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)