The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [126]
Following the attacks of 9/11, journalists dared not question the White House’s interpretation of events. “It starts with a feeling of patriotism within oneself,” explained CBS anchorman Dan Rather, speaking with a British journalist in May 2002. “It carries through with a certain knowledge that the country as a whole—and for all the right reasons—felt and continues to feel this surge of patriotism within themselves. And one finds oneself saying, ‘I know the right question, but you know what? This is not exactly the right time to ask it.”’47
Wearing flag label pins and crying on camera, journalists suspended even the pretense of objectivity as they affirmed the administration’s claim that the attacks of 9/11 constituted a fundamental turning point in human history. “The world is different,” a phrase repeated endlessly in late 2001 and 2002, became a kind of password that opened the door for an extraordinary degree of fear mongering on the part of the administration, as would its successor adage, “9/11 can happen again.”48
This wasn’t the first time a White House had been behind a massive and expensive fear campaign. As we saw earlier in this book, other such efforts—the war on drugs, in particular—dragged on for years, consuming many millions of dollars. But it is difficult to find an earlier example where an administration amassed so much machinery to the cause.
Before we review that machinery, let us consider the premise upon which it was based. Was the world so different after 9/11? Certainly the average citizen and even the average journalist could be forgiven for feeling frightened and disoriented after September 11. At first, the estimated loss of life at the Twin Towers was reported to be as high as 50,000 (the actual death toll was 2,752). No one knew if other cities would be hit within days. Throughout the fall of 2001, anthrax-laced letters threatening the United States were mailed to various news organizations and political offices. Though the letters were later traced to a U.S. military laboratory and ascribed to an American biodefense researcher, at the time they were understandably assumed to be the work of foreign terrorists.49
But by the end of 2001, no attacks other than the anthrax letters had occurred in the United States. According to figures published by the U.S. State Department, the total number of deaths from terrorist attacks worldwide in 2001 was 3,547, more than three-quarters of which were on 9/11. About the same number of Americans died that year from drowning. Nearly three times as many died from gun-related homicides, and five times as many in alcohol-related motor vehicle accidents. In Overblown, a book on America’s response to 9/11, John Mueller, a professor of political science at Ohio State University, notes that over the last four decades, lightning has killed as many Americans as have terrorists.50
Even if terrorist acts in the United States had increased significantly, the risk to an average citizen of serious harm or death would have been less than from everyday dangers such as accidents and hypertension. In a worst-case scenario, if a terrorist group were to somehow detonate a nuclear bomb in a major U.S. city, the highest casualty rate is predicted to be around 250,000. As gruesome as that would be, the nation has borne worse. The influenza epidemic of 1918 killed 600,000.51
Post-9/11 and throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, although terrorists continued to attack