Month: October 2001

Victory Blog is gone, but Spy Hamlet, its replacement, is a worthy successor. The lead story today is the government announcing new measures against the “global anxietyist networks” that are “worrying innocent Americans.”

Experts also point to such fear-producing CNN tactics as frightening photographs of anthrax germs and ominous theme music as further evidence of anxietyist groups’ involvement in the national epidemic of concern.

“It’s not just CNN,” Kerr said, “but groups like Fox News, CNBC, and even CSPAN that are behind the anxietyist attacks. These are large, well-funded, well-organized groups dedicated to scaring the shit out of innocent men, women, and children.”

A palpable hit on the Amusementmeter.

Are journalists themselves responsible for the “doubts” and “haunting spectre of quagmire” that they report on as lurking about the war? William Saletan at Slate thinks so.

The reason such questions “bubble around” is that reporters raise and repeat them in a self-escalating cycle. Here’s how it works. On Friday, a reporter tells an admiral at a Pentagon briefing, “There is a growing chorus now—it’s still a small chorus, but it’s getting louder—of critics who are saying that the United States appears to be bogged down.” On Saturday, under the headline “New Sense of Impatience Is Emerging,” the Los Angeles Times cites the “bogged down” question as evidence that doubts have “crystallized” as “the military faces increasingly skeptical questions.” On Sunday, ABC’s Cokie Roberts opens her interview with Rumsfeld by noting, “There’ve been stories over the weekend that give the perception that this war after three weeks is not going very well.”

Saletan suggests that lack of news of tremendous success can only be hyped by the media as failure — a self-fulfilling prophecy when it then turns into stories about American citizenry doubting whether the war can be won after all the “setbacks” endured.

(Also via InstaPundit)

Jeffrey Rosen in The New Republic writes a good article about the risks of terrorism — and how they are overestimated by an anxious public (and a story-seeking media).

As new cases of anthrax infection continue to emerge, the World Health Organization is begging people not to panic. But tabloid headlines like this one from The Mirror in London send a different message: “PANIC.”

[…] Will sensationalistic reports of worst-case terrorist scenarios exaggerate people’s fear of being caught in an attack? There’s every reason to believe that they will because of the media’s tendency to exaggerate the scope and probability of remote risks. In a book called Random Violence, Joel Best, then of Southern Illinois University, examined the “moral panics” about a series of new crimes that seized public attention in the 1980s and ’90s: freeway violence in 1987, wilding in 1989, stalking around 1990, kids and guns in 1991, and so forth. In each case, Best writes, television seized on two or three incidents of a dramatic crime, such as freeway shooting, and then claimed it was part of a broader trend. By taking the worst and most infrequent examples of criminal violence and melodramatically claiming they were typical, television created the false impression that everyone was equally at risk, thereby increasing its audience.

Rosen disagrees with the Administration issuing non-specific “warning,” like the one this week. I disagree with him, but I also see his point. Certainly to the degree that it’s then amplified by the media, and lacks specificity as to the level of risk, it may just be uselessly churning matters even further.

(Via InstaPundit)