Dowd’s colleague at the Times, Frank Rich, warned in February 2007 that the situation had become so dire that experts were going public in a desperate bid to get the attention of a White House that didn’t want to listen. “Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA bin Laden unit, told MS-NBC’S Keith Olbermann last week that the Taliban and al-Qaeda, having regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan, ‘are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States,’ ” Rich wrote. But Michael Scheuer, far from being a secretive expert reluctantly stepping out of the shadows, is the author of several polemical books and a frequent media commentator. And his statement was merely a passing comment tossed into the end of the interview. “We don’t treat the—this Islamist enemy as seriously as we should,” Scheuer had said. “We think that we’re going to arrest them, one man at a time. These people are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States, and we’re going to have absolutely nothing to respond against. It’s going to be a unique situation for a great power, and we’re going to have no one to blame but ourselves.” The show’s host then thanked Scheuer and that was the end of it. Scheuer offered no evidence to support his brief comment, and yet Rich presented the comment as credible evidence of a horrific threat—with nothing but the fact that Scheuer once worked at the CIA to support it. The irony is that in 2002 and 2003, when the administration was making the case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that posed a serious threat to the United States—with evidence provided by the CIA—Frank Rich rigorously examined that evidence, found it lacking, and denounced what he felt was a ruthless attempt to scare the public into supporting the invasion. But in 2007, the politics had changed and so had Rich’s standards about what constituted reliable proof.
Still, however important these factors may be, they lie at the surface. It is underneath, moving like tectonic plates, that we find the real force driving the media’s hyperbolic coverage of terrorism.
People were afraid. Their intuitive minds told them to be afraid, the Bush administration told them to be afraid, and being afraid, they wanted to know more. Reporters, editors, and producers shared these feelings. After all, they lived in the same communities as everyone else, listened to the same presidential statements, and processed it all with the same intuitive minds. And so, in living rooms and newsrooms alike, there was virtual unanimity that terrorism was a grave and growing menace.
With that belief in place, confirmation bias kicked in. Information that contradicted what everyone believed—attack statistics, mortality odds, risk comparisons, the failures of Aum Shinrikyo, the spectacular plots that turned out to be much less than they appeared—got little or no attention. But reporters seized on absolutely anything that confirmed what everyone believed and fed it into the media machine—which then poured out vast volumes of biased information.
Inevitably, this strengthened the popular perception of terrorism. A mammoth feedback loop was created. To the media, actual attacks and foiled plots—of any scale or sophistication—proved that terrorism was a grave and growing menace. So did the absence of attacks and plots. Even imaginary attacks would do. What was never considered was the possibility that terrorism is not a grave or growing threat. It was a grand and disturbing demonstration of the profound influence that confirmation bias can have on human affairs.
With the news media, politicians, and the public locked in a feedback loop that steadily amplified the fear, the entertainment media added their contribution. It is hard to imagine a threat better suited to drama than terrorism, and for that reason it has been used in novels, movies, and TV shows for decades. Post-9/11, with fears of terrorism soaring, the image of outnumbered government agents struggling mightily to stop scowling plotters from nuking Los Angeles—most notably on the popular television show 24—became a dramatic staple.
The most disturbing aspect of much of this entertainment was the deliberate blurring of the line between fiction and reality. “Five years ago, September 11 was seared into America’s memory,” begins a fairly typical commercial for the Showtime series Sleeper Celclass="underline" American Terror. The speaker is the real President Bush delivering a speech marking the anniversary of 9/11. “Today we are safer,” he says, “but we are not yet safe.” Ominous drums pound. Images of flags and cities appear and go black. Then comes a furious burst of images and sounds—a man firing a gun, someone being tortured, another urgently whispering, “A nuclear attack. . . .” And finally a warning flashes on-screen: “The next attack could be anywhere.”
Everything we know about risk perception suggests this stuff is poisonous to both Head and Gut. For Head, there is factual misinformation. The Centers for Disease Control actually felt compelled to issue a fact sheet explaining that smallpox isn’t nearly as communicable, uncontrollable, or deadly as it was portrayed in made-for-TV movies. For Gut, there is a barrage of violent images and potent emotions that can drive its intuitive judgments. As we saw earlier, people’s perceptions of the risks posed by climate change were significantly boosted by watching The Day After Tomorrow. If an implausible movie about a relatively abstract threat can do that, it’s reasonable to assume that gritty, pulse-quickening stories about a far more visceral and emotional threat can do much more.
What’s the average American to make of all this? She starts with the strong feeling that terrorism is a serious threat because that’s what the memories and feelings of 9/11 lead her Gut to conclude. This sense is repeatedly confirmed by the statements of the administration and the rest of the political establishment. It’s also strengthened every day by government agencies, police departments, security experts, security companies, NGOs, the media, pundits, and the entertainment industry. And this average American is surrounded by others who have the same memories and feelings, who get the same information from the government and the media, and who agree that the threat of terrorism is high. In the face of such a consensus, it’s only natural to go with the group, particularly because, as we have seen, our tendency to conform to the group’s opinion rises as the issue becomes more important—and this is about as important as issues come.
Strongly believing the threat of terrorism to be high, the average American then becomes subject to confirmation bias, latching on to whatever information she comes across that seems to support her belief while ignoring or dismissing whatever does not. In effect, she filters information through a screen of bias—information that has already been filtered the same way by the media and others. The result is bias squared.
It’s perfectly understandable, then, that Americans’ fear of terrorism actually rose during four years in which there were no terrorist attacks, or that almost one-half of Americans are worried that they or their families could be killed by terrorists. It’s hard to imagine a more powerful array of factors pressing on the unconscious mind. And the influence of Gut on our conscious judgments should never be underestimated, not even when those making the judgment have spent their lives rationally analyzing information. In July 2007, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff told the Chicago Tribune that he had a “gut feeling that we are in a period of vulnerability. ” George Tenet, the former director of the CIA, used almost exactly the same phrase in his 2007 memoirs. “I do not know why attacks didn’t occur” in the years after 9/11, he wrote. “But I do know one thing in my gut: al-Qai’ida is here and waiting.”