Politicians and the Media

A problem with getting coherent thinking on the risk of terrorism is that reporters and politicians find extreme and alarmist possibilities so much more appealing than discussions of broader context, much less of statistical reality. That is, although hysteria and alarmism rarely make much sense, politicians and the media are often naturally drawn to them.

There is no reason to suspect that President Bush’s concern about terrorism is anything but genuine. However, his approval rating did receive the greatest boost for any president in history in September 2001, and it would be politically unnatural for him not to notice. His chief political adviser, Karl Rove, [in 2003 said] that the “war” against terrorism will be central to Bush’s re-election campaign. The Democrats, scurrying to keep up, have stumbled all over each other with plans to expend even more of the federal budget on the terrorist threat, such as it is, than President Bush.

This process is hardly new. The preoccupation of the media and of Jimmy Carter’s presidency with the hostages taken by Iran in 1979 to the exclusion of almost everything else may look foolish in retrospect, as Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, conceded in his memoirs. But it doubtless appeared to be good politics at the time -- Carter’s dismal approval rating soared when the hostages were seized. Similarly, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration became fixated on a handful of American hostages held by terrorists in Lebanon. At the time, Reagan’s normally judicious secretary of state, George Shultz, was screaming that we needed desperately to blast somebody somewhere “on a moment’s notice” -- even without adequate evidence -- in order to avoid looking like the indecisive “Hamlet of nations.” He apparently preferred the King Lear approach. Normally, however, only lunatics and children rail at storms; sensible people invest in umbrellas and lightning rods.

Since Sept. 11, the American public has been treated to endless yammering about terrorism in the media. Politicians may believe that, given the public concern on the issue, they will lose votes if they appear insensitively to be downplaying the dangers of terrorism (though this fear does not seem to have infected Sen. McCain). However, the media like to tout that they are devoted to presenting fair and balanced coverage of important public issues. I may have missed it, but I have never heard anyone in the media stress that in every year except 2001, only a few hundred people in the entire world have died as a result of international terrorism.

Continued.

As often noted, the media appear to have a congenital incapacity for dealing with issues of risk and comparative probabilities -- except, of course, in the sports and financial sections. But even in their amazingly rare efforts to try, the issue -- one that would seem to be absolutely central to any rounded discussion of terrorism and terrorism policy -- never goes very far. For example, in 2001 The Washington Post published an article by a University of Wisconsin economist that attempted quantitatively to point out how much safer it was to travel by air than by automobile, even under the heightened atmosphere of concern inspired by the Sept. 11 attacks. He reports that the article generated a couple of media inquiries, but nothing more. Gregg Easterbrook’s cover story in the Oct. 7, 2002, New Republic forcefully argued that biological and chemical weapons are hardly capable of creating “mass destruction,” a perspective relevant not only to terrorism, but also to the drive for war against Iraq that was going on at the time. The New York Times asked him to fashion the article into an Op-Ed piece, but that was the only interest the article generated in the media.

In addition, it should be pointed out that the response to Sept. 11 has created a vast and often well-funded terrorism industry. Its members would be nearly out of business if terrorism were to be back-burnered, and, accordingly, they have every competitive incentive (and they are nothing if not competitive) to conclude that it is their civic duty to keep the pot boiling.

Moreover, there is more reputational danger in underplaying risks than in exaggerating them. People routinely ridicule futurist H.G. Wells’ prediction that the conflict beginning in 1914 would be “the war that will end war,” but not his equally confident declaration at the end of World War II that “the end of everything we call life is close at hand.” Disproved doomsayers can always claim that caution induced by their warnings prevented the predicted calamity from occurring. (Call this the Y2K effect.) Disproved Pollyannas have no such convenient refuge.

The challenge, thus, is a difficult one. But it still seems sensible to suggest that officials and the press at least once in a while ought to assess probabilities and put them in some sort of context, rather than simply to stress extreme possibilities so much and so exclusively.

Continued Tomorrow.