CHAPTER SEVEN
133: “. . . three-quarters of all Americans would be considered ‘diseased.’ ” See Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz, Changing Disease Definitions: Implications for Disease Prevalence, Effective Clinical Practice, March/April 1999.
139: “Self-interest and sincere belief seldom part company.” For a thorough and entertaining look at how the brain is wired for self-justification, see Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.
145: “‘One out of eight American children is going hungry tonight.’” See It Ain’t Necessarily So: How the Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture of Reality, David Murray, Joel Schwartz, and S. Robert Lichter.
147: “. . . half-truths, quarter-truths, and sort-of-truths.” Another fine example is reported in Michael Siegel, Is the Tobacco Control Movement Misrepresenting the Acute Cardiovascular Health Effects of Secondhand Smoke Exposure? Epidemiologic Perspectives and Innovations 4:12. The author, a professor in the School of Public Health at Boston University, shows how anti-smoking groups promoted smoking bans by ridiculously exaggerating the danger of secondhand smoke. And another: In the late 1980s and early 1990s, activists and officials struggling to convince people that HIV-AIDS was not only a “gay man’s disease” had an unfortunate tendency to spin numbers. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control, for example, reported that “women accounted for 19 percent of adult/adolescent AIDS cases in 1995, the highest proportion yet reported among women.” That frightening news made headlines across the United States. But as David Murray, Joel Schwartz, and S. Robert Lichter point out in It Ain’t Necessarily So, the CDC did not include the actual numbers of AIDS cases in the summary that garnered the headlines. Those numbers actually showed a small decline in the number of women with AIDS. The proportion of AIDS cases involving women had gone up because there had been a much bigger drop in the number of men with AIDS. By the mid-1990s, it was becoming increasingly obvious that activists and agencies had been hyping the risk of heterosexual infection in the United States, the U.K. and elsewhere, but some thought that was just fine. “The Government has lied, and I am glad,” wrote Mark Lawson in a 1996 column in The Guardian.
151: " ’I hope that means being both.’ ” Many critics of environmentalists have repeated this quotation in a form that cuts off the last several sentences, thereby unfairly making it look as if Schneider endorsed scare-mongering.
152: “. . . may be misleading, but it certainly gets the job done.” Another technique for making uncertain information exciting is to dispense with the range of possible outcomes that often accompanies uncertainty and instead cite one number. Naturally, the number cited is not the lowest number, nor the average within the range. It is the biggest and scariest. Thus, when former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern estimated in 2006 that the costs of climate change to the global economy under a range of scenarios would be 5 to 20 percent, environmentalists—and far too many journalists—cited it as “up to 20 percent” or simply “20 percent.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
157: “. . . major U.S. magazines between 1993 and 1997.” See Wylie Burke, Amy Olsen, Linda Pinsky, Susan Reynolds, and Nancy Press, Misleading Presentation of Breast Cancer in Popular Magazines, Effective Clinical Practice, March/April 2001.
159: “. . . disease got nowhere near the coverage proportionate to their death toll.” See K. Frost, E. Frank, and E. Maibach, Relative Risk in the News Media: A Quantification of Misrepresentation, American Journal of Public Health, 1997.
165: “. . . not so exciting and alarming is played down or ignored entirely.” A handy way to spot sensationalism is to look for the words “danger” and “lurk” in the same sentence—as in “Danger Lurks in Unlikely Corners” (USA Today), “Danger Lurks in Yellowstone Park” (Associated Press), “Why Danger Lurks in the High School Parking Lot” (Metro West Daily News of Boston), and my personal favorite, “Dangers Lurk in Dirty Salons, ” a Fox News story about the little-appreciated threat of improperly cleaned nail files and foot baths.
180: “. . . can be distracted by dramatic stories of no real consequence.” A further example: In 1996 and 1997, “flying truck tires” became a major issue in the province of Ontario thanks to a classic feedback loop. Two tragic incidents in which loose tires struck and killed motorists got considerable media attention. The issue became political. Reporting proliferated and even trivial incidents in which no one was endangered made the news. It seemed the roads were in chaos. New safety regulations were passed and, just as quickly as it appeared, the crisis vanished.
So, had the regulations put out a real fire? No. The ministry of transportation didn’t have a comprehensive incident-collection system in place prior to the crisis, but its partial figures showed there were 18 “wheels-off ” incidents and two deaths in 1995, the year the issue started emerge. Given the millions of vehicles on the road, those numbers are tiny. Then, in 1996, the government started to gather better data. The 1996 figures show 41 incidents, and another two deaths. In 1997, there were 215 incidents and no deaths. In 1998, there were 99 incidents. The following year, there were 79, then 87. In 2001, there were 65 incidents and two people were killed. In 2002, there were 66 incidents. In 2003, there were 75 incidents and another person was killed.
Before the panic, tires came loose occasionally and there was a tiny risk to motorists. The same was true during the crisis and afterward. All that changed was the appearance and disappearance of the feedback loop.
CHAPTER NINE
187: “. . . so small it can be treated as if it were zero.” The term de minimis comes from the legal maxim de minimis non curat lex—the law does not concern itself with trifles.
189: “. . . saying they followed ‘very closely’ (49 percent) or ‘fairly closely’ (30 percent).” Smart was discovered alive in March 2003. People magazine named her one of the “50 Most Beautiful People of 2005.”
190: “This astonishingly good news went almost completely unreported.” See Shannon Catalano, Intimate Partner Violence in the United States, U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
190: “. . . debate declined and disappeared virtually unnoticed.” In 1999 and 2000, a panic about “home invasions” swept Toronto and Vancouver after numerous incidents in which criminals burst into homes, brutalized the occupants, and grabbed whatever they could take. In one attack, an 85-year-old woman was beaten so badly she later died. Story followed story and it became common knowledge that home invasions were a terrible new threat that was rapidly getting worse. Few reporters mentioned that there was no definition of “home invasion” and therefore no statistics on the crime. They also didn’t mention that most recognized categories of crime were falling rapidly, which made it hard to believe that this one form of violent crime was soaring. No matter. Everyone knew it was true and in that inflamed atmosphere a bill stiffening sentences was inevitable. It appeared and passed. And with that, the whole issue faded. But then in 2002, Statistics Canada issued a report that used two different definitions of “home invasion” and used those to track the crime using existing data. Under the first definition, the rate of “home invasions” had dipped slightly between 1995 and 2000; under the second definition, it had fallen 22 percent. The report was almost completely ignored by the media.