The Culture of Fear (8 page)

With Brind as their medical mouthpiece, antiabortion groups intensified their scare drive throughout 1995 and 1996. Some persisted even after a massive study published in 1997 in the
New England Journal of Medicine
showed that the earlier research had been flawed in precisely the ways Polly Newcomb and other experts suspected. Conducted by epidemiologists from the University of Copenhagen, the later study relied not on self-reports but on data produced through the mandatory registration in Denmark of births, cancer cases, and abortions. The scientists were able to compare 281,000 women who had had abortions with 1.2 million others who had not. They determined that neither group was more likely to develop breast cancer.
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Joel Brind’s rejoinder when a reporter from the
Washington Post
asked him to comment on the study? “This is an apparently large and powerful study with the politically correct result that is not scientifically correct,” Brind said. At once reinforcing the PC scare and using it to defend another misbegotten terror, Brind vowed to continue his campaign of fear.
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Tall Tales and Overstated Statistics

I
f the mystery about baseless scares is how they are sold to a public that has real dangers to worry about, in the case of more defensible fears the question is somewhat different. We
ought
to have concerns about crime, drug addiction, child abuse, and other afflictions to be discussed. The question is, how have we gotten so mixed up about the true nature and extent of these problems?

In no small measure the answer lies in stories like one that broke on March 19, 1991. If you read a newspaper or turned on a TV or radio newscast that day or the several days thereafter you were told that the streets of America were more dangerous than a war zone.

The press had been provoked to make this extreme assertion not by a rise in violent crime but by a dramatic event. The Gulf War had just ended, and a soldier who returned home to Detroit had been shot dead outside his apartment building.

The front-page story in the
Washington Post
portrayed the situation this way:
Described by his mother as a man who deeply loved his family and his country, Riggs had written home from Saudi Arabia, “There’s no way I’m going to die in this rotten country. With the Lord’s grace and his
guidance, I’ll walk American soil once again.” But before that letter even arrived, while Riggs was moving his wife and three-year-old daughter to a new apartment, five shots rang out and witnesses heard the sound of screeching tires. Some faceless thug had killed him just to get his car. “His wife, Toni, found him dying in a gutter,” the
Post
reported.
¹

TV newscasts showed Mrs. Riggs sobbing. She had warned her husband that there had been a shooting on the street earlier in the day, but he wouldn’t listen. “He said he’d just got back from having missiles flying over his head, and a few shots weren’t going to bother him,” according to Toni’s aunt, quoted in the
Los Angeles Times.
That of course was the larger point, or as the
Post
put it, “Riggs’s death was a tragic reminder of President Bush’s words recently when he announced a new crime bill: ‘Our veterans deserve to come home to an America where it is safe to walk the streets’.”
²

From the point of view of journalists and editors an ideal crime story—that is, the sort that deserves major play and is sure to hold readers’ and viewers’ attention—has several elements that distinguish it from other acts of violence. The victims are innocent, likable people; the perpetrator is an uncaring brute. Details of the crime, while shocking, are easy to relay. And the events have social significance, bespeaking an underlying societal crisis.

The murder of Anthony Riggs seemed to have it all. The only problem was, very little of this perfect crime story was true. Reporters named the right victim but the wrong perpetrator, motive, and moral.

It was the massive media attention, ironically, that resulted in the real story coming out. Confronted with demands from politicians and citizen groups to catch Riggs’s killer, the Detroit police launched an all-out investigation. While digging through garbage cans around the Conley Street neighborhood, an officer came upon a handgun that turned out to belong to Michael Cato, the brother of Riggs’s wife, Toni. Nineteen years old at the time and currently serving a life sentence for murder,
Michael said in a confession that his sister had promised him a share of $175,000 in life insurance benefits.

Reporters cannot be blamed for failing to possess this information prior to its discovery by the police, but had they been a little skeptical or made a few phone calls they almost certainly would have stumbled on at least some aspects of the truth. They might have learned, for example, that Toni had been making noises about dumping Anthony for some time, or that it was she who arranged a hefty life insurance policy for her husband before he went off to war. Reporters might also have checked into Mrs. Riggs’s past and discovered previous irregularities, such as the fact that she had not yet divorced her previous husband when she married Anthony.

Journalists also might have discovered the existence of a letter Riggs wrote to his mother from Saudi Arabia. “Toni has wrecked my car. She is now bouncing checks.... She is never home: 2:30 A.M., 4 A.M.... I would put my head through the neck of a hot sauce bottle to please her, but now I need happiness in return,” People magazine, the only major publication that subsequently ran a full-fledged account of the true story, quoted him penning.
³

Had news writers checked with knowledgeable criminologists or homicide detectives they might have been impressed as well by the improbability of a car thief murdering someone execution-style when a simple shot or two would have done the job. Carjacking victims seldom get shot at all, particularly if they do not resist.
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Journalists generally pride themselves on being suspicious about information they are given. Your average journalist “wears his skepticism like a medieval knight wore his armor,” Shelby Coffey, head of ABC News and former editor of the
Los Angeles Times,
has said. Yet when it comes to a great crime story, a journalist will behave like the high school nerd who has been approached by the most popular girl in school for help with her science project. Grateful for the opportunity, he doesn’t bother to ask a lot of questions.
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There are discernible differences, though, between reporters for electronic versus print media. Unlike their colleagues at local television stations, who will go for any story that includes a police chase or a humiliated
celebrity, journalists at newspapers and magazines have a particular fondness for crime stories that help them make sense of some other phenomenon they are having trouble covering in its own right. In the Riggs murder the phenomenon in question was the Gulf War. The news media had difficulty reporting accurately on the war because the Pentagon kept the press away from the action and used tightly scripted briefings to spoonfeed only what the generals and the president wanted known. As part of that spin Generals Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf were defined as the war’s heroes. Grunts on the battlefield and in the air seemed almost irrelevant to a war fought with smart bombs. Their homecoming consequently had little intrinsic meaning or news value. So when the Riggs murder came along, reporters eagerly used it to mark the end of the war on Iraq and the start of the next phase in the ongoing domestic war on crime.
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If the news media merely got the facts wrong about an occasional homicide, that would be no big deal. But the significance they attach to many of the homicides and other violent crimes they choose to spotlight is another matter. The streets of America are not more dangerous than a war zone, and the media should not convey that they are.

Some places journalists have declared crime ridden are actually quite safe. Consider an article
Time
magazine ran in April 1994 headlined across the top of two pages: “Not a month goes by without an outburst of violence in the workplace—now even in flower nurseries, pizza parlors and law offices.” One of literally thousands of stories published and broadcast on what was dubbed “the epidemic of workplace violence,”
Time’s
article presented a smorgasbord of grisly photographs and vignettes of unsuspecting workers and managers brutally attacked by their coworkers or employees. “Even Americans who see a potential for violence almost everywhere like to suppose there are a few sanctuaries left. One is a desk, or a spot behind the counter, or a place on the assembly line,” the writer sighed.
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More than five hundred stories about workplace violence appeared in newspapers alone just during 1994 and 1995, and many included some seriously scary statistics: 2.2 million people attacked on the job each year, murder the leading cause of work-related death for women, the number-three cause for men. “How can you be sure,” asked a reporter for the St.
Petersburg Times,
“the person sitting next to you at work won’t go over the edge and bring an Uzi to the office tomorrow?” Her answer was, “You can’t.”
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At least one journalist, however, grew leery of his colleagues’ fear mongering. Erik Larson, a staff reporter for the
Wall Street Journal,
having come upon the same numbers quoted time and again, decided to take a closer look. The result was an expose in the
Journal
titled “A False Crisis,” in which Larson revealed how the news media had created an epidemic where none existed. Of about 121 million working people, about 1,000 are murdered on the job each year, a rate of just 1 in 114,000. Police, security guards, taxi drivers, and other particularly vulnerable workers account for a large portion of these deaths. Cab drivers, for instance, suffer an occupational homicide rate twenty-one times the national average. On the flip side of that coin, people in certain other occupations face conspicuously low levels of risk. The murder rate for doctors, engineers, and other professionals is about 1 in 457,000, Larson determined.
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Another vocational group with relatively low rates, it turns out, is postal workers. The expression “going postal” became part of the American vernacular after some particularly bloody assaults by U.S. Postal Service employees against their supervisors. Yet postal employees are actually about two and a half times
less
likely than the average worker to be killed on the job.
¹⁰

All in all fewer than one in twenty homicides occurs at a workplace. And while most of the media hoopla has been about disgruntled workers killing one another or their bosses—the Uzi-toting fellow at the next desk—few workplace murders are actually carried out by coworkers or ex-workers. About 90 percent of murders at workplaces are committed by outsiders who come to rob. The odds of being killed by someone
you work with or employ are less than 1 in 2 million; you are several times more likely to be hit by lightning.
¹¹

Larson deconstructed as well the survey that produced the relentlessly reproduced statistic of 2.2 million people assaulted at work each year. Most of the reported attacks were fairly minor and did not involve weapons, and once again, the great majority were committed by outsiders, not by coworkers, ex-employees, or bosses. What is more, the survey from which the number comes would not pass muster among social scientists, Larson points out. The response rate is too low. Fewer than half of the people contacted responded to the survey, making it likely that those who participated were not typical of employed Americans as a whole.
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Given that workplace violence is far from pandemic, why were journalists so inclined to write about it? Perhaps because workplace violence is a way of talking about the precariousness of employment without directly confronting what primarily put workers at risk—the endless waves of corporate layoffs that began in the early 1980s. Stories about workplace violence routinely made mention of corporate downsizing as one potential cause, but they did not treat mass corporate firing as a social ill in its own right. To have done so would have proven difficult for many journalists. For one thing, whom would they have cast as the villain of the piece? Is the CEO who receives a multimillion dollar raise for firing tens of thousands of employees truly evil? Or is he merely making his company more competitive in the global economy? And how would a journalist’s boss—or boss’s boss at the media conglomerate that owns the newspaper or network—feel about publishing implicit criticism of something they themselves have done? Pink slips arrived with regularity in newsrooms like everywhere else in corporate America in recent years, and they didn’t exactly inspire reporters to do investigative pieces about downsizing.
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To its great credit, the
New York Times
did eventually run an excellent series of articles on downsizing in 1996. In one of the articles the authors noted off-handedly and without pursuing the point that about 50 percent more people are laid off each year than are victims of crime. It is an important comparison. From 1980 through 1995 more than 42
million jobs were eliminated in the United States. The number of jobs lost per year more than doubled over that time, from about 1.5 million in 1980 to 3.25 million in 1995. By comparison, during that same period most crime rates—including those for violent crimes—declined. A working person was roughly four to five times more likely to be the victim of a layoff in any given year than to be the victim of a violent crime committed by a stranger.
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