"Barry Glassner - The Culture of Fear (incomplete)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Glassner Barry)

Crime in the News
Tall Tales and Overstated Statistics

If the mystery about baseless scares is how they are sold to a public that has real dangers to worry about, in the case of more defensible fears the question is somewhat different. We ought to have concerns about crime, drug addiction, child abuse, and other afflictions to be discussed. The question is, how have we gotten so mixed up about the true nature and extent of these problems?

In no small measure the answer lies in stories like one that broke on March 19, 1991. If you read a newspaper or turned on a TV or radio newscast that day or the several days thereafter you were told that the streets of America were more dangerous than a war zone.

The press had been provoked to make this extreme assertion not by a rise in violent crime but by a dramatic event. The Gulf War had just ended, and a soldier who returned home to Detroit had been shot dead outside his apartment building.

The front-page story in the Washington Post portrayed the situation this way:

Conley Street, on this city's northeast side, is a pleasant-looking row of brick and wood homes with small, neat lawns, a street that for years was the realization of the American dream for middle-income families. But in the past few years, Conley has become a street of crack, crime and occasional bursts of gunfire. And at 2:15 a.m. Monday, the bullets killed Army Spec. Anthony Riggs, something that all of Iraq's Scud missiles could not do during his seven months with a Patriot missile battery in Saudi Arabia.

Described by his mother as a man who deeply loved his family and his country, Riggs had written home from Saudi Arabia, "There's no way I'm going to die in this rotten country. With the Lord's grace and his guidance, I'll walk American soil once again." But before that letter even arrived, while Riggs was moving his wife and three-year-old daughter to a new apartment, five shots rang out and witnesses heard the sound of screeching tires. Some faceless thug had killed him just to get his car. "His wife, Toni, found him dying in a gutter," the Post reported.

TV newscasts showed Mrs. Riggs sobbing. She had warned her husband that there had been a shooting on the street earlier in the day, but he wouldn't listen. "He said he'd just got back from having missiles flying over his head, and a few shots weren't going to bother him," according to Toni's aunt, quoted in the Los Angeles Times. That of course was the larger point, or as the Post put it, "Riggs's death was a tragic reminder of President Bush's words recently when he announced a new crime bill: 'Our veterans deserve to come home to an America where it is safe to walk the streets'."

Oops, Wrong Story

From the point of view of journalists and editors an ideal crime story-that is, the sort that deserves major play and is sure to hold readers' and viewers' attention-has several elements that distinguish it from other acts of violence. The victims are innocent, likable people; the perpetrator is an uncaring brute. Details of the crime, while shocking, are easy to relay. And the events have social significance, bespeaking an underlying societal crisis.

The murder of Anthony Riggs seemed to have it all. The only problem was, very little of this perfect crime story was true. Reporters named the right victim but the wrong perpetrator, motive, and moral.

It was the massive media attention, ironically, that resulted in the real story coming out. Confronted with demands from politicians and citizen groups to catch Riggs's killer, the Detroit police launched an all-out investigation. While digging through garbage cans around the Conley Street neighborhood, an officer came upon a handgun that turned out to belong to Michael Cato, the brother of Riggs's wife, Toni. Nineteen years old at the time and currently serving a life sentence for murder, Michael said in a confession that his sister had promised him a share of $175,000 in life insurance benefits.

Reporters cannot be blamed for failing to possess this information prior to its discovery by the police, but had they been a little skeptical or made a few phone calls they almost certainly would have stumbled on at least some aspects of the truth. They might have learned, for example, that Toni had been making noises about dumping Anthony for some time, or that it was she who arranged a hefty life insurance policy for her husband before he went off to war. Reporters might also have checked into Mrs. Riggs's past and discovered previous irregularities, such as the fact that she had not yet divorced her previous husband when she married Anthony.

Journalists also might have discovered the existence of a letter Riggs wrote to his mother from Saudi Arabia. "Toni has wrecked my car. She is now bouncing checks...She is never home: 2:30 a.m., 4 a.m...I would put my head through the neck of a hot sauce bottle to please her, but now I need happiness in return," People magazine, the only major publication that subsequently ran a full-fledged account of the true story, quoted him penning.

Had news writers checked with knowledgeable criminologists or homicide detectives they might have been impressed as well by the improbability of a car thief murdering someone execution-style when a simple shot or two would have done the job. Carjacking victims seldom get shot at all, particularly if they do not resist.

Journalists generally pride themselves on being suspicious about information they are given. Your average journalist "wears his skepticism like a medieval knight wore his armor," Shelby Coffey, head of ABC News and former editor of the Los Angeles Times, has said. Yet when it comes to a great crime story, a journalist will behave like the high school nerd who has been approached by the most popular girl in school for help with her science project. Grateful for the opportunity, he doesn't bother to ask a lot of questions.

There are discernible differences, though, between reporters for electronic versus print media. Unlike their colleagues at local television stations, who will go for any story that includes a police chase or a humiliated celebrity, journalists at newspapers and magazines have a particular fondness for crime stories that help them make sense of some other phenomenon they are having trouble covering in its own right. In the Riggs murder the phenomenon in question was the Gulf War. The news media had difficulty reporting accurately on the war because the Pentagon kept the press away from the action and used tightly scripted briefings to spoonfeed only what the generals and the president wanted known. As part of that spin Generals Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf were defined as the war's heroes. Grunts on the battlefield and in the air seemed almost irrelevant to a war fought with smart bombs. Their homecoming consequently had little intrinsic meaning or news value. So when the Riggs murder came along, reporters eagerly used it to mark the end of the war on Iraq and the start of the next phase in the ongoing domestic war on crime.

Oops, Wrong Crisis

If the news media merely got the facts wrong about an occasional homicide, that would be no big deal. But the significance they attach to many of the homicides and other violent crimes they choose to spotlight is another matter. The streets of America are not more dangerous than a war zone, and the media should not convey that they are.

Some places journalists have declared crime ridden are actually quite safe. Consider an article Time magazine ran in April 1994 headlined across the top of two pages: "Not a month goes by without an outburst of violence in the workplace-now even in flower nurseries, pizza parlors and law offices." One of literally thousands of stories published and broadcast on what was dubbed "the epidemic of workplace violence," Time's article presented a smorgasbord of grisly photographs and vignettes of unsuspecting workers and managers brutally attacked by their coworkers or employees. "Even Americans who see a potential for violence almost everywhere like to suppose there are a few sanctuaries left. One is a desk, or a spot behind the counter, or a place on the assembly line," the writer sighed.

More than five hundred stories about workplace violence appeared in newspapers alone just during 1994 and 1995, and many included some seriously scary statistics: 2.2 million people attacked on the job each year, murder the leading cause of work-related death for women, the number-three cause for men. "How can you be sure," asked a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, "the person sitting next to you at work won't go over the edge and bring an Uzi to the office tomorrow?" Her answer was, "You can't."

At least one journalist, however, grew leery of his colleagues' fear mongering. Erik Larson, a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, having come upon the same numbers quoted time and again, decided to take a closer look. The result was an exposй in the Journal titled "A False Crisis," in which Larson revealed how the news media had created an epidemic where none existed. Of about 121 million working people, about 1,000 are murdered on the job each year, a rate of just 1 in 114,000. Police, security guards, taxi drivers, and other particularly vulnerable workers account for a large portion of these deaths. Cab drivers, for instance, suffer an occupational homicide rate twenty-one times the national average. On the flip side of that coin, people in certain other occupations face conspicuously low levels of risk. The murder rate for doctors, engineers, and other professionals is about 1 in 457,000, Larson determined.

Another vocational group with relatively low rates, it turns out, is postal workers. The expression "going postal" became part of the American vernacular after some particularly bloody assaults by U.S. Postal Service employees against their supervisors. Yet postal employees are actually about two and a half times less likely than the average worker to be killed on the job.

All in all fewer than one in twenty homicides occurs at a workplace. And while most of the media hoopla has been about disgruntled workers killing one another or their bosses-the Uzi-toting fellow at the next desk-few workplace murders are actually carried out by coworkers or ex-workers. About 90 percent of murders at workplaces are committed by outsiders who come to rob. The odds of being killed by someone you work with or employ are less than 1 in 2 million; you are several times more likely to be hit by lightning.

Larson deconstructed as well the survey that produced the relentlessly reproduced statistic of 2.2 million people assaulted at work each year. Most of the reported attacks were fairly minor and did not involve weapons, and once again, the great majority were committed by outsiders, not by coworkers, ex-employees, or bosses. What is more, the survey from which the number comes would not pass muster among social scientists, Larson points out. The response rate is too low. Fewer than half of the people contacted responded to the survey, making it likely that those who participated were not typical of employed Americans as a whole.