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By Root 751 0

whole sectors of the populace have been scared senseless. Take, for instance, the most public mea culpa I have found in the history of journalistic fear mongering. In 2006, on the twentieth anniversary of its infamous “Marriage Crunch” article, which had declared that a forty-year-old single woman was “more likely to be killed by a terrorist” than to marry, Newsweek magazine admitted that “states of unions aren’t what we predicted they’d be.... Beyond all the research studies and forecasts, the trend-spotting and fear mongering that are too often the stock in trade of both journalists and academics, the real story of this anniversary is the unexpected happily-ever-afters.”

So wrote Daniel McGinn, a national correspondent for the magazine. In a lengthy article, he noted that about 90 percent of baby boomers either have married or will marry, and that most single women over forty who want to wed eventually do so. McGinn also tracked down eleven of the fourteen single women Newsweek had profiled in the original story. Only three remained single, and none had divorced.10

Another gloomy forecast that had been repeated across all media in the 1980s and ’90s—the fate of “crack babies”—has been soundly rebuffed by journalists as well. At the time, doctors had warned that the infants, “if they survive, are largely doomed to the underclass because of faulty cognitive and psychological development.” Headlines in the nation’s leading newspapers foretold a “bleak,” “joyless” future for such children, despite, as I discuss in chapter 3, considerable evidence at the time suggesting little cause to single out these children for special worry and stigmatization.

By 2009, journalists began to correct their publications’ earlier scare stories. That year, Susan Okie reported in the New York Times on the results of studies tracking the lives of these children for nearly fifteen years. “So far, these scientists say, the long-term effects of such [cocaine and opiate] exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small,” wrote Okie. Other media outlets picked up the story or ran their own.11

One can only hope that journalists—and public officials, advocates, and academics as well—will not wait so long in the future to question scares du jour as they arise.

Better still, one can hope for a future in which fear campaigns fail to sway the public in the first place, a prospect that the Presidential election of 2008 suggested may be more than mere fancy. The entry of Barack Obama early in the campaign provoked many of the racist scare tactics outlined in chapter 5 and added a layer of terrorist and anti-Muslim rhetoric to the mix, with Obama’s detractors repeatedly mentioning his middle name (Hussein) and accusing him of “palling around with terrorists.” Yet despite this, Obama captured the presidency with 52.4 percent of the popular vote. The final chapter of this new edition discusses the various attempts by both Republican and Democratic opponents to frighten voters away from Obama. That these tactics failed is an encouraging testament to Americans’ willingness to vote for—as the Obama campaign put it—hope over fear.

INTRODUCTION: WHY AMERICANS FEAR THE WRONG THINGS

Why are so many fears in the air, and so many of them unfounded? Why, as crime rates plunged throughout the 1990s, did two-thirds of Americans believe they were soaring? How did it come about that by mid-decade 62 percent of us described ourselves as “truly desperate” about crime—almost twice as many as in the late 1980s, when crime rates were higher? Why, on a survey in 1997, when the crime rate had already fallen for a half dozen consecutive years, did more than half of us disagree with the statement “This country is finally beginning to make some progress in solving the crime problem”?1

In the late 1990s the number of drug users had decreased by half compared to a decade earlier; almost two-thirds of high school seniors had never used any illegal drugs, even marijuana. So why did a majority of adults rank drug abuse as the greatest danger to