The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [23]
Reporters generally did a laudable job the following year as well, when anti-abortion groups heralded two more studies. One estimated a 30 percent increased risk of breast cancer for women who have abortions; the other put the figure at 23 percent. Journalists explained that both studies suffered, as had earlier research, from a potential reporting bias that could substantially skew their results. They quoted the lead researcher on one of the studies, the epidemiologist Polly Newcomb of the Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, who noted that women battling breast cancer might be more likely than others to inform researchers that they had had abortions. Cancer patients are more accustomed to giving full and accurate medical histories, Newcomb suggested, and they are searching themselves for an explanation for their illness.40
Strikingly, the lead researcher on the other study in 1995, an endocrinologist at Baruch College named Joel Brind, offered no such caveats. On the contrary, he told CNN, “The evidence is quite clear, in fact, it should have been out long ago.” Brind advocated that every woman considering abortion be informed of the potential increased risk of breast cancer. When reporters checked into Brind’s background, however, they learned that he is an antiabortion activist who contributes frequently to newsletters and web sites published by prolife groups. Richard Knox of the Boston Globe reported that Brind told him he had conducted the study specifically to provide legislators with justification for requiring doctors to warn women about a cancer risk.41
With Brind as their medical mouthpiece, antiabortion groups intensified their scare drive throughout 1995 and 1996. Some persisted even after a massive study published in 1997 in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that the earlier research had been flawed in precisely the ways Polly Newcomb and other experts suspected. Conducted by epidemiologists from the University of Copenhagen, the later study relied not on self-reports but on data produced through the mandatory registration in Denmark of births, cancer cases, and abortions. The scientists were able to compare 281,000 women who had had abortions with 1.2 million others who had not. They determined that neither group was more likely to develop breast cancer.42
Joel Brind’s rejoinder when a reporter from the Washington Post asked him to comment on the study? “This is an apparently large and powerful study with the politically correct result that is not scientifically correct,” Brind said. At once reinforcing the PC scare and using it to defend another misbegotten terror, Brind vowed to continue his campaign of fear.43
2
CRIME IN THE NEWS
Tall Tales and Overstated Statistics
If the mystery about baseless scares is how they are sold to a public that has real dangers to worry about, in the case of more defensible fears the question is somewhat different. We ought to have concerns about crime, drug addiction, child abuse, and other afflictions to be discussed. The question is, how have we gotten so mixed up about the true nature and extent of these problems?
In no small measure the answer lies in stories like one that broke on March 19, 1991. If you read a newspaper or turned on a TV or radio newscast that day or the several days thereafter you were told that the streets of America were more dangerous than a war zone.
The press had been provoked to make this extreme assertion not by a rise in violent crime but by a dramatic event. The Gulf War had just ended, and a soldier who returned home to Detroit had been shot dead outside his apartment building.
The front-page story in the Washington Post portrayed the situation this way:
Conley Street, on this city’s