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David Brown of the Washington Post, in a detailed story in 1997, put the matter even more baldly. “The theory that many veterans of the Persian Gulf War are ill because they were unwittingly exposed to nerve gas more than five years ago contradicts most of what’s known about the health effects of chemical weapons,” he wrote. People exposed to nerve gases almost invariably exhibit symptoms immediately, and three decades of research contradict the likelihood of permanent or delayed damage as a result of exposure.22

Yet in 1997 and 1998 a predominant impression conveyed by much of the media was that nerve gas had caused the ailments that nearly 100,000 Gulf War vets were reporting. Several lengthy articles in the New York Times by Philip Shenon and a book by Seymour Hersh gave prominent play to scientists who argued that exposure to nerve gas had caused cognitive and other health problems for Gulf War vets. The impression was bolstered by a TV movie in May 1998 advertised as “the movie the Government doesn’t want you to see.” Utilizing the Cuisinart effect discussed earlier, the film intercut scenes with stars Ted Danson and Jennifer Jason Leigh and interviews with real-life vets and politicians. “The lines between fact and fiction are collapsing,” John Sacret Young, the writer and executive producer of the movie, declared in a piece about the making of the film. Young referred to Gulf War Syndrome as “a neurological holocaust.”23

Three days before Young’s much-hyped film aired, a short piece by Gina Kolata, buried deep inside the Times, reported on a study suggesting that stress played a crucial role in Gulf War maladies. By then there had been many studies indicating the same, and four months had passed since a report on “Frontline,” the investigative program on National Public Television, criticized editors at the Times for having assigned Shenon, its Pentagon reporter, to cover Gulf War Syndrome rather than a medical reporter. The program pointed out what most of the media had not: thousands of veterans who were ill had not been exposed to nerve gas, and, vice versa, most of the troops who may have been exposed were not ill.24

Multiple Chemical Sensitivity

Fears feed off of one another. Speculation that Gulf War Syndrome resulted from veterans’ exposure to assorted chemicals helped those who monger scares about multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), a metaphoric illness that has received plenty of favorable, anecdote-dependent coverage in its own right. A half-page article in the Los Angeles Times in 1996, for instance, presented a man named Alan Bell, another victim-cum-expert who founded his own foundation “directed to research and raising public awareness.” A mild-mannered attorney and loving father in excellent health before his “life as he knew it came to a crashing halt,” Bell succumbed to exposure to sprays and pesticides when his home was being remodeled, according to the reporter, Michael Haederle. For the past several years, Haederle reported, Bell followed a macrobiotic diet, seldom left his home, and wore only cotton clothing that has been washed in baking soda, vinegar, and powdered milk.25

The article about Bell, eulogistically headlined “He Fights So Your Next Breath Won’t Make You Sick,” was one of several unquestioning pieces in the major media about MCS. An Associated Press story in 1995 spotlighted Peggy Magidson, an MCS sufferer who abandoned her career and friends to live out in the woods. “I used to be a fashionable executive lady with designer dresses and high heels,” the story quoted Magidson saying, whose faded flannel shirt and dungarees were stained, the reporter said, from having been washed in a brew of baking soda, vinegar, and bleach. The writer went on to present the scary (if absurd) statistic that MCS afflicts anywhere from 15 to 33 percent of the population: people who, like Magidson, become violently ill at the smell of perfumes, pesticides, household cleansers, and