The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [25]
Journalists generally pride themselves on being suspicious about information they are given. Your average journalist “wears his skepticism like a medieval knight wore his armor,” Shelby Coffey, head of ABC News and former editor of the Los Angeles Times, has said. Yet when it comes to a great crime story, a journalist will behave like the high school nerd who has been approached by the most popular girl in school for help with her science project. Grateful for the opportunity, he doesn’t bother to ask a lot of questions.5
There are discernible differences, though, between reporters for electronic versus print media. Unlike their colleagues at local television stations, who will go for any story that includes a police chase or a humiliated celebrity, journalists at newspapers and magazines have a particular fondness for crime stories that help them make sense of some other phenomenon they are having trouble covering in its own right. In the Riggs murder the phenomenon in question was the Gulf War. The news media had difficulty reporting accurately on the war because the Pentagon kept the press away from the action and used tightly scripted briefings to spoonfeed only what the generals and the president wanted known. As part of that spin Generals Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf were defined as the war’s heroes. Grunts on the battlefield and in the air seemed almost irrelevant to a war fought with smart bombs. Their homecoming consequently had little intrinsic meaning or news value. So when the Riggs murder came along, reporters eagerly used it to mark the end of the war on Iraq and the start of the next phase in the ongoing domestic war on crime.6
Oops, Wrong Crisis
If the news media merely got the facts wrong about an occasional homicide, that would be no big deal. But the significance they attach to many of the homicides and other violent crimes they choose to spotlight is another matter. The streets of America are not more dangerous than a war zone, and the media should not convey that they are.
Some places journalists have declared crime ridden are actually quite safe. Consider an article Time magazine ran in April 1994 headlined across the top of two pages: “Not a month goes by without an outburst of violence in the workplace—now even in flower nurseries, pizza parlors and law offices.” One of literally thousands of stories published and broadcast on what was dubbed “the epidemic of workplace violence,” Time’s article presented a smorgasbord of grisly photographs and vignettes of unsuspecting workers and managers brutally attacked by their coworkers or employees. “Even Americans who see a potential for violence almost everywhere like to suppose there are a few sanctuaries left. One is a desk, or a spot behind the counter, or a place on the assembly line,” the writer sighed.7
More than five hundred stories about workplace violence appeared in newspapers alone just during 1994 and 1995, and many included some seriously scary statistics: 2.2 million people attacked on the job each year, murder the leading cause of work-related death for women, the number-three cause for men. “How can you be sure,” asked a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, “the person sitting next to you at work won’t go over the edge and bring an Uzi to the office tomorrow?” Her answer was, “You can’t.”8
At least one journalist, however, grew leery of his colleagues’ fear mongering. Erik Larson, a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, having come upon the same numbers quoted time and again, decided to take a closer look. The result was an expose in the Journal titled “A False Crisis,” in which Larson revealed how the news media had created an epidemic where none existed. Of about 121 million working people, about 1,000 are murdered on the job each year, a rate of just