More reporting puts more examples and more emotions into more brains. Public concern rises, and reporters respond with more reporting. More reporting, more fear; more fear, more reporting. The feedback loop is established and fear steadily grows.
It takes more than the media and the public to create that loop, however. It also takes people and institutions with an interest in pumping up the fear, and there were plenty of those involved in the manufacture of the road-rage crisis, as Fumento amply documented. The term “road rage” and the alleged epidemic “were quickly popularized by lobbying groups, politicians, opportunistic therapists, publicity-seeking safety agencies and the U.S. Department of Transportation.” Others saw a good thing and tried to appropriate it—spawning “air rage,” “office rage,” and “black rage.” In the United Kingdom, therapists even promoted the term “trolley rage” to describe allegedly growing numbers of consumers who flew into a fury behind the handle of a shopping cart just as drivers lost it behind the wheel of a car.
With road rage established as something that “everyone knows” is real, the media applied little or no scrutiny to frightening numbers spouted by self-interested parties. “Temper Cited as Cause of 28,000 Road Deaths a Year,” read a headline in the New York Times after the head of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA)—a political appointee whose profile grew in lockstep with the prominence of the issue— claimed that two-thirds of fatalities “can be attributed to behavior associated with aggressive driving.” This became the terrifying factoid that gave the imprimatur of statistics to all the scary anecdotes. But when Fumento asked a NHTSA spokesperson to explain the number, she said, “We don’t have hard numbers but aggressive driving is almost everything. It includes weaving in and out of traffic, driving too closely, flashing your headlights—all kinds of stuff. Drinking, speeding, almost everything you can think of, can be boiled down to aggressive driving behaviors.”
With such a tenuous link to reality, the road-rage scare was not likely to survive the arrival of a major new story, and a presidential sex scandal and impeachment was certainly that. Bill Clinton’s troubles distracted reporters and the public alike, so the feedback loop was broken and the road-rage crisis vanished. In 2004, a report commissioned by the NHTSA belatedly concluded, “It is reasonable to question the claims of dramatic increases in aggressive driving and road rage. . . . The crash data suggest that road rage is a relatively small traffic safety problem, despite the volume of news accounts and the general salience of the issue. It is important to consider the issues objectively because programmatic and enforcement efforts designed to reduce the incidence of road rage might detract attention and divert resources from other, objectively more serious traffic safety problems.” A wise note of caution, seven years too late.
In 2001, the same dynamic generated what the North American media famously dubbed the Summer of the Shark. On July 6, 2001, off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, an eight-year-old boy named Jessie Arbogast was splashing in shallow water when he was savaged by a bull shark. He lost an arm but survived, barely, and the bizarre and tragic story with a happy ending became headline news across the continent. It established a new narrative, and “suddenly, reports of shark attacks—or what people thought were shark attacks—came in from all around the U.S.,” noted the cover story of the July 30, 2001, edition of Time magazine. “On July 15, a surfer was apparently bitten on the leg a few miles from the site of Jessie’s attack. The next day, another surfer was attacked off San Diego. Then a life guard on Long Island, N.Y., was bitten by what some thought was a thresher shark. Last Wednesday, a 12-foot tiger shark chased spearfishers in Hawaii.” Of course, these reports didn’t just “come in.” Incidents like these happen all the time, but no one thinks they’re important enough to make national news. The narrative changed that, elevating trivia to news.
The Time article was careful to note that “for all the terror they stir, the numbers remain minuscule. Worldwide, there were 79 unprovoked attacks last year, compared with 58 in 1999 and 54 the year before. . . . You are 30 times as likely to be killed by lightning. Poorly wired Christmas trees claim more victims than sharks, according to Australian researchers.” But this nod to reason came in the midst of an article featuring graphic descriptions of shark attacks and color photos of sharks tearing apart raw meat. And this was the cover story on one of the most important news magazines in the world. The numbers may have said there was no reason for alarm but to Gut, everything about the story shouted: Be afraid!
In early September, a shark killed a ten-year-old boy in Virginia. The day after, another took the life of a man swimming in the ocean off North Carolina. The evening newscasts of all three national networks made shark attacks the top item of the week. This is what the United States was talking about at the beginning of September 2001.
On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, predators of another kind boarded four planes and murdered almost 3,000 people. Instantly, the feedback loop was broken. Reports of sharks chasing spearfishers vanished from the news and the risk of shark attack reverted to what it had been all along— a tragedy for the very few touched by it, statistical trivia for everyone else. Today, the Summer of the Shark is a warning of how easily the public—media and audience together—can be distracted by dramatic stories of no real consequence.
Storytelling may be natural. It may also be enlightening. But there are many ways in which it is a lousy tool for understanding the world we live in and what really threatens us. Anecdotes aren’t data, as scientists say, no matter how moving they may be or how they pile up.
Criticisms like this bother journalists. It is absurd that the news “should parallel morbidity and mortality statistics,” wrote Sean Collins, the producer who took exception to criticisms of media coverage by public-health experts. “Sometimes we have to tell stories that resonate some place other than the epidemiologists’ spreadsheet.”
He’s right, of course. The stories of a young woman with breast cancer, a man paralyzed by West Nile virus, and a boy killed by a shark should all be told. And it is wonderful that the short life of Shelby Gagne was remembered in a newspaper photograph of a toddler grinning madly. But these stories of lives threatened and lost to statistically rare causes are not what the media present “sometimes.” They are standard fare. It is stories in line with the epidemiologists’ spreadsheet that are told only sometimes—and that is a major reason Gut so often gives us terrible advice.
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