The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [36]
Ample real-world evidence in support of Gerbner’s proposition can be found among the nation’s elderly, many of whom are so upset by all the murder and mayhem they see on their television screens that they are terrified to leave their homes. Some become so isolated, studies found, that they do not get enough exercise and their physical and mental health deteriorates. In the worst cases they actually suffer malnutrition as a consequence of media-induced fear of crime. Afraid to go out and buy groceries, they literally waste away in their homes. The pattern becomes self-perpetuating; the more time elderly people spend at home, the more TV they tend to watch, and the more fearful they grow.62
All of which is regrettable because in actuality people over sixty-five are less likely than any other age group to become victims of violent crime—about sixteen times less likely than people under twenty-five, according to statistics from the Justice Department. The news media report these statistics on occasion, but more commonly they depict the elderly in the manner a Boston Globe article did, as “walking time bombs for crime, easy prey.” They speciously tell their older readers, as did the Los Angeles Times, “that a violent encounter—one that a younger person could easily survive—may end lethally for them: A purse-snatching becomes a homicide when an old woman falls to the pavement and dies in the hospital; an old man is brutalized and dies when he loses his will to live; an elderly couple are unable to flee their home during an arson fire, dying in the flames.”63
Journalists further drive home this mistaken message through their coverage of crimes committed against famous older people. After Rosa Parks, the civil rights heroine, was beaten and robbed in her Detroit home in 1994 at the age of eighty-one, the Washington Post talked of “weak and elderly citizens living at the mercy of street thugs.” Although violent crime against senior citizens had dropped by 60 percent in the previous twenty years, the Post went on to declare in an editorial, “What happened to Rosa Parks in Detroit is a common, modern-day outrage that quietly takes place across our land.”64
Immediately following the attack on Parks her neighbors had expressed concern that media hype would further stigmatize their neighborhood and city, and Parks herself urged reporters not to read too much into the event. Ignoring Parks’s own view that she had been assaulted by “a sick-minded person,” reporters painted her assailant as “a self-involved brute” who “probably thought that as nice as all that civil rights stuff was, he was kicking the butt of just another now-useless old lady who was holding $50,” as another Washington Post writer remarked. 65
To hear the news media tell it, America’s youth make a sport of victimizing old folks. USA Today, in a roundup article on crime against the elderly, told of Nathaniel Hurt, sixty-one, of Baltimore, who shot and killed a thirteen-year-old boy who had vandalized his property. Hurt said he had had enough of neighborhood teens taunting him. In their article USA Today neither depicted Hurt’s actions as vigilantism nor provided information about the boy Hurt murdered. Instead, the moral of the story came from Hurt’s lawyer: “Police don’t want to admit that elderly people in Baltimore can’t go out their door without fear.”66
Crimes Nouveaux: Granny Dumping
The elderly can trust no one, politicians and reporters suggest. Everyone, including those entrusted to care for them, and even their own flesh and blood, may be potential victimizers.
“The American College of Emergency Physicians estimates that 70,000 elderly Americans were abandoned last year by family members unable or unwilling to care for them or pay for their care,” the New York Times reported in an editorial that followed a front-page story heralding a major new trend. “Granny dumping,” as it was called, attracted media attention after an incident in Idaho in 1992. John Kingery, a wheelchair-bound eighty-two-year-old Alzheimer’s patient