The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [132]
6 Piller and Romney, “State Pays Millions.”
7 Dennis C. Blair, “Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence” (unclassified statement for the record), 12 February 2009, http://intelligence.senate.gov/090212/blair.pdf.
8 David Ropeik, Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What‘sReally Dangerous in the World Around You (Boston: Mariner Books, 2002); Kids Risk Project: http://www.kidsrisk.harvard.edu; Alan Woolf, “What Should We Worry About?” Newsweek, 22 September 2003.
9 Elizabeth Gudrais, “Unequal America: Causes and Consequences of the Wide-and Growing—Gap Between Rich and Poor,” Harvard Magazine, July-August 2008.
10 Daniel McGinn, “Marriage by the Numbers,” Newsweek, 5 June 2006.
11 Mike Cooper, “‘Crack’ Babies’ Future Bleak,” CDC AIDS Weekly, 21 May 1990, p. 8; Susan Okie, “The Epidemic That Wasn‘t,” New York Times, 27 January 2009.
Introduction
1 Crime data here and throughout are from reports of the Bureau of Justice Statistics unless otherwise noted. Fear of crime: Esther Madriz, Nothing Bad Happens to Good Girls (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), ch. 1; Richard Morin, “As Crime Rate Falls, Fears Persist,” Washington Post National Edition, 16 June 1997, p. 35; David Whitman, “Believing the Good News,” U.S. News & World Report, 5 January 1998, pp. 45—46.
2 Eva Bertram, Morris Blachman et al., Drug War Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 10; Mike Males, Scapegoat Generation (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1996), ch. 6; Karen Peterson, “Survey: Teen Drug Use Declines,” USA Today, 19 June 1998, p. A6; Robert Blendon and John Young, “The Public and the War on Illicit Drugs,”Journalof the American Medical Association 279 (18 March 1998): 827-32. In presenting these statistics and others I am aware of a seeming paradox: I criticize the abuse of statistics by fearmongering politicians, journalists, and others but hand down precise-sounding numbers myself. Yet to eschew all estimates because some are used inappropriately or do not withstand scrutiny would be as foolhardy as ignoring all medical advice because some doctors are quacks. Readers can be assured I have interrogated the statistics presented here as factual. As notes throughout the book make clear, I have tried to rely on research that appears in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Where this was not possible or sufficient, I traced numbers back to their sources, investigated the research methodology utilized to produce them, or conducted searches of the popular and scientific literature for critical commentaries and conflicting findings.
3 Bob Herbert, “Bogeyman Economics,” New York Times, 4 April 1997, p. A15; Doug Henwood, “Alarming Drop in Unemployment,” Extra, September 1994, pp. 16-17; Christopher Shea, “Low Inflation and Low Unemployment Spur Economists to Debate ‘Natural Rate’ Theory,” Chronicle of Higher Education,24 October 1997, p. A13.
4 Bob Garfield, “Maladies by the Millions,” USA Today, 16 December 1996, p. A15.
5 Jim Windolf, “A Nation of Nuts,” Wall Street Journal, 22 October 1997, p. A22.
6 Andrew Ferguson, “Road Rage,” Time, 12 January 1998, pp. 64—68; Joe Sharkey, “You’re Not Bad, You’re Sick. It’s in the Book,” New York Times, 28 September 1997, pp. N1, 5.
7 Malcolm Dean, “Flesh-eating Bugs Scare,” Lancet 343 (4June 1994): 1418; “Flesh-eating Bacteria,” Science 264 (17 June 1994): 1665; David Brown, “The Flesh-eating Bug,” Washington Post National Edition, 19 December 1994, p. 34; Sarah Richardson, “Tabloid Strep,” Discover (January 1995): 71; Liz Hunt, “What’s Bugging Us,” TheIndependent, 28 May 1994, p. 25; Lisa Seachrist, “The Once and Future Scourge,” Science News 148 (7 October 1995): 234-35. Quotes are from Bernard Dixon, “A Rampant Non-epidemic,” British Medical Journal 308 (11 June 1994): 1576-77; and Michael Lemonick and Leon Jaroff, “The Killers All Around,” Time, 12 September 1994, pp. 62-69. More recent coverage: