The Culture of Fear (36 page)

Auspiciously, by late in the decade, knowledgeable science journalists were actively countering the twaddle on those shows. In particular, Sharon Begley,
Newsweek’s
science reporter, published a lengthy rebuttal of the MMR—autism scare in 2009. “It is bad enough that the vaccine-autism scare has undermined one of the greatest successes of preventive medicine and terrified many new parents,” Begley avowed at the conclusion of the article. “Most tragic of all, it has diverted attention and millions of dollars away from finding the true causes and treatments of a cruel disease.”
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No effort to shine the light of science on a metaphorical illness, regardless how sizeable or decisive the evidence, seems to be enough, however, to settle down the media and politicians for long if the ailment has sympathetic victims, motivated attorneys, energetic advocacy groups, and heartbreaking anecdotes buoying it. Consider another metaphorical illness I highlighted. Headlines in major newspapers and on radio and television in 2008 blared “Gulf War Syndrome Is Real,” and the stories said the causes were a drug given to soldiers and pesticides to which troops were exposed in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But in point of fact, my conclusion in chapter 7 was probably closer to the mark: “Not until well into the twenty-first century are medical scientists likely to have sufficient long-term studies to reach a definitive conclusion about the causes of Gulf War Syndrome” (p. 159).

Reporters and advocates variously ignored or played down the fact that the 2008 report from a Congressional advisory committee of scientists and veterans was just one of at least a dozen expert summaries of the matter, and far from the most persuasive, comprehensive, or prestigious. Two years earlier, for instance, a panel assembled by the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine reviewed nearly all the scientific literature—850 studies—and concluded that while Gulf War veterans suffer awful symptoms and deserve better care than they’ve received, GWS has no clear diagnosis, cause, or recommended treatment.
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It is, therefore, an apt metaphor for America’s involvement in the Gulf, where we have now gone to war twice: briefly in the ‘90s, lengthily in the ’00s, each time without clear provocation, diagnosis of conditions, or realistic battle plans, and with scarce attention to protecting and caring for our soldiers.

An iffy illness of more recent origin likewise resonates as a metaphor for other collective failings and anxieties. Said to cause a mountain of miseries, from infections, bleeding gums, and pulmonary hemorrhages to brain lesions, memory loss, seizures, and even dementia, household mold spawned an industry that encompasses everything from fumigators to home mold-detection kits to mold-sniffing dogs.

The panic took off in 2001, after a Texas family was awarded $32.1 million for a mold problem in their twenty-two-room mansion. That
case, which was widely publicized, had the effect of a starting gun at the Indy 500. At the time, there were about 227 lawsuits over toxic mold. At the time of this writing there are tens of thousands.

It fell to Daniel Heimpel, a writer for the
L.A. Weekly,
to bring to light the victim-cum-advocate who started it all, Sharon Kramer, a former realtor whose daughter Erin is among a small group of people susceptible to mold allergies because of previously compromised immune systems (Erin has cystic fibrosis). In 1998 Erin was diagnosed with allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis, which she contracted from mold during a hospital stay. With her daughter’s case as proof of the syndrome, Sharon Kramer made toxic mold her life’s work. A decade later she was still fighting. “She saw a conspiracy funded by businesses out to end mold claims while risking the public’s health. She believed that the well-being of thousands depended on her exposing that deceit,” writes Heimpel. “Kramer’s belief has consumed her.”
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When I checked the scientific literature, it wasn’t hard to learn that “the term ‘toxic mold’ is not accurate. While certain molds are toxigenic, meaning they can produce toxins (specifically mycotoxins), the molds themselves are not toxic, or poisonous,” as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) notes. “Certain individuals with chronic respiratory disease (chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, asthma) may experience difficulty breathing. Individuals with immune suppression may be at increased risk for infection from molds.”
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When a blue-ribbon panel of scientists conducted an exhaustive appraisal of the scientific evidence well into the panic, they reported that while mold can worsen a person’s asthma condition and produce common if annoying upper respiratory tract symptoms in most anyone, “the available evidence does not support an association between either indoor dampness or mold and the wide range of other health complaints that have been ascribed to them.”
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As with other metaphoric illnesses, most of the alleged symptoms of toxic mold syndrome are vague and far-flung. And like other impassioned advocates, Sharon Kramer pits herself against the medical establishment, which she believes is in league with business—in this case, housing developers and contractors. For Kramer and other advocates,
anecdotal evidence trumps scientific study, and those anecdotes can go far in making for good news stories and tearful testimony in court cases, before legislatures, and on advocates’ websites and blogs.

A metaphor for anxieties shared by a great many Americans—that our health is at the mercy of powerful, mysterious forces that do not care about us—toxic mold syndrome, unlike mold itself, is unlikely to fade away under the light of day.

Neither is another illogicality I discussed in earlier chapters: an overemphasis of uncommon crimes and deemphasis of the common instrument of death and serious injury in those and other crimes.

In TV newsrooms,
if it bleeds it leads
remains the watchword. A study of 559 newscasts in twenty television markets across the United States compared the crimes covered by local news to the number and types of crimes actually committed. Although crime had fallen for eight years prior to the 2004 study, in all twenty markets “audiences were told essentially the same story—that random, violent crime was a persistent and structural feature of American society,” the researchers found. All the more misleading, the newscasts consistently gave the impression that murder and other serious crimes are rampant in places where they are rare.

In the nation’s largest cities, murder accounted for only .2 percent of all crimes, and in the suburbs of those cities, murder accounted for just .01 percent. Yet not only are murder stories a staple of the coverage in those cities, accounting for 36 percent of the crimes reported on the TV news, the newscasts warned suburban viewers that crime was moving to their areas.
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Why scare the suburban audiences? They tend to have the buying power advertisers like, the study suggested: “The notion that the newscast is the product and that the audience is the customer is exactly backwards.” The advertisers are the customers and access to the audience is the product. Crime stories are a cost-effective way to capture an audience. The more vulnerable the viewing public is made to feel, the
more essential the role of the local newscaster as a neighbor who “sounds the alarm for collective defense.”

Thus the pattern I noted in the 1980s and ’90s continues. And as then, the most immediate and confirmable factor in most of the deadly crimes—access to firearms by people who should not have them—continues to be largely ignored in the coverage. Having been on the receiving end of vitriolic attacks by gun lovers for daring to make that point in this book and elsewhere, I confess to being somewhat wary of returning to an issue that so many politicians, journalists, and scholars have decided to brush aside rather than endanger their careers or their families’ peace of mind.

But the dearth of attention to gun violence ought not to go entirely unremarked. Shortly after the bloodbath at Columbine, Jeffrey Fagen, director for the Center for Violence Research and Prevention at Columbia University, pointed out that three common themes apply to school shootings: the perpetrator has a long-standing grievance, a mental illness, and access to firearms. None of these alone produces a massacre, he noted; their convergence does.
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Eight years later, that point was driven home again for those who cared to notice, after a student went on a shooting spree at Virginia Tech. Cho Seung-Hui, who killed thirty-two people on that campus in April 2007, had been diagnosed with mental illness while still in middle school and had been treated while at college. The creepy videotapes he left behind demonstrated a long-standing grievance. And he had firearms: a 9mm Glock and a .22-caliber Walther.

American society, unlike many others around the globe, has no effective means for removing the one factor in that deadly triad that outside forces can control—a fact that barely got mentioned in the extensive news coverage following the shootings. In a cover story,
Newsweek
magazine puzzled instead over Cho’s background. “A Cho who grew up in, say, Japan, would almost certainly not have acted on his hatred and fury: biology and psychology set the stage for homicidal violence, but the larger culture would likely have prevented its execution.” That in the “larger culture” of Japan it is extremely difficult to buy a handgun somehow eluded the writer and her editors.
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True to form after gun disasters,
Newsweek,
along with other media outlets, politicians, and pundits, engaged in lots of head-scratching over criminal minds, negligent parents, powerless teachers, and ineffective mental health workers. Access to guns was treated as just one of many factors contributing to violence on campus, when in truth, as Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University succinctly put it, “Guns transform what is widespread teenage behavior into disasters.”
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The same can be said of disputes between adults that need not be deadly. Pick any one-month period, search news and police sources, and you’re almost guaranteed to find dozens of instances of jealous lovers or ex-lovers, disgruntled employees or ex-employees, shooting and killing one another and, often, unlucky bystanders as well. With close to 30,000 Americans dying and more than twice that number wounded by firearms annually, the carnage is not only tragic, it is expensive. The leading cause of uninsured hospital stays, gunshot injuries cost the nation’s hospitals about $800 million a year. Yet regardless how familiar or surprising the event—be it everyday gunfire by estranged partners or shooting rampages at a nursing home, immigration center, health club, or church (all occurred in 2009)—little will be heard from political leaders or media analysts about the unique and preventable role that firearms played.
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When reporters bother to look beyond the propaganda that “gun rights” advocacy groups shower upon them, they discover that much can be done to reduce those numbers. Indeed, they learn that some measures that could save thousands of lives do not even raise the ire of any but the most ultra-radical pro-gun forces. Gary Fields, a
Wall Street Journal
reporter, was a case in point with an article he authored in 2008 about a ten-year-old program in Richmond, Virginia. Supported by everyone from the NRA to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, “Project Exile” does not attempt to control gun sales or ownership. Instead, it metes out harsh punishment to anyone who commits a gun crime, no matter how minor, including illegal possession of a firearm. By means of television, radio, and outdoor advertising, the program doggedly reminds local residents that, as a forty-foot sign on city buses says, “An Illegal Gun Gets You 5 Years in Federal Prison.”
With bail unlikely and parole nonexistent, the number of guns on the street dropped 31 percent in the first year, Fields reported.
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There was another powerful group, in addition to the gun lobby, who diverted legislators, journalists, and the broader public from addressing firearm violence: the Bush administration. Risks to innocent Americans from gun violence were among a long list of imminent, avertable dangers that the Bush administration chose to ignore during its eight years in Washington from 2000 to 2008, for reasons of political expediency and ideology. (The collapse of the banking and housing sectors toward the end of the Bush years comes immediately to mind as another example where sensible regulation could have prevented a great deal of human suffering.)

How did the Bush administration and its allies dispense with social issues and Democratic rivals the White House found bothersome? They developed an effective machinery for drumming into every citizen unease over a danger the administration insisted loomed larger than all others.

Through a variety of channels, they repeated time and again the eerie incantation:
9/11 can happen again.

Before I discuss how the Bush administration kept that incantation foremost in Americans’ minds and public policy for a full seven years, let me be clear about the gravity of the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. Without question, they were singular in their horror. When nineteen men hijacked four passenger jets and used them to strike the United States, the tragedy tapped one of our most enduring fears—the random, catastrophic plane crash—and multiplied it exponentially. I find it hard to imagine a more nightmarish vision than United Flight 175 plunging into one of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers while the other tower blazed beside it, debris spiraling 100 stories downward. Terrified office workers fled as the towers collapsed; dazed, ash-covered firefighters wandered through the wreckage; citizens sobbed and clutched one another; a huge chunk of the Pentagon lay in
ruins from an assault by another plane; still another was a gray gash in the earth; and all of it was replayed on television ceaselessly over the coming weeks.