant hyperventilated, “Loosely translated, the teenage girl was ‘pimping’ a teenage boy ... If Taylor added him to her MySpace ’friends’ list, the tousled-hair teen would be able to look at her website and send messages to her.”
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If in the 1990s parents were spooked by predators who lurked on online chat rooms, as we saw in chapter 2, in the 2000s that scare matured along with the Internet. Now parents learned that legions of adults drool over their children’s photos on MySpace, the social networking website dating to 2003, and gawk at the videos teens post on YouTube, which launched in 2005.

Not that patterns of abuse had changed what I reported a decade ago. The vast majority of crimes against children and adolescents—sexual and otherwise—continued to be perpetrated by parents, relatives, and other adults the child or teen knows. More than four out of five victims are abused by a parent, and another 10 percent by a caregiver, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The incidence of actual abuse as a result of an online connection is “vanishingly small,” as a sociologist who has studied the data put it.
¹⁰

A group of researchers at the University of New Hampshire put it bluntly: “The publicity about online ‘predators’ who prey on naive children using trickery and violence is largely inaccurate. Internet sex crimes involving adults and juveniles more often fit a model of statutory rape—adult offenders who meet, develop relationships with, and openly seduce underage teenagers—than a model of forcible sexual assault or pedophilic child molesting.” That declaration, atop an article they published in 2008 in American Psychologist, a journal of the American Psychological Association, is noteworthy not only for its clarity but for the occasion of its writing. Fed up with frightening and misleading statements by reporters, advocacy groups, and public officials, many of whom are cited in the paper, the authors wrote the piece in part to correct the record about their own research.
¹¹

Indeed, it was a report of theirs, published two years earlier by an advocacy group, that gave rise to a favorite statistic of the fear mongers: “One in seven young people has been sexually solicited online.” Hearing
or reading that sentence, almost anyone would imagine that an astounding number of American youngsters had been solicited online by the sort of dirty older men featured in NBC’s To Catch
a
Predator series that aired from 2004 through 2008—and later in reruns on MSNBC—and involved hidden cameras and sting operations. Actually, though, in the UNH study, nearly half of the solicitations reported were teens hitting on other teens; just 9 percent were adults. (In other cases, the age was unknown.)
¹²

When adults do solicit minors online, the UNH researchers find, the young person almost invariably knows that the person at the other computer is an adult. Trickery about the perpetrator’s age or intentions is rare. Moreover, as an exhaustive study in 2009 from Harvard University pointed out, youths who are approached and respond are typically teens already at risk because of their own drug abuse or troubled home environments. Many engage willingly with the adult who solicits them.
¹³

Fear mongers make online social networking scary by pretending away those sorts of findings. “Children are solicited every day online. Some fall prey, and the results are tragic. That harsh reality defies the statistical academic research underlying the report,” an attorney general from Connecticut who campaigns against Internet dangers vacuously told the
New
York Times when the Harvard study came out.
¹⁴

While adults were being told their kids were endangering their lives online—or at best, wasting them away—studies were finding that the online activities of youths are not only nontoxic, they’re productive. A report in 2008 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation got little attention, but the extensive three-year study showed that youth use online media primarily for self-directed learning and to gain and extend friendships. “The digital world is creating new opportunities for youth to grapple with social norms, explore interests, develop technical skills, and experiment with new forms of self-expression,” the researchers wrote.
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Even entertainment sites like YouTube are used in those ways, as I learned firsthand. When a student at the university where I work mentioned in passing that she relies on YouTube for help in understanding
her math and science classes, I did a little checking and found a wealth of material. Upon typing “calculus” in the search box at
youtube.com
, I was sent to “Calculus in 20 Minutes,” a series of instructive, fast-paced mini-lectures by a professor of mathematics at Williams College. The one I watched had received nearly 150,000 views. A search for “physics” brought a lecture by a University of California, Berkeley, professor on atoms and heat that had received a quarter of a million hits. To be sure, those numbers don’t compare to the twelve million hits the video “Best Break Dance Ever” received, but they aren’t shabby.
¹⁶

Scares about children being abducted
off-
line continued as well. Even in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when one might plausibly have expected pressing concerns to eclipse pseudoterrors, the media were preoccupied with missing kids. In the summer of 2002, just months after the attacks, I wrote an article for the
Wall StreetJournal
about a little experiment I did. Over the course of a couple of weeks, whenever I had the chance, I turned on the TV and flipped between MSNBC, Fox News Channel, and CNN to see what they were covering. Rarely did I have to wait more than twenty minutes to get a report about one or more child abductions. Most of the time, I didn’t have to wait at all.

How did editors and journalists defend spending so much airtime on child abductions? They used words like “trend” or “epidemic” even as child abductions remained extremely rare, and they threw out bogus numbers. On his Fox News Channel show, Bill O’Reilly talked of “100,000 abductions of children by strangers every year in the United States,” though an exhaustive study from the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) that year found only 115 cases a year of “stereotypical kidnappings” (children abducted by nonfamily members and kept for long periods of time or murdered). “The majority of victims of stereotypical and other nonfamily abductions were teens—not younger children—and most were kidnapped by someone
they knew somewhat—not by strangers or slight acquaintances,” a subsequent report in 2006 from the OJJDP noted.
¹⁷

Yet the obsession with kidnapped kids has shown no signs of slackening. In the late 2000s, the high-profile missing children were Caylee Anthony and Madeleine McCann. Madeleine, just shy of her fourth birthday, went missing in May 2007 from a resort in Portugal, and the story continued to get media attention for a couple of years, well after the Portuguese police had closed the case. Caylee Anthony disappeared in June 2008; her mother was eventually arrested for her murder. Caylee’s tragedy combined two high-voltage scares I have discussed in the book: the missing child and the monster mom.