The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [12]
As a social scientist I am impressed and somewhat embarrassed to find that journalists, more often than media scholars, identify the jugglery involved in making small hazards appear huge and huge hazards disappear from sight. Take, for example, the scare several years ago over the Ebola virus. Another Washington Post reporter, John Schwartz, identified a key bit of hocus-pocus used to sell that scare. Schwartz called it “the Cuisinart Effect,” because it involves the mashing together of images and story lines from fiction and reality. 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. Alternating between Dustin Hoffman’s character exclaiming, “We can’t stop it!” and real-life science writer Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague, proclaiming that “HIV is not an aberration ... it’s part of a trend,” Dateline’s report gave the impression that swarms of epidemics were on their way.39
Another great journalist-debunker, Malcolm Gladwell, noted that the book that had inspired Outbreak, Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone, itself was written “in self-conscious imitation of a sci-fi thriller.” In the real-world incident that occasioned The Hot Zone, monkeys infected in Zaire with a strain of Ebola virus were quarantined at a government facility in Reston, Virginia. The strain turned out not to be lethal in humans, but neither Preston in his book nor the screenwriters for Outbreak nor TV producers who sampled from the movie let that anticlimax interfere with the scare value of their stories. Preston speculates about an airborne strain of Ebola being carried by travelers from African airports to European, Asian, and American cities. In Outbreak hundreds of people die from such an airborne strain before a cure is miraculously discovered in the nick of time to save humanity. In truth, Gladwell points out in a piece 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,” Gladwell notes.40
Such disproofs of disease scares appear rather frequently in general-interest magazines and newspapers, including in publications where one might not expect to find them. The Wall StreetJournal,for instance, while primarily a business publication and itself a retailer of fears about governmental regulators, labor unions, and other corporate-preferred hobgoblins, has done much to demolish medical myths. Among my personal favorites is an article published in 1996 titled “Fright by the Numbers,” in which reporter Cynthia Crossen rebuts a cover story in Time magazine on prostate cancer. One in five men will get the disease, Time thundered. “That’s scary. But it’s also a lifetime risk—the accumulated risk over some 80 years of life,” Crossen responds. A forty-year-old’s chance of coming down with (not dying of) prostate cancer in the next ten years is 1 in 1,000, she goes on to report. His odds rise to 1 in 100 over twenty years. Even by the time he’s seventy, he has only a 1 in 20 chance of any kind of cancer, including prostate.41
In the same article Crossen counters other alarmist claims as well, such as the much-repeated pronouncement that one in three Americans is obese. The number actually refers to how many are overweight,