Proofiness - Charles Seife [29]
It was an illusion, and a relatively implausible one at that. The engine in the Audi 5000 was not strong enough to overpower the brakes—if the driver was pushing hard on the brake, the car would have stayed put even if the engine was going full throttle. (And in all of the accidents in question, the Audi’s brakes were in working order.) When the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration studied the issue, they found that the unintended accelerations were caused by drivers pressing the accelerator pedal instead of the brake. In each case, the panicking driver, trying to stop the car, stomped on the accelerator harder and harder, making the Audi zoom out of control. (Which explains why Audi accident investigators occasionally found accelerator pedals that had been bent by the pressure of the driver’s foot.) A Canadian investigation found the same thing. The Audis weren’t defective; there was nothing mechanically wrong with them. But 60 Minutes had the unexpected acceleration on tape! What about the eerie footage of the accelerator pedal pressing down on its own and the Audi suddenly zooming out of control? This is where standard 60 Minutes fearmongering turns, in my opinion, into bona fide journalistic misconduct. The demonstration seems to have been rigged. A safety “expert” had apparently bored a hole in the Audi’s transmission and forced high-pressure air in—it was this high pressure that caused the accelerator to depress “by itself.” Bradley never hinted that the Audi had been doctored, and, to all appearances, 60 Minutes had successfully tricked its audience into thinking that a risk existed when it was just a fiction.27
Exaggerating risks—and the fear these risks cause—is a potent tool, and not just for journalists. Politicians have long known that the public tends to support its leaders in times of crisis, so there’s an incentive to make threats seem bigger than they are. According to some critics, the Homeland Security Advisory System—the color-coded five-level terror alert system created shortly after the September 11 attacks—is nothing more than an institutionalized way for the executive branch to manipulate the perceived risk of a terrorist attack. Though it’s hard to divine the motivations of the Bush administration, there are some disturbing hints that the alert system was manipulated for political ends. For one thing, the alert level has never been relaxed below stage three (“yellow”) since the September 11 attacks, indicating an “elevated” risk of terrorist attack. “Elevated” means “higher than usual,” so it’s completely nonsensical to declare that the everyday state of affairs exposes us to a higherthan-usual risk of terrorist attack. It’s impossible to have an eternally elevated risk, just as it’s impossible for all the children in Lake Wobegon to be above average. Another hint comes from indications that political considerations occasionally played a role in raising and lowering the alert level. For example, in 2003, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, the administration admitted relaxing the alert from stage two (“orange”) to stage three (“yellow”) not because of any change in the level of threat, but so they could elevate it again a few days before the war began. And finally, there’s a bit of evidence that is very disturbing even though it should be taken with a big grain of salt. A 2004 study seemed to indicate that every time the government issued a terror warning, the president’s approval rate spiked higher. The benefits of scaring the public are all too apparent.28
Nevertheless, if you want to make oodles of money, underestimating risks, not exaggerating them,