The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [88]
Moehringer notes briefly, for the sake of balance, a Pentagon study that concluded that soldiers were not exposed to lethal chemicals and have no unique illnesses, much less diseases inherited by their children. The bulk of the article, however, endorses the theory that Christian’s troubles began when his father inhaled “black, cottony smoke of burning oil wells, stood beside sky-high stockpiles of radioactive ammunition, and ingested fistfuls of experimental medicine.” The future father had a funny feeling about those medicines at the time, but when he told his lieutenant, he was instructed “to shut the hell up” and swallow, Moehringer reported.11
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997 strongly refuted the birth defect scare. Comparing 33,998 infants born to Gulf War veterans and 41,463 babies of other military personnel, the researchers found no evidence of an increase in the risk of birth defects for children of Gulf War vets. Their study was reported by Moehringer’s newspaper in a story written by another reporter. For his part, however, Moehringer was still writing scare stories. A few months before the New England,journal study came out he published a piece—“Gulf War Syndrome Feared to Be Contagious”—that made an impact well beyond California. Newspapers throughout the country reprinted it, and TV networks and international wire services ran their own reports.12
The basic premise—that medical professionals contracted GWS from vets they treated—had already been rebutted by the Centers for Disease Control, the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, and various independent medical scientists. Scientists also had rebutted an alarming possibility Moehringer raised about dangers to the nation’s blood supply from donations to the Red Cross by Gulf veterans. Moehringer instead chose to give prominence to the views of a biochemist in Irvine, California, named Garth Nicolson, who had conducted investigations of members of his own family and others he believed caught GWS from veterans. Nicolson told Moehringer that he himself “lost four teeth and had part of my lower jaw removed.”13
Other news outlets, in covering Moehringer’s story, essentially repeated what he had reported. Of those I located, only CNN managed to add that, although Nicolson had been pushing his theory for two years, he remained the only researcher to claim evidence that Gulf War Syndrome is contagious. 14
Circuitous Critique
Why would major news media disseminate the speculations of a wannabe expert many months after he had been refuted by certified experts?15
The answer to this question is to be found, I believe, in some telling language early in Moehringer’s article: “Despite failing to find favor with official Washington and colleagues, many remain convinced that the cause of Gulf War illness is an infectious microbe ...” Gulf War Syndrome provided an occasion for criticizing the Pentagon—something that none of the main participants in the war had much motivation to do about the war itself. Veterans of the war, having been heralded for ending America’s post—World War losing streak and curing what had come to be known as the “Vietnam Syndrome,” certainly were not inclined to find fault with how the war was waged. Nor were politicians, who shared, Republicans and Democrats alike, in the glory of America’s victory. Nor were journalists who had engaged in what CBS News anchor Dan Rather described as “suck-up coverage” of the military and exhibited “a lack of guts to speak up, to speak out, to speak our minds” during the war.16
Throughout the mid-