And this is just to speak of the news media. The bias in favor of sensational storytelling is all the more true of the entertainment media, because in show business there is no ethic of accuracy pushing back. Novels, television, and movies are filled with risk-related stories that deploy the crowd-pleasing elements known to every storyteller from Homer to Quentin Tarantino—narrative, conflict, surprise, drama, tragedy, and lots of big emotions—and bear no resemblance to the real dangers in our lives. Evening television is a particularly freakish place. A recent episode of CSI featured the murder of a ruthless millionaire casino owner—a case solved when diaper rash on the body led investigators to discover the victim had a sexual fetish that involved being stripped down and treated like a baby. Meanwhile, on the medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, a beautiful young woman presents herself for a routine checkup, is told she has advanced cervical cancer, and is dead by the end of the show—just another day in a hospital where rare disorders like Rasmussen’s encephalitis turn up with amazing frequency, and no one ever gets diabetes or any of the boring diseases that kill more people than all the rare disorders combined.
It’s the information equivalent of junk food, and like junk food, consuming it in large quantities may have consequences. When we watch this stuff, Head knows it’s just a show—that cops don’t spend their time investigating the murders of millionaires in diapers and hospitals aren’t filled with beautiful young women dying of cancer. But Gut doesn’t know any of that. Gut knows only that it is seeing vivid incidents and feeling strong emotions and these things satisfy the Example Rule and the Good-Bad Rule. So while it’s undoubtedly true that the news media contribute to the fact that people often get risk wrong, it is likely that the entertainment media must share some of that blame.
An indication of how influential the media can be comes from the most unlikely place. Burkina Faso is a small country in West Africa. It was once a French colony, and French is the dominant language. The French media are widely available, and the local media echo the French media. But Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries on earth, and threats to life and limb there are very different than in France. So when researchers Daboula Kone and Etienne Mullet got fifty-one residents of the capital city to rate the risk posed by ninety activities and technologies—on a scale from 0 to 100—it would be reasonable to expect the results would be very different than in similar French surveys. They weren’t. “Despite extreme differences in the real risk structure between Burkina Faso and France,” the researchers wrote, “the Burkina Faso inhabitants in this sample responded on the questionnaire in a way which illustrates approximately the same preoccupations as the French respondents and to the same degree.”
That said, people often exaggerate the influence the media have on society, in part because they see the media as something quite apart from society, as if it were an alien occupying force pumping out information from underground bunkers. But the reporters, editors, and producers who are “the media” have houses in the suburbs, kids in school, and a cubicle in an office building just like everybody else. And they, too, read newspapers, watch TV, and surf the Internet.
In the 1997 study that found the media paid “impressively disproportionate” attention to dramatic causes of death, cancer was found to be among the causes of death given coverage greater than the proportion of deaths it causes. The authors ignored that finding but it’s actually crucial. Cancer isn’t spectacular like a house fire or homicide, and it’s only dramatic in the sense that any potentially deadly disease is dramatic—including lots of deadly diseases that get very little media attention. What cancer does have, however, is a powerful presence in popular culture. The very word is black and frightening. It stirs the bleak feelings psychologists call negative affect, and reporters experience those feelings and their perceptions are shaped by them. So when the media give disproportionate coverage to cancer, it’s clear they are reflecting what society thinks, not directing it. But at the same time, the disproportionate attention to cancer in the media can lead people to exaggerate the risk—making cancer all the more frightening.
Back and forth it goes. The media reflect society’s fear, but in doing so, the media generate more fear, and that gets reflected back again. This process goes on all the time but sometimes—particularly when other cultural concerns are involved—it gathers force and produces the strange eruption sociologists call a moral panic.
In 1998, Time magazine declared, “It’s high noon on the country’s streets and highways. This is road recklessness, auto anarchy, an epidemic of wanton carmanship.” Road rage. In 1994, the term scarcely existed and the issue was nowhere to be seen. In 1995, the phrase started to multiply in the media, and by 1996 the issue had become a serious public concern. Americans were increasingly rude, nasty, and violent behind the wheel; berserk drivers were injuring and killing in growing numbers; it was an “epidemic.” Everyone knew that, and by 1997, everyone was talking about it. Then it stopped. Just like that. The term road rage still appears now and then in the media—it’s too catchy to let go—but the issue vanished about the time Monica Lewinsky became the most famous White House intern in history, and today it is as dated as references to Monica Lewinsky.
When panics pass, they are simply forgotten, and where they came from and why they disappeared are rarely discussed in the media that featured them so prominently. If the road-rage panic were to be subjected to such an examination, it might reasonably be suggested that its rise and fall simply reflected the reality on American roads. But the evidence doesn’t support that. “Headlines notwithstanding, there was not—there is not—the least statistical or other scientific evidence of more aggressive driving on our nation’s roads,” concluded journalist Michael Fumento in a detailed examination of the alleged epidemic published in The Atlantic Monthly in August 1998. “Indeed, accident, fatality and injury rates have been edging down. There is no evidence that ‘road rage’ or an aggressive-driving ‘epidemic’ is anything but a media invention, inspired primarily by something as simple as alliteration: road rage.”
Of course the media didn’t invent the road-rage panic in the same sense that marketers hope to generate new fads for their products. There was no master plan, no conspiracy. Nor was there fabrication. The incidents were all true. “On Virginia’s George Washington Parkway, a dispute over a lane change was settled with a high-speed duel that ended when both drivers lost control and crossed the center line, killing two innocent motorists,” reported U.S. News & World Report in 1997. That really happened. It was widely reported because it was dramatic, tragic, and frightening. And there were other, equally serious incidents that were reported. A new narrative of danger was established: Drivers are behaving worse on the roads, putting themselves and others at risk. That meant incidents didn’t have to be interesting or important enough to stand up as stories on their own. They could be part of the larger narrative, and so incidents that would not previously have been reported were. The same article also reported “the case in Salt Lake City where seventy-five-year-old J. C. King—peeved that forty-one-year-old Larry Remm Jr. honked at him for blocking traffic—followed Remm when he pulled off the road, hurled his prescription bottle at him, and then, in a display of geriatric resolve, smashed Remm’s knees with his ’92 Mercury. In tony Potomac, Maryland, Robin Flicker—an attorney and ex-state legislator—knocked the glasses off a pregnant woman after she had the temerity to ask him why he bumped her jeep with his.” Today, these minor incidents would never make it into national news, but they fit an established narrative at the time and so they were reported.