ZNet Commentary
Vague
Warnings And Public Panic
By Ben Bagdikian
The American public, already traumatized
by the horrors of September
11, are periodically warned that another such act is on the way. Justified
warnings, based on realistic knowledge, are necessary and appreciated. But
there is a social cost in raising perpetual alarms of impending threats to
national security that don't materialize or are so vague as to be useless in
any
pragmatic way.
We have received constant warnings of another Al Qaeda-act.
They come
periodically from the President, Attorney General Ashcroft, the Director of
Homeland Security, and the FBI.. Periodically, Washington has instructed
law enforcement agencies to be on "high alert" on some specific date
---
July 4, or the anniversary of September 11, or because of a sudden increase in intercepted
communications without specifying what was communicated by
whom about what.
All that has has had the country's police chiefs,
sheriffs, and other agencies forever saying, "We're already on 'high
alert' so what else do we do now? And where and when are the bad things
supposed to happen?"
This brings to mind Chicken Little's warning that
"The sky is falling in!" or the little boy forever crying
"Wolf!" But Chicken Little presumably clucked around in an otherwise
bored chicken flock and the "Wolf!" boy lost his audience.
But our national chicken coop is still shaken by past attacks. Many people
have stopped flying, or have held back visiting patriotic landmarks, and
everyone is aware that "something" may happen "somewhere."
It would be folly to assume that Al Qaeda or some
other clandestine group with malice
toward the
But there is a different kind of danger from too many urgent alarms
without meaningful information. The precise mature of the damage to public
security was enunciated years ago by the psychologists, Gordon Allport and Leo Postman.
Allport and Postman studied riots and public hysteria based on real fears
but vague information. They reduced their studies to a specific formulation:
The greater the public anxiety and the greater the inadequate credible information,
the greater the chances are for panic and hysteria.
Already burned into the contemporary American memory are the terrifying
pictures of the World Trade Centers disappearing
before our eyes, the
fumbled air attack on the Pentagon that nevertheless produced death and
destruction, and the crashed Pennsylvania plane when a rebellious set
of passengers fought back and gave their lives when the crashed hijacked
plane failed to reach whatever had been its target.
The American public will never forget those scenes. Nor will they fail to
revive them vividly when high government officials warn of some kind of
repetition. So the first part of the Allport-Postman thesis is already there:
high public anxiety.
But because the country is regularly warned to be on "high
alert" without
useful details (Be Alert! Disaster May Strike Anywhere Anytime!") the second
part of the thesis is also there: the absence of precise and credible information.
Consequently, we have a national formula for panic and hysteria. This, too,
has occurred. Attorney General Ashcroft has detained and held
incommunicado unknown hundreds of people, some of them American citizens, others
legal permanent residents, unthinkable before September 11.
Windows have been smashed and fire bombs hurled into the establishments of
innocent ethnic Americans who seem to the rioting marauders to match the
ethnicity of the Al Qaeda hijackers. There has been
murder.
Acts of arson and destruction and insults have been inflicted on individuals
and families whom some ignorant Americans have seen as resembling
Palestinians. The taut nerves have spread to campuses where pro-Israeli
and pro-Palestinian confrontations have occurred . The
thuggish ignorance
of the window smashers affects all of us, if for no other reason that to the
mindless window smashers a majority of American citizens "look foreign."
Norman Solomon has shown that
massive Israeli Army invasion of
neighborhoods, with thousands of men, women and children
killed and injured in the rubble, as Israeli "retaliation" for
individual Palestinian suicide bombers
Israeli cafes and other public places that has killed
dozens.
But only once did Solomon find our news services use the word "retaliation"
to explain Palestinian suicide bombers for Israel's massive invasion of
Palestine, its seizing the best land, water and electrical sources within
Palestine, building of Jewish settlements on Palestinian property and
protecting them with deadly military force with a network of IsraeliArmy
roads covering Palestine that, along with long and repeated day-long
curfews of Palestinian cities, has paralyzed the
Muslim society, machine gunned its ambulances and caused malnutrition among
some Palestinian children.
Neither does it seem to have occurred to Sharon and his supporters that
the more the Israelis imposed killings and destruction on Palestinians, the
more Palestinian youths have blown themselves in Tel Aviv cafes in what is
clearly retaliation for what Israel has done to their homeland. The one-sided
response of the White House and most of the major news media has
put cruel pressure on all Americans who are Muslims or are of Arab or other
Middle Eastern origin.
That kind of imbalance and diminution of full and precise information in
basic reporting in the main body of American news media has increased the
probability of American hysteria and panic. The same is not true in
and elsewhere because both the news and official statements of European
leaders have been more balanced and less high-pitched in denunciations
of one side.
But the ultimate sign of hysterical response, of course, is in President
Bush's preparation to commit the
is not a public riot, but it does reflect the Allport-Postman thesis: by his constant
support of Prime Minister Sharon's destruction and killings in
Palestine as necessary Israeli "defense,"
thus encouraging international
violence in that part of the Middle East, he has raised public tensions
sufficiently to offer an outlet in a war (or, Sharon-like, a "defense") against Sadam
Hussein and the country of Iraq.
This does not mean that Sadam Hussein is a saint any
more than Yassir
Arafat is a saint. But it does mean that the White House and the nature of
American basic news sources on the
there exists in the main media is smothered in the public rhetoric of threats
and war from leadership in
Nothing could have multiplied the negative effects of the Allport-Postman
thesis than the White House plan to create a corps of spies on every
neighborhood and house in the country. Called TIPS
for Terrorism Information
and Prevention System it would organize truck drivers, bus drivers, port
workers, meter readers, letter carriers and others are expected to report
any "suspicious activities" they observe. Even though the political
fate
of the program is vague, its proposal by the highest officials of our government
portrays ignorance or worse of horrors past:
In Communist East Germany, individuals informed on their spouses, or their
best friends, or the local grocery merchant, and anyone else in order to
keep in the good graces of the secret police. They did it because, who
knows? Perhaps their spouses had secretly done the same thing to them, or
their best friend, or the corner grocer because they, too, were desperate to
be seen as friendly to the secret police. The result was a rotten, dysfunctional
society that collapsed of its own ugliness when the Soviets fell.
Or the old KGB in the Soviet Union where people by the millions were
arrested or disappeared because the country was run by paranoids without
any sense of constitutional or human rights.
Or the "disappeared"
from
Or the uncounted hundreds of thousands of murdered Muslims in
Timor
As uncontrolled and ruthless corporate "globalization" make victims
of
billions of the disenfranchised and impoverished of the world, will there
not be a time when a charismatic leader with larger goals and even greater
ruthlessness than bin
Laden organize planetary rage against the
States
All the horrors have come from exploiting each person's fear of "the other,"
the definition of "the other" up to authoritarian political leaders protecting
their own power.
Doesn't anyone in the Bush Administration read history? Or GeorgeOrwell?
Ben Bagdikian is the author of THE MEDIA MONOPOLY and other books on
the mass media.