The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [54]
In time the media was forced to backpeddle. By the mid-1990s crack babies were in school, functioning much like their peers, and reporters and editors changed their spin. The less candid among them reframed the crack baby story as a war that had been won. “City Government Officials and Kind-Hearted People Actually Solved the Crack-Baby Crisis,” read the headline on a Washington Post story in 1994. Other journalists simply fessed up: their apocalyptic predictions had been unfounded. “Not a Lost Generation” stated a subhead in a New York Times piece in 1993. “Tell me, what does a crack baby look like? Nobody who talks about them ever comes in to see them,” an Associated Press story quoted the director of a children’s center asking angrily. “They’ll come in here and look at our kids and they look normal. So they say, ‘Where are the drug babies?’ I tell them, ‘They’re right here.’”82
A story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer went so far as to quote educators with the Cleveland public schools about the detrimental effect of the label crack baby. Used by health officials and teachers to catalogue kids as developmentally handicapped, the term gets “tossed around on school playgrounds by children to taunt each other,” the newspaper reported. 83
Part of the credit for the demise of the crack baby panic goes to Ira Chasnoff, a Chicago pediatrician who had been the media’s expert of choice and the source of an oft-quoted estimate that 387,000 babies had been born to crack-addicted women. (The figure was more like 100,000, according to government estimates, a number some experts say is still inflated.) Chasnoff’s research, published in medical journals from 1985 through 1988, suggested that crack-exposed infants experienced a daunting list of physical and emotional problems. Within a few years, however, Chasnoff was publishing papers showing that crack-exposed kids suffer little permanent damage. He began to complain to reporters that their coverage of crack babies was perpetuating what he termed an “us-versus-them idea” about poor children. And when a journalist asked him to comment on studies suggesting that prenatal cocaine exposure has a slight impact on IQ, he replied, “The greatest impediment to cognitive development in young children is poverty.”84
Crack babies in fact served as screens on which the American public could displace its worries about the youngest generation as a whole—fears that the young, having been cheated and neglected, would become “an unmanageable multitude” or “a lost generation,” as a Time cover story on crack babies aptly titled “Innocent Victims” put it. We focused on the crack baby crisis because, unlike our deeper fears, the crack baby crisis was contained. It existed only in other people’s neighborhoods, and it could be solved if only pregnant women would keep away from crack.85
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Americans welcomed every permissible excuse to avoid facing up to our collective lack of responsibility toward our nation’s children. When Hillary Rodham Clinton’s book It Takes a Village came out in 1996, she toured the country to urge better health care, day care, and nutrition for America’s youth. What did media interviewers and audiences concentrate on? A dubious real-estate investment she was involved in years earlier, whether she fired members of the White House travel office, and if her feminism made her a lousy First Lady. In an interview with Clinton on ABC’s “20/20” Barbara Walters began with a statement and question: “Instead