Free The Culture of Fear by Barry Glassner Page A

Rimm, the college student whom Time glorified in its notorious “cyberporn” issue as the “Principal Investigator” of “a research team,” is almost totally devoid of legitimate credentials.
    I have found that for some species of scares—Internet paranoia among them—secondary scholars are standard fixtures. Bona fide experts
easily refute these characters’ contentions, yet they continue to appear nonetheless. Take scares about so-called Internet addiction, a malady ludicrously alleged to afflict millions of people and sometimes cause death. Far and away the most frequently quoted “expert” has been psychologist Kimberly Young, whom journalists dubbed “the world’s first global shrink” (Los Angeles Times). Her “major study” ( Psychology Today ) turns out to have been based on unverifiable reports from a nonscientific sample of people who responded to her postings online. Young’s research was rebutted on basic methodological grounds by scholars within and outside her field. Yet she managed to give Internet addiction a clinical air and tie it to serious afflictions by talking of “a newfound link between Net addiction and depression” ( USA Today ) and offering ill-suited similes. “It’s like when a smoker thinks they can quit anytime they want, but when they try they can’t,” Young told a reporter. 3
    Fear mongers make their scares all the more credible by backing up would-be experts’ assertions with testimonials from people the audience will find sympathetic. In “War of the Worlds” those people were actors playing ordinary citizens who said they had seen the Martians, experienced the destruction they wrought, or had a plan for how to survive the attack. In the stories I studied comparable characters appear: victims of Gulf War Syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivity, and breast implant disorders who testify before congressional panels, juries, and talk show audiences; “seasoned travelers” who express their concerns to reporters at airports after plane crashes; former friends and neighbors of women who have murdered their children.
    Professional narrators play an important role too in transforming something implausible into something believable. Cantril observed of “War of the Worlds” that “as the less credible bits of the story begin to enter, the clever dramatist also indicates that he, too, has difficulty in believing what he sees.” When we are informed that a mysterious object is not a meteorite but a spaceship, the reporter declares, “this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed.” Anchors on TV newsmagazines utter similar statements at the beginning or end of scare stories. “It’s frightening,” NBC’s Katie Couric says as she introduces a
report suggesting that “shots designed to protect your children might actually hurt or cripple them.” ABC’s Barbara Walters opines at the conclusion of a report about a woman who falsely accused her father of sexual abuse, “What a terrifying story.” 4
     
    Statements of alarm by newscasters and glorification of wannabe experts are two telltale tricks of the fear mongers’ trade. In the preceding chapters I pointed out others as well: the use of poignant anecdotes in place of scientific evidence, the christening of isolated incidents as trends, depictions of entire categories of people as innately dangerous.
    If journalists would curtail such practices, there would be fewer anxious and misinformed Americans. Ultimately, though, neither the ploys that narrators use nor what Cantril termed “the sheer dramatic excellence” of their presentations fully accounts for why people in 1938 swallowed a tall tale about martians taking over New Jersey or why people today buy into tales about perverts taking over cyberspace, Uzi-toting employees taking over workplaces, heroin dealers taking over middle-class suburbs, and so forth. 5
    The success of a scare depends not only on how well it is expressed but also, as I