Another viewpoint I received today. Our media could all calm down, too. Paul
Geov Parrish WorkingForChange 10.15.01 Terror news American media is doing the terrorists' work for them Over this past weekend, my country went crazy. Americans have always been a little bit crazy, of course, at least in the eyes of the rest of the world. But reports of new anthrax exposures in Reno, New York, and Florida have been the signal for a media feeding and speculation frenzy -- and that, in turn, is coloring a lot of usually complacent people various shades of hysterical. A remarkable variety of people I know are reporting alarm and fear in the past couple of days, in their schools and workplaces and neighborhoods and families: folks terrified of anthrax, fueled by breathless Internet myths and conspiracy theories, bullshit detectors turned off, suspicious of anyone who might look vaguely Arabic or Islamic. And it's almost everyone that's feeling it, even the most improbable people: immigrants, people of color, people who have themselves spent their lives decrying things like racial profiling. Mass media, especially TV news, has taken the lead in teaching us to fear. Here in Seattle, as in many parts of the country, envelopes with unidentified powders that wouldn't have been noticed last week have led to evacuated buildings. The most widely reported yesterday was at Boeing, and the lead story on one station's evening news was introduced as follows: "A possible Anthrax attack at Boeing! The lab reports are in, we'll have the details..." Only after the commercial break did viewers learn that the tests were negative and there was no story. In the meantime, viewers were left on tenterhooks, to marinade in their own dread. That sort of sensationalism is going on across the country. In Sunday's newspapers, for example, we got 25 paragraphs into a Washington Post story summarizing anthrax reports across the country before learning that the "five more cases in Florida" headline concerned five blood tests, out of over 1,000 people tested after the American Media exposures, which came back positive for anthrax antibodies -- after previous, less sensitive tests had turned up negatives. So what the headline refers to is that out of a sample size of 1,000, five people had been exposed to the anthrax bacterium at some point in their lives. What's the exposure rate among, say, farmers, to this naturally occurring bacterium that shows up routinely in animals and soil? We weren't told. Chances are good that these lab results have absolutely nothing to do with any public health concerns or criminal investigation. And yet, they make scary headlines, and yet again public fear is ramped up a few more notches. Based on what is known -- and this needs to be said, over and over and over -- the odds that any single person in this country (including me, and I have no immune system and work in media) will die from anthrax are negligible. Negligible. Far lower than my chances of winning the lottery. And I don't play. The chances that any non-white person "exhibiting suspicious behavior" is a bin Laden operative also approach nil -- dozens, at best, out of billions of people. (The chances that said person is afraid of being lynched, on the other hand, are depressingly high.) War hysteria is a new phenomenon in the United States, at least since World War II on the West Coast. Beyond statements that we'll be embarrassed about next year, we need to recognize it for what it is because it's not politically neutral. War hysteria encourages the scapegoating of people who look like anyone's conception of "the enemy" -- just as harsh new "anti-terrorist" attacks on civil liberties are being rammed through Congress. It encourages support for the bombing of not just Afghanistan, but any country where association with terrorism can be inferred. Just as Iraq is being served up by some as our next target. (In the Post story, a Trenton, New Jersey postmark for the anthrax envelope sent to NBC News was actually linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombers' ties to Jersey City, on the other side of the state. Does this mean we'll be bombing New Jersey now?) Most of all, war hysteria leaves the public susceptible to any sort of rumor or demagoguery. The public knows what political and military leaders and media talking heads have been reluctant to dwell upon: a small, dedicated, and low-tech cell of homicidal maniacs has its choice of an endless variety of ways in which it can kill massive numbers of people in the United States, or anywhere in the developed world. We're impossibly vulnerable. It's become something of a parlor game to exchange ideas for easily accomplished mass murder. (I won't go through a list, but here's just one: take a small, fast boat, pack it with high explosives, and T-bone a luxury cruise ship in mid-ocean, a long way from any medical facilities. Those ships have several thousand well-heeled, decadent Americans on them. How do you defend them?) This means, of course, that minimizing the chances of future terror attacks requires actions that have nothing to do with bombing the Taliban or Saddam. In the short term, we need to increase the effectiveness of domestic security, beef up emergency management plans, work internationally with police, intelligence agencies, and international courts. In the longer term, we need to take a hard look at foreign and economic policies which have in some cases contributed to the Third World desperation that permeates the fertile recruiting grounds for psychotic ideologues like bin Laden. But during war hysteria, how much of that will actually happen? We got a lot of empty, puffed-chest idiocy after September 11's attacks, reminding us that America is strong and resilient and can't be cowed by terrorism. Terrorists, we were told, win only if our lives are changed by our terror, and we wouldn't let that happen. Osama bin Laden's video last weekend, vowing that Americans would feel fear, was widely written off as evil hyperbole. And yet, here we are, a few days later, and the country is unraveling over a threat that is, so far, pretty minor in the catalog of this world's miseries. The networks and White House went through an absurd dance last week, the networks agreeing (among other things) to censor tapes of bin Laden so as not to expose us viewers to his words. But intentionally or not, the terrorists behind these anthrax incidents -- if they are even the work of bioterrorists, which we don't know for sure -- are winning. Their weapon is not biochemistry, but the obsession of American "news" reporting with aiming for the strongest possible emotional jolt to its viewers or readers, no matter how irresponsible. American media is doing the terrorists' work for them. After a decade in which U.S. media saturated the world with nonsense like O.J. and Elian, if terrorists are out there choosing their weapons, it's hard to believe that their use of our media's irrepressible money-driven instinct to scare its audience is an accident. Capitalism and the logic of the marketplace has come to war: for the first time in human history, the targets of an attack have chosen the weapon of our destruction by popular demand. The terrorists are giving us what the networks long ago decided we want. If this is, in fact, how things are intended to play out, I'm awestruck at the genius and simplicity of the idea -- and horrified by our defenselessness. I don't expect that U.S. media will change its ways and go all responsible on us. I also don't expect that opportunistic politicians and companies, who may have their own reasons for whipping up our terror, will step back and realize that they're doing Evil's work for it. If we are to avoid war, if we are to avoid being manipulated into losing the very freedoms we're supposedly mobilizing to defend, if we are in fact being attacked with the goal of putting each of us in perpetual dread, our only true defense for that is each other and our own good sense. Stacked up against the power of modern U.S. propaganda -- now being unwittingly used as a weapon of war against its residents -- I'm feeling pretty uneasy myself, about where this is heading. * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected], Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
