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By Root 576 0

victim of a crime. You can lose your home, your health insurance, your self-esteem, your sense of security, and your willingness to report harassment or hazardous working conditions at your next place of employment. During the economic boom of the late 1990s layoffs occurred at an even higher rate than in the 1980s. In what former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich dubbed “down-waging” and “down-benefiting,” highly profitable companies replaced full-time workers with part-timers, temps, and lower-paid full-timers, and they subcontracted work to firms that paid lower wages and provided poorer benefits. Yet throughout the past two decades the news media printed and broadcast exponentially more stories about crime. In the early and mid-1990s 20 to 30 percent of news items in city newspapers concerned crime, and close to half of the news coverage on local television newscasts was about crime.15

Unhappy Halloween

Workplace violence was not the first false crime crisis used by journalists as a roundabout way to talk about other matters they found difficult to address directly. Even the New York Times has been known to engage in the practice.

“Those Halloween goodies that children collect this weekend on their rounds of ‘trick or treating’ may bring them more horror than happiness,” began a story in the Times in October 1970 that launched a long-running crime panic. “Take, for example,” the reporter continued, “that plump red apple that Junior gets from a kindly old woman down the block. It may have a razor blade hidden inside. The chocolate ‘candy’ bar may be a laxative, the bubble gum may be sprinkled with lye, the popcorn balls may be coated with camphor, the candy may turn out to be packets containing sleeping pills.”16

Similar articles followed in the nation’s news media every autumn for years to come. In 1975 Newsweek reported in its edition that hit newsstands at the end of October, “If this year’s Halloween follows form, a few children will return home with something more than an upset tummy: in recent years, several children have died and hundreds have narrowly escaped injury from razor blades, sewing needles and shards of glass purposefully put into their goodies by adults.”17

In her columns of the mid- and late 1980s even “Dear Abby” was reminding parents around trick-or-treat time that “somebody’s child will become violently ill or die after eating poisoned candy or an apple containing a razor blade.” An ABC News/Washington Post poll in 1985 showed that 60 percent of parents feared their kids could become victims. 18

This time no journalist stepped forward to correct the media’s and public’s collective fantasy, even though, as Jan Harold Brunvand, the folklorist and author observed, “it’s hard to imagine how someone could shove a blade into a fruit without injuring himself. And wouldn’t the damage done to the apple by such a process make it obvious that something was wrong with it?”19

The myth of Halloween bogeymen and bogeywomen might never have been exposed had not a sociologist named Joel Best become sufficiently leery that he undertook an examination of every reported incident since 1958. Best, currently a professor at the University of Southern Illinois, established in a scholarly article in 1985 that there has not been a single death or serious injury. He uncovered a few incidents where children received minor cuts from sharp objects in their candy bags, but the vast majority of reports turned out to be old-fashioned hoaxes, sometimes enacted by young pranksters, other times by parents hoping to make money in lawsuits or insurance scams.20

Ironically, in the only two known cases where children apparently did die from poisoned Halloween candy, the myth of the anonymous, sadistic stranger was used to cover up the real crime. In the first incident family members sprinkled heroin on a five-year-old’s Halloween candy in hopes of fooling the police about the cause of the child’s death. Actually, the boy had found and eaten heroin in his uncle’s home. In the second incident a boy died after eating cyanide-poisoned