The Culture of Fear (35 page)

Such sensational stories provided heart-wrenching material for all news outlets, but special credit in recent years would have to go to Nancy Grace, a former prosecutor who relentlessly covered missing children on her nightly HLN (CNN’s Headline News Network) program. CNN might as well rename HLN “CAN, as in Caylee Anthony Network, because HLN has been riding the toddler’s demise for hours each day,” Los Angeles Times media critic James Rainey noted after watching her program for a few days in 2009.
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And the TV show wasn’t the half of it. Television and the Internet have become more symbiotic since this book was first published; nervous viewers can now access the details twenty-four hours a day. Around the time of Rainey’s column, I scanned the “Nancy Grace” home page and was greeted with: “Nancy Grace reports on George Anthony telling police about the smell of death in his daughter’s car trunk. Click here to watch!”
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In public lectures and media interviews, when I mention examples like those, and the actual statistics about kidnapped kids, I am often asked: Other than appealing to our baser appetites, what harm is there in the news media obsessing over missing children? My answer is, a lot of harm, ranging from expensive and ill-conceived legislation to needless restrictions on children’s ability to play and get exercise.

The nationwide AMBER Alert system, named for a child murdered in Texas in 1996, costs the federal government $5 million annually and the states many times that amount, and produces frequent notices in
the media about kidnapped children. But “the system does not typically work as designed (i.e., to save children who are in life-threatening danger) and might be generally incidental to the safe return of most of the hundreds of children for whom the alert system is said to have been ‘successful,’” a team of criminologists at the University of Nevada concluded from their extensive study of AMBER Alerts over a three-year period beginning in 2003.
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Even were that system and others like it to become more successful than the research suggests thus far, crucial questions would remain. As criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University noted in an op-ed in the
New York Times
, “More important than the risk of ineffectiveness is the danger of misuse. What should the criteria be for determining reliable information? Who might get hurt in the process of hurriedly chasing down inaccurate leads and wrong suspects? What might happen, for example, if an incorrect license plate of a suspected abductor is displayed on electronic highway signs? Might some poor motorist be pulled over by authorities or, worse, chased down by a group of vigilantes? These concerns are especially salient in the climate of fear and hysteria that surrounds what many have accurately called a parent’s worst nightmare.”
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For children, too, fear and hysteria about stranger danger are harmful. While they should certainly be taught commonsense rules about interacting with strangers, too many warnings can lead to the “mean-world syndrome” I mentioned at the beginning of this book. Children raised to view every adult with distrust might have little desire to become engaged in civic life when they are adults.

Missing children coverage is also bad for citizens who would like to get some actual news with their news. The hours and column-inches wasted on these stories could be put to better use. Focusing on bizarre and uncommon cases distracts us from the common dangers millions of children face every day like malnourishment, poverty, lack of health insurance, and crowded and crumbling public schools. In a UNICEF study in 2007 that looked at factors like poverty, health, safety, and education, children in the United States were found to be at much greater danger than anywhere else in the developed world.
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The other major fright about America’s youth—teen pregnancy—broadened in scope in the mid-’00s. No longer focused primarily on low-income girls of color, the scare got expanded to include young women from other ethnic and income groups, and to non-pregnant girls, even girls who had yet to have intercourse. In 2005, Katie Couric reported “horror stories of kids growing up way too fast, having oral sex at ridiculously young ages.” To find out “what’s really going on,” she gathered a group of teenage girls from across the nation for an NBC news special, “The 411: Teens and Sex.”
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“I was in a journalism classroom and we could hear through the bathroom vent and so every time anybody was having sex, we like run in there and say, ‘Caught,’” said Natalia.

“Supposedly during gym class a bunch of guys were in the bathroom for a long time and they were in a line and the girl was in the bathroom,” said Kameron.

“I’m 16 ... I don’t think oral sex should be expected in a relationship, but unfortunately, I think it is,” said Kierstin.

To their credit, Couric and her colleagues recognized that a roomful of gossiping teenage girls does not an epidemic make, and in conjunction with People magazine, NBC News commissioned a national survey of 1,000 teens between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. Among the results: just 12 percent said they had had oral sex, and 13 percent said they’d had intercourse. “In fact there is good news,” Couric properly reported. “Our survey shows that seven out of ten teens between the ages of thirteen and sixteen are not sexually active and haven’t really gone beyond kissing.”

But no good news shall go unchallenged. In the coming years, scary teen sex stories continued to surface, and in 2008 much was made of the findings from a survey commissioned by Liz Claiborne Inc. “‘Horrors’ Found in Tween, Teen Dating,” blared a CBS Early Show story. “Forty percent of the youngest tweens, those between the ages of eleven and twelve, report that their friends are victims of verbal abuse in relationships,” the network alerted. “Nearly three-in-four
tweens (72 percent) say boyfriend/girlfriend relationships usually begin at age fourteen or younger.”

Had newswriters taken a moment to examine the survey results, as sociologist Mike Males did, they could have learned that this survey also contained reassuring news for nervous parents. Only 1 percent of eleven- and twelve-year-olds, and 7 percent of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, said they had done more than kiss. Just 2 percent had ever felt their safety was threatened by a partner or had experienced violence. “How did Claiborne turn 2 percent into 37 percent or even 72 percent?” Males asked in a commentary. “By rigging the survey with crude statistical shenanigans, including: (a) asking young teens if they imagined ‘persons your age’ might be having sex or being abused by partners, and (b) defining terms ludicrously broadly. Note that what ‘friends’ (undefined) are doing could result from one case known to many other students, or gossip, or rumors, or speculations from media reports like the ones Claiborne pushed.”
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What was the purpose, as Males put it, of making “America’s fifth graders sound like a mob of brutal sluts?” Perhaps it was to inflate the relevance of Claiborne’s
loveisrespect.org
, their National Teen Dating Abuse Helpline website, the latest addition to the company’s Love Is Not Abuse campaign, a PR effort launched in 1991 to revitalize the aging brand.
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In 2008, the year Claiborne’s survey grabbed headlines, the media went wilder still over a fable about a supposed “pregnancy pact” at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts. The episode further illustrates a strategy I described in chapter 6 for keeping a scare alive when low-income youths fail to accommodate fear hawkers by decreasing their rates of involvement: claim the problem has moved beyond the inner cities and is tainting middle and upper class teens. In chapter 6 my focus was on drug use, but in the mid- and late-’00s, when teen pregnancy rates had been declining since 1990 and were at their lowest rates since the 1970s, the strategy got put to use to keep fear alive about pregnant teens.
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The Gloucester fairy tale was told first by Time magazine, which reported that “nearly half” of a group of seventeen girls at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts, none older than sixteen, “confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the
story got worse: ‘We found out one of the fathers is a twenty-four-year-old homeless guy,’ the principal says, shaking his head.” Numerous media outlets quickly repeated the story, calling it “shocking” (CBS) and “disturbing” (CNN), wondering “shall we go to the mall—or get pregnant” (
Salon.com
headline) and “what happened to shame” (Fox News), and denouncing Gloucester High for its “proteen birth” agenda (Fox News).

“The pact is so secretive,” CNN said, “we couldn’t even find out the girls’ names,” a difficulty that may have resulted from there being no such pact, as reporters who dug an inch deeper learned from other officials at the school and in the town, as well as from one of the pregnant students. The notion of a pact arose from stories about a group of girls who had promised to help one another care for their children, she suggested. It was only
after
they’d learned they were pregnant, the student explained, that they made the promise.
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In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times after the pregnancy pact story had been roundly debunked, Mike Males proposed that politicians, reporters, and social scientists abandon the term “teenage pregnancy” altogether. Contrary to the misimpression that phrase conveys, in the majority of cases the mother is not “a child herself,” she’s in her late teens, and the father isn’t a teen at all. He is in his twenties.
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Too, panics over “teen pregnancy” invariably disparage low-income girls of color—even when the story is ostensibly about well-to-do white girls. As Veronica Cassidy of Fairness and Accuracy in Media noted, “a racial subtext ran through most coverage” of the pregnancy pact story. “The Time article pointed out that Gloucester is a ‘mostly white’ town, and subsequent coverage consistently mentioned that these girls were white—a point that seemed to imply that teen pregnancy is only expected of young women of color,” Cassidy wrote.
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Another of the youth-related scares I discussed got updated as well. The panic I reported in chapter 7 over chilling reports that the DPT (diptheria-pertussis-tetanus) vaccine caused serious impairment in
children resulted in substantial numbers of parents refusing to immunize their children. The upshot, as subsequent studies documented, has been significant increases in the number of cases of whooping cough. (The risk of pertussis is about six times higher for unvaccinated children.)
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Indeed, health officials have become concerned in recent years that the number of parents who buy into panics over vaccines and refuse to vaccinate their babies may be endangering the population broadly. Their concerns have been raised by incidents of diseases that had largely disappeared in the United States, such as whooping cough, measles, and
Haemophilus influenzae
type b (known as Hib), as well as a more sweeping danger. When vaccination rates fall sufficiently, a population loses what’s known as “herd immunity,” where the number of immunized people is so large, even those who have not been vaccinated are safe because they never come in contact with an infected person.
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Yet, apparently having learned nothing from the adverse effects on children of their crusade against DPT shots, the same array of forces—advocacy groups and ratings- and vote-hungry media and politicians—coalesced more recently to fill parents with fear about a preservative in the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine that supposedly causes autism. Well after it was definitively debunked by the medical community, the MMR vaccine—autism link continued to pop up in the media—even making its way into primetime programming. In the 2008 premiere episode of
Eli Stone,
an ABC courtroom drama, attorney Stone represents the parents of an autistic child in their lawsuit against a vaccine manufacturer. In his closing argument, Stone declares, “Is there proof mercuritol causes autism? Yes. Is that proof direct or incontrovertible proof? No. But ask yourself if you’ve ever believed in anything, in anyone, without absolute proof.”
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Or, in this case, any proof. Back in the real world, the preservative that allegedly caused problems in the MMR vaccine was no longer in use by 2007, and Andrew Wakefield, the physician who had first raised the issue in a 1998 study published in
The Lancet,
had been brought up on medical misconduct charges in Great Britain and retracted that study.
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Yet the victim-cum-expert I cited as a driving force behind the DPT vaccine scare of the 1990s, Barbara Loe Fisher, was still actively advocating for “vaccine safety and informed consent” via the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), an organization she founded in 1982. A quote from Fisher on NVIC’s home page makes their position clear: “If the State can tag, track down and force citizens against their will [to] be injected with biologicals of unknown toxicity today, there will be no limit on what individual freedoms the State can take away in the name of the greater good tomorrow.”

Fisher has been joined in the past decade by a slew of new antivaccine crusaders and advocacy groups whose websites garner millions of hits, and whose spokespeople have come to include a category that scarcely existed when I wrote the earlier edition but has become commonplace—the
celebrity victim-cum-expert.

In the vaccine scare, former
Playboy
model Jenny McCarthy was arguably among the most physically attractive celeb victims. The parent of an autistic child (“vaccine injured,” she likes to say), McCarthy asked on CNN, with nothing to suggest the question had merit, “With billions of pharmaceutical dollars, could it be possible that the vaccine program is becoming more of a profit engine than a means of prevention?” Even as scores of scientists and physicians were urging that the antivaccine advocates be granted no more respect than Holocaust deniers and AIDS deniers, producers at cable news stations and shows like “Oprah” and “Imus in the Morning,” gave McCarthy and fellow zealots lots of airtime to implant ill-informed anxieties in anxious parents’ minds.
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