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By BARRY GLASSNER
BASIC BOOKS
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Copyright © 1999 Barry Glassner. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-465-01489-5
Chapter 1
Start with silly scares, the kind that would be laughable were they
not advanced with utter seriousness by influential organizations,
politicians, and news media. Promoted by the same means as other
fears—and often to the same ends—they afford a comfortable
entry point into the fear mongers' bag of tricks. It becomes easier
to recognize how we are bamboozled about serious concerns, having
seen the same techniques at work in the promotion of frivolous dangers.
Scenarios Substitute for Facts
"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of
it," said the ultimate master of terror, Alfred Hitchcock.
Fear mongers regularly put his wisdom to use by depicting would-be
perils as imminent disasters. "They're all around you, everywhere
you drive, waiting to explode," exclaimed an announcer at the
beginning of ABC's newsmagazine "20/20" in 1996, devoted
to what he called "a growing American danger—road rage."
Hugh Downs, the program's coanchor, continued the ruse. Eliciting
viewers' everyday experiences, he recast them as portentous. "How
many times have you been bullied on the road, honked at or tailed,
cursed at by another driver? Maybe you've done this yourself. Well,
tonight, you will see again where this kind of aggression can lead,"
said Downs, insinuating that viewers had already anticipated what
Tom Jarriel, the reporter whose story he then introduced, was about
to detail.
A seemingly innocuous beep of the car horn can lead, Jarriel said,
to "anger so explosive it pushes people over the edge: fist
fights, even shootings, between perfect strangers." Out in
the real world, people honk their horns all the time without getting
socked or shot, but in the fluid logic of Jarriel's narrative stark
imagery and atypical anecdotes eclipsed reality. "It happens
without warning to ordinary people," Jarriel said, and to prove
the point, he interviewed a man who was shot in the face after cutting
someone off on a highway.
Oprah Winfrey, in a program on road rage in 1997, used the same
approach. First she transmuted familiar occurrences into a huge
new danger. "We've all been there. It starts out with the tap
of the horn, an angry gesture, a dirty look ..., " she declared.
Then she proceeded to recount a few actual incidents in which the
outcome was a shooting or fistfight. That expressions of annoyance
almost never intensify to a shooting or fight was beside the point.
"This is a show that affects so many people," she said,
and then cleverly produced an impressive but ultimately meaningless
number. "This woman's biggest offense was pulling out of her
driveway ... countless millions of you have done that," she
said in the course of introducing someone who had been attacked
by another driver.
Journalists in the print media used a slightly different tactic.
Call it the foreshadowing anecdote. After relaying the gory details
of a particular instance of highway violence, they asserted that
the given example "raises the overarching question of road
anarchy" (Time) or represents "just the latest case of
`road rage' to gain national attention" (USA Today). A page-one
story in the Los Angeles Times in 1998 declared that "road
rage has become an exploding phenomenon across the country"
and depicted the Pacific Northwest as a region particularly "plagued
by a rise in road rage." Only after wading through twenty-two
paragraphs of alarming first-person accounts and warnings from authorities
did the reader learn that a grand total of five drivers and passengers
had died in road rage incidents in the region over the previous
five years.
An average of one death a year constitutes a plague? The only
other statistical evidence the reporter managed to muster was from
a study released in 1997 by the American Automobile Association.
Cited habitually in stories about road rage, the AAA study afforded
reporters an opportunity to declare that incidents of road rage
had "been rising 7% a year" (Los Angeles Times), or as
People magazine put it, "more than 50 percent since 1990."
I found only one article that put the AAA's findings in proper perspective:
a piece in U.S. News & World Report noted that, of approximately
250,000 people killed on roadways between 1990 and 1997, the AAA
attributed 218 deaths, or less than one in a thousand, directly
to angry drivers. And of the 20 million motorists injured during
that period the AAA attributed less than 1 percent of those injuries
to aggressive driving.
Big percentages do not necessarily have big numbers behind them.
The dramatic "up more than 50%" statistic in the AAA study
derived from the difference between two relatively modest figures:
the number of traffic incidents that involved major violence in
1990 (1,129) compared to 1996 (1,800). An increase of 671 incidents
in fifty states over seven years is hardly "a growing epidemic"
(USA Today's description of road rage). Nor does it warrant the
thousands of stories about road rage that appeared in print and
on radio and television—coverage that helped produce the 671
figure in the first place. The AAA derived their estimates from
newspaper, police, and insurance reports, all of which are influenced
by hype. The more talk there is about road rage, the more likely
are newspaper reporters, police officers, and insurance agents to
classify as examples of it incidents that they would have ignored
altogether or catalogued differently in the past.
Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as the Pygmalion effect,
in deference to George Bernard Shaw. In Shaw's Pygmalion, Liza comes
to appreciate that, as she puts it to Colonel Pickering, "the
difference between a flower girl and a lady is not how she behaves,
but how she's treated." Posits Liza, during an exchange with
the Colonel, "I shall always be a flower girl to Professor
Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, but I know
I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and
always will."
In the late 1990s police and reporters treated all variety of
highway mishaps as road rage. One evening in 1998 the lead image
on local news shows in Los Angeles was a car that had been sliced
in half by a truck on a freeway. The fatal accident had been caused
by the driver going up an exit ramp in the wrong direction, but
reporters and highway patrol officers labeled it "another case
of road rage." Their justification? Witnesses reported the
driver had been tailgating a van just moments earlier. At the time
she drove up the exit ramp and into oncoming traffic she was neither
a perpetrator nor victim of road rage, but because she may have
acted aggressively in the recent past the incident could be counted
as road rage.
A few days after that incident, when an off-duty prison guard
was shot dead on a freeway ramp, police and reporters described
the event as "a random act of violence, like other examples
of so-called road rage violence plaguing the nation's motorists"
(Los Angeles Times). This time too the characterization was unfounded.
The victim's husband, who had been driving the car, let police know
immediately after the event that it was neither random nor an instance
of road rage. According to his account, their assailants had followed
them from a shopping mall, forced them to pull off the road, and
stolen money. It was when his wife pulled out her state corrections
officer badge, the husband reported, that they shot her. Police
later suspected the husband himself in the murder, but never was
road rage a likely hypothesis.
Bad People Substitute for Bad Policies
Stories about road rage left little doubt as to what, or rather
who, was Responsible—vicious strangers. Over the past decade
or so police and reporters had warned of disparate new categories
of creeps out to get us—home invasion robbers, carjackers,
child nabbers, deranged postal workers. Now they were issuing an
even broader warning. Everywhere we go are "strangers in their
cars, ready to snap, driven to violence by the wrong move,"
the announcer on "20/20" cautioned. Indeed, Tom Jarriel
went on to suggest, "the most disturbing aspect of the growing
trend toward roadway violence is that we can't choose who we drive
with on the highways."
In just about every contemporary American scare, rather than confront
disturbing shortcomings in society the public discussion centers
on disturbed individuals. Demented drivers rather than insane public
policies occupied center stage in the coverage of road rage. Where
reference was made at all to serious problems that drivers face,
these were promptly shoved behind a curtain of talk about violent
motorists. "Roads are more crowded all the time, which means
more delays and more frustration," National Public Radio's
Alex Chadwick reported, but rather than pursue the point with insights
from, say, experts on mass transit, he quotes someone from the AAA
who contends that driving "frees the beast" in people.
In USA Today reporter Patrick O'Driscoll notes that 70 percent
of urban freeways are clogged at rush hour (up 15 percent over the
past fifteen years) and that traffic exceeds road capacity in most
U.S. cities. Did he then go on to consider possibilities for relieving
the congestion? On the contrary, his next sentence began, "Faced
with tempers boiling over like radiators in rush-hour gridlock,
police agencies are seeking ways to brand aggressive driving as
socially unacceptable ..."
Rather than traffic experts journalists spotlighted police officials,
who understandably took the opportunity to urge the hiring of more
officers. Or reporters turned to so-called experts such as Arnold
Nerenberg, a psychologist who dubs himself "America's road-rage
therapist" and runs a web site (www.roadrage.com) where he
brags that he has been featured in dozens of TV programs and magazines.
Not a researcher, Nerenberg nonetheless offers authoritative-sounding
sound bites that support reporters' portrayal of highway violence
as personal pathology. "There's a deep psychological urge,"
he tells Newsweek, "to release aggression against an anonymous
other." Road rage is "a mental disorder that is contagious,"
USA Today quotes him. In an interview with the New York Times, Nerenberg
called on the American Psychiatric Association to add road rage
to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
At some point in their lives, he said, more than half of the U.S.
population suffers from the disorder, which Nerenberg described
on ABC's "World News Tonight" as "an adjustment reaction
disorder."
Such psychoblather only obscures what even Nerenberg himself knows
to be the primary instrument of murder on the nation's roadways.
Asked directly by People magazine whether there is truly any difference
between now and twenty years ago, Nerenberg allows, "One thing
that makes the problem worse is that we have more Americans arming
themselves. Millions of us illegally carry loaded weapons. The more
guns in cars, the greater the chance they'll be used."
Most of the coverage of road rage, however, shamelessly disregarded
the import of firearms, even though the AAA study found that offenders
in road rage incidents often use guns to kill or injure their victims.
On Oprah Winfrey's show devoted to road rage the murder of one driver
by another was recounted tearfully and in detail by the victim's
fiancé as well as by the man who killed him. But at no point
in the program did anyone mention that the victim would almost certainly
have survived had there not been a gun involved. In fact, when Winfrey
brought on the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,
his only mention of weapons was metaphoric. He referred to cars
as "three-thousand-pound weapons."
Experts who do try to direct attention to the matter of guns seldom
succeed. In a road rage story on CNN occasioned by a fatal shooting,
the local district attorney counseled against "too many guns
in cars" and made a comparison: "When you go to Canada,
they ask you, `Do you have any guns in your car,' because you have
to check them at their border. If you're coming from Canada to this
country, they ask you if you have any fruit." Rather than pursue
the matter CNN correspondent Dennis O'Hayer promptly shifted the
focus. "Even if you don't have a gun, your own driving tactics
could be setting you up for a dangerous face-off," he said.
Someone identified as a traffic columnist with the Atlanta Constitution
then proceeded to urge viewers against death-defying acts such as
"getting in the left lane and holding up traffic."
One of my initial hypotheses about why pseudodangers receive so
much attention was that they provide opportunities to talk about,
and perhaps rectify, problems too big to face in their totality.
Stupefied by the quantity of guns on the streets, we might focus
on doing something about the much smaller number in cars. My hypothesis
could not have been farther from the truth. Pseudodangers represent
further opportunities to avoid problems we do not want to confront,
such as overcrowded roads and the superabundance of guns, as well
as those we have grown tired of confronting. An example of the latter
is drunk driving, a behavior that causes about eighty-five times
as many deaths as road rage (about 17,000 versus 200). Close to
half of all fatal traffic crashes involve alcohol, and three in
five Americans will be involved in an alcohol-related crash at some
point in their lives. Moved by those statistics and by the advocacy
group, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, journalists had covered the
issue of drunk driving in a sound and sustained way throughout the
1980s and early 1990s. Thanks in part to that coverage, the number
of alcohol-related highway deaths plunged by 31 percent between
1982 and 1995. Fatality rates fall twice as rapidly, studies find,
in years of high media attention compared to those of relatively
little attention. Intensive coverage permits passage of powerful
laws, creation of sobriety checkpoints, and new notions such as
the "designated driver," all of which save lives.
Yet by the mid-1990s groups like MADD were finding it difficult
to be heard in the media over the noise about road rage and other
trendy issues. In the years that followed the fatality rate stopped
declining. Polls taken on the eastern seaboard during the late 1990s
found people more concerned about road rage than drunk driving.
Who could blame them when they read in their local paper, "It's
not drunken or elderly or inexperienced drivers who are wreaking
havoc. Instead, scores of people are severely injured or killed
every day by stressed-out drivers who have abandoned civil roadway
behavior" (Philadelphia Daily News).
The Power of Calling Something "P.C."
If the first of those two sentences by Don Russell of the Daily
News inverted the truth about dangerous drivers, the second misled
more broadly still. Russell is one of several writers on road rage
who alluded to the issue of civility. Reporters variously raised
the matter themselves or quoted police officers declaring that "people
have forgotten how to be civil to each other" (USA Today).
In so doing they exemplified another unfortunate hallmark of fear
mongering: the tendency to trivialize legitimate concerns even while
aggrandizing questionable ones.
Worries about Americans acting uncivilly toward one another date
back at least to frontier days, and in our present era bad behavior
behind the wheel is far from the most significant or pressing form
of incivility. At a time when a disabled black man in Texas was
beaten by racists then chained to a truck and dragged down a road
to his death and a gay college student in Wyoming was tied to a
fence, pistol-whipped, and left to die, we would do well to focus
our sights on bigtime incivilities such as racism and homophobia.
Instead we are diverted by willy-nilly references in stories about
road rage, or worse, by fear mongers who intentionally set out to
confuse matters.
One of the most effective scare campaigns of the late twentieth
Century—political correctness on college campuses—was
undertaken for the express purpose of changing the terms of debate
about civility. The people who generated the scare did not phrase
it in those terms, mind you; they couched their alarmism in First
Amendment language. In the late 1980s conservative commentators
began warning of what they described as "the greatest threat
to the First Amendment in our history" (Rush Limbaugh), "the
equivalent of the Nazi brownshirt thought-control movement"
(Walter Williams), and "an ideological virus as deadly as AIDS"
(David Horowitz).
President George Bush, in a commencement address at the University
of Michigan in 1991, put the matter somewhat more soberly when he
decried those who would "declare certain topics off-limits,
certain expressions off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits."
Some professors and students were indeed urging that certain categories
of statements and gestures be eradicated from university life. Specifically,
they sought to do away with racist, sexist, and homophobic behavior.
If anything qualifies as uncivil in a diverse society, they argued,
it is precisely these sorts of acts.
People who got chastised as PC were trying to create a more respectful
and inclusive environment on campuses for groups that largely had
been excluded—a goal that conservatives could not attack head-on
lest they lose the already limited support they had in minority
communities. Besides, far from being First Amendment absolutists
themselves, many conservatives eagerly support restraints on a range
of behaviors, from flag burning to the display of homoerotic art.
So rather than engage in honest debate with campus liberals and
progressives, conservatives labeled them "politically correct."
Much the way their forebears had used the epithet "Communist"
a few decades earlier, conservatives of the 1990s accused their
enemies of being PC. Primarily by means of anecdotes retold time
and again in political speeches, in the news media, and in popular
books such as Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education and Roger Kimball's
Tenured Radical, they created an impression of armies of PC militants
occupying the nation's colleges and universities.
Conservatives told, for instance, of a mob of 200 at the State
University of New York at Binghamton who, armed with sticks and
canes, invaded a lecture hall and threatened an elderly man who
was giving a talk. According to pieces in the Wall Street Journal
(one of them titled "The Return of the Storm Troopers"),
the university's president did nothing about the hooligans because
college presidents "live in terror of being politically incorrect."
Then there was the story of a class at Harvard on feminist theory
taught by Alice Jardine, a professor of French. According to Dinesh
D'Souza, who sat in on the class one day, a student delivered "ribald
one-liners about a man who lost his penis ... and brought loud and
unembarrassed laughter from the professor and other students."
Almost invariably, after such stories came out witnesses to the
actual events debunked them. Participants at the Binghamton event,
as well as a campus police investigator and one of the speakers,
reported there had been no violence. The entire incident consisted,
they said, of a single student who engaged in disruptive behavior
for about four minutes, for which the university placed him on probation.
About the class at Harvard, Alice Jardine subsequently explained
that the discussion of the missing penis was actually about the
myth of Osiris, a deity whose body parts were scattered throughout
Egypt. Osiris's wife, Isis, buried each part as she found them.
The phallus was never recovered; images of it, which are used in
festivals, can be bought at tourist shops in Egypt.
Yet information correcting the faulty reports came out mostly
in academic books and journals, not in the mass media. The general
public was left with a highly inaccurate image of white men being
mercilessly jeered and muzzled at America's public and private universities.
Granted, activists from the political left sometimes behaved with
impudence or intolerance. Speakers were shouted down on occasion
if they were perceived as racist, sexist, or antigay. The sum of
those occurrences did not support, however, a claim that "the
delegitimization, even demonization, of the white male has reached
extreme lengths," as Paul Craig Roberts of the Cato Institute,
a conservative think tank, put it in an op-ed in the San Francisco
Examiner in 1996. Guilefully trading on the memory of the Holocaust,
Roberts went on to assert that affronts to white males on college
campuses are "comparable to ... the denunciation of Jewry by
anti-Semites."
Exaggerated assertions of that kind received more public notice
than did the true patterns of discrimination and exclusion on U.S.
campuses. Perhaps editors despaired of being called PC themselves
if they ran the story, but there was an important story to be told.
The data were rather shocking: on the eve of the twenty-first century
women, blacks, and Hispanics, far from displacing white males in
the professorate, mostly hold jobs at lower ranks and with lower
pay. At the height of the PC scare, in the early and mid-1990s,
women made up less than one-third of full-time faculty at American
colleges and universities, a figure just slightly higher than in
1920, when women won the right to vote. Only about one in twenty
professors was Hispanic or African American.
Research on students documented additional disturbing trends.
Women and students of color often received less attention and encouragement
in classrooms than did their white male counterparts, and outside
of class they were the targets of tens of thousands of verbal and
physical attacks each year. Gay and lesbian students likewise faced
assaults, bigotry, and death threats. Even at famously liberal colleges
gays and lesbians experienced prejudice. In a survey at Yale almost
all gay and lesbian students said they had overheard antigay remarks,
and one in four had been threatened. At Oberlin College nearly half
of gay, lesbian, and bisexual students said they have to censor
themselves when discussing gay issues.
For faculty members in the meantime, to be openly gay or lesbian
at many colleges was to risk being denied tenure, promotion, and
opportunities to move into administrative positions, research showed.
Smoke Trumps Fire
The PC scare demonstrates how an orchestrated harangue can drown
out a chorus of genuine concern. Faculty and students would raise
questions about inequities at their schools only to find themselves
made into causes célèbres of anti-PC fear mongering.
Imagine how surprised people must have been at Chico State University
in 1996 and 1997, when just about every prominent conservative commentator
took out after them. "Totalitarianism didn't disappear with
the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's alive and well on many American
college campuses today," wrote Linda Chavez in a column in
USA Today in reaction to an event at the previously unnoticed California
school. Her comment was typical of the commentary by conservative
essayists. Reading them, you would have thought that Chico State
was under some sort of military occupation. The conservatives in
fact were reacting to a one-word alteration in a help-wanted ad.
"We are seeking a dynamic classroom teacher ...," the
draft of an advertisement for a philosophy teacher had read. When
a member of the university committee that reviews job ads questioned
whether dynamic was the best word to describe the kind of teacher
the program was actually seeking, the word was replaced by excellent.
Some highly effective teachers do not have dynamic personal styles,
the English professor had observed, and vice versa, some high-spirited
teachers do not actually have much worthwhile knowledge. In addition,
she suggested, the term dynamic may unintentionally discriminate
against candidates from certain Asian and Hispanic backgrounds in
which personal styles tend to be more unassuming.
Just about everyone involved at Chico State had concurred with
the editorial revision, yet in the months that followed the editing
of the ad conservatives took every opportunity to assail the modification
as PC degeneracy. "This episode typifies the sorry state of
higher education today: Academes are so afraid of offending people
that they're afraid to ask for strong teachers," Debra Saunders,
a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, blasted without bothering
to explain her assumption that excellent teachers are not strong.
In San Francisco's other paper, the Examiner, Paul Roberts of the
Cato Institute suggested that the secret plan at Chico was to exclude
white men from faculty positions. "All qualifications are restrictive,
which explains their de-emphasis and the plight of overrepresented
white males in our brave new world of equal outcomes," Roberts
wrote.
By this point in the PC scare sense and sensibility had become
optional. Once a pseudodanger becomes so familiar it ends up in
the dictionary (not to say the title of a popular TV show hosted
by comedian Bill Maher), argument and evidence are dispensable.
Indeed, in the late 1990s some of the best-known conservative columnists,
no longer feeling obliged to diagnose particular incidents of political
correctness in any depth, simply threw out bunches of ostensible
examples. George Will, in a piece disparaging what he called "sensitivity-soaked
Chico," went on to complain about an entry in a mail-order
catalogue for kindling wood "felled by lightning or other natural
causes." Even mail-order companies have to act PC, Will bemoaned,
"lest the friends of trees have their feelings hurt."
John Leo, of U.S. News & World Report, likewise included Chico
in a laundry list of what he dubbed "p.c. crimes and misdemeanors."
His sardonic subhead—"Wanted: Lethargic New Teacher"—was
rather mild compared to some others in the same column. Beneath
the heading "Tired of Education? Try Gender Courses" Leo
warned that "p.c. folk" have been "working to replace
useful college courses with dubious ones." He cited as examples
"The Politics of Dance Performance" offered at Swarthmore
and "Christianity, Violence and Victimization" at Brown.
Both Leo and Will banked on the improbability that anyone would
look into their examples. The courses Leo cited did not replace
other courses; they were added as electives. Nor did the courses
represent dubious additions to the curriculum. A well-educated student
of a particular art form ought to know something about its political
dimensions, and the serious study of a religion necessarily includes
attention to dishonorable as well as glorious moments in its history.
As for the mail-order catalogue—the company was merely trying
to make an unexceptional product sound special, a common practice
in direct marketing.
Success Doesn't Come Cheap
If so many of their examples were untenable, how did conservatives
engender such a successful scare? How did it come about that politically
correct, a phrase hardly used in the media prior to Bush's speech
in 1991, appeared in the nation's major newspapers and magazines
more than 5,000 times a year in the mid-1900s? In 1997, the last
year for which data were available, it appeared 7,200 times.
The short but not incorrect answer is money. Behind the scenes
millions of dollars were spent to generate that level of noise.
Right-wing foundations such as Coors, Olin, and Bradley, along with
corporate and individual contributors, provided funding for a national
network of organizations: such think tanks as the Cato Institute
and American Enterprise Institute; conservative college newspapers,
including the Dartmouth Review, where Dinesh D'Souza got his start;
magazines such as William F. Buckley's National Review and David
Horowitz's Heterodoxy; and faculty groups, most notably the National
Association of Scholars. With an annual budget in the vicinity of
$1 million, the NAS had the wherewithal to provide politicians and
the press with an unending supply of sound bites, anecdotes, and
op-eds.
In an article in Skeptic magazine on what he termed "the
great p.c. conspiracy hoax" Brian Siano of the University of
Pennsylvania compared the strategies of the NAS to a national magazine
that asks its readers to send in accounts of psychic experiences
or sightings of flying saucers. Such a request would inevitably
produce loads of testimonials. "One might be able to debunk
one or two accounts, but the rest of this database would remain
`unchallenged,' to be trotted out by the faithful as often as possible,"
Siano suggests. "Now imagine," he adds, "if you could
spend a half dozen years and millions of dollars on such a project."
Siano's comparison is apt. The NAS continually collected reports
of political correctness gone amiss, packaged the best, and peddled
them to the media. Anyone who dared challenge the reports quickly
discovered the power of NAS's home-court advantage. In 1996 after
USA Today quoted an NAS official's assertion that Georgetown University,
as part of a general "dumbing down" of its curriculum,
had decided to drop Shakespeare as a requirement for English majors,
the dean at Georgetown responded that the school was doing nothing
of the sort. Georgetown's curriculum for English majors includes
more, not fewer, Shakespeare classes than in the past, he pointed
out. Moreover, regardless of their major, all Georgetown students
must complete twelve courses of general-education requirements,
including two literature courses. This factual information from
the dean did not appear, though, in the news story, but only later,
in a letter-to-the-editor column.
When Robert Brustein, artistic director of the American Repertory
Theater, picked up on NAS rhetoric and proclaimed that "most
English departments are now held so completely hostage to fashionable
political and theoretical agendas that it is unlikely Shakespeare
can qualify as an appropriate author," journalists found the
quote too juicy to resist. The image appeared widely in the press
of PC thugs in ivory towers forcibly evicting the Bard. But when
John Wilson, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, suspicious
of the claim, consulted data from the Modern Language Association,
he discovered that fully 97 percent of English departments at four-year
colleges offered at least one course on Shakespeare. Almost two-thirds,
he learned, required English majors to take a Shakespeare course.
In the MLA's on-line bibliography, Shakespeare received nearly 20,000
entries—more than three times the next runner-up (James Joyce),
and thirty-six times as many as Toni Morrison, reported Wilson.
Wilson's correction to the NAS and Brustein et al. appeared, however,
in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the equivalent of a trade
magazine.
To the extent that great literary works were being withheld from
America's youth, PC forces were seldom to blame. The real censors,
though they received scant attention, were people like the school
superintendent in Maryland who banned Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon
in 1997 after some parents called the classic of African-American
literature "trash" and "anti-white." And they
were conservatives in the U.S. Congress and state legislatures.
"The real danger to Shakespeare," Katha Pollitt accurately
noted in The Nation, "is not that he will cease to be compulsory
at elite colleges like Georgetown but that he will cease to be made
available and accessible to a broad range of students." Throughout
the 1980s and 1990s conservatives slashed budgets at the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education,
and other public programs. Among the unfortunate results of those
reductions in funding, such places as the Shakespeare Theater in
Washington, Shakespeare and Company in Massachusetts, and the Folger
Shakespeare Library had to curtail programs that train teachers
and reach wide audiences.
Conservative politicians had whipped up popular support for such
cuts in the first place by—you guessed it—portraying the
public agencies as hotbeds of political correctness.
One Scare Supports Another
Once a scare catches on, not only do its advocates have the offensive
advantage, as the Shakespeare follies illustrate, but they can also
use the scare as a defensive weapon in other disputes. This chapter
concludes with an important case in point, in which the PC label
was actually used to countermand a scientific fact.
Anyone who commuted by bus or train in the Washington, D.C., area
during the mid-1990s or sought an abortion in the South in that
period will probably remember this fear campaign. More than one
thousand advertisements appeared in buses and subway stations around
Washington and Baltimore alluding to a scary statistic: "Women
who choose abortion suffer more and deadlier breast cancer."
In Louisiana and Mississippi legislators passed laws that require
doctors to inform women twenty-four hours before an abortion that
the procedure can increase their risk of breast cancer.
Some antiabortion activists had been pushing the point since the
early 1980s, when it first became apparent that as the number of
abortions rose in the years after 1973, when the procedure became
legal, rates of breast cancer also increased. Not until 1994, however,
did the news media pay much attention to prolifers' fear mongering.
That year, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute published
an article in which researchers estimated that having an abortion
might raise a woman's risk of breast cancer by 50 percent.
To their credit, journalists were circumspect about the study.
In contrast to coverage of some other pseudodangers (road rage among
them), the news media generally did an excellent job of putting
in perspective the 50 percent figure. Reporters noted that other
studies had found no increased risk, and that even if future research
confirmed the figure, the import would be minimal for most women
considering abortion. A 50 percent increased risk may sound large,
but in epidemiologic terms it is not. It does not mean that if all
women had abortions, half again as many would develop breast cancer;
rather, it means that a woman's lifetime risk goes up by 50 percent.
If she had a 10 percent probability of developing breast cancer,
abortion would raise it to 15 percent. Heavy smoking, by comparison,
increases the risk of developing lung cancer by 3,000 percent. Some
studies suggest that living in a city or drinking one glass of alcohol
a day raises the risk of breast cancer by greater than 50 percent.
Reporters generally did a laudable job the following year as well,
when anti-abortion groups heralded two more studies. One estimated
a 30 percent increased risk of breast cancer for women who have
abortions; the other put the figure at 23 percent. Journalists explained
that both studies suffered, as had earlier research, from a potential
reporting bias that could substantially skew their results. They
quoted the lead researcher on one of the studies, the epidemiologist
Polly Newcomb of the Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle,
who noted that women battling breast cancer might be more likely
than others to inform researchers that they had had abortions. Cancer
patients are more accustomed to giving full and accurate medical
histories, Newcomb suggested, and they are searching themselves
for an explanation for their illness.
Strikingly, the lead researcher on the other study in 1995, an
endocrinologist at Baruch College named Joel Brind, offered no such
caveats. On the contrary, he told CNN, "The evidence is quite
clear, in fact, it should have been out long ago." Brind advocated
that every woman considering abortion be informed of the potential
increased risk of breast cancer. When reporters checked into Brind's
background, however, they learned that he is an antiabortion activist
who contributes frequently to newsletters and web sites published
by prolife groups. Richard Knox of the Boston Globe reported that
Brind told him he had conducted the study specifically to provide
legislators with justification for requiring doctors to warn women
about a cancer risk.
With Brind as their medical mouthpiece, antiabortion groups intensified
their scare drive throughout 1995 and 1996. Some persisted even
after a massive study published in 1997 in the New England Journal
of Medicine showed that the earlier research had been flawed in
precisely the ways Polly Newcomb and other experts suspected. Conducted
by epidemiologists from the University of Copenhagen, the later
study relied not on self-reports but on data produced through the
mandatory registration in Denmark of births, cancer cases, and abortions.
The scientists were able to compare 281,000 women who had had abortions
with 1.2 million others who had not. They determined that neither
group was more likely to develop breast cancer.
Joel Brind's rejoinder when a reporter from the Washington Post
asked him to comment on the study? "This is an apparently large
and powerful study with the politically correct result that is not
scientifically correct," Brind said. At once reinforcing the
PC scare and using it to defend another misbegotten terror, Brind
vowed to continue his campaign of fear.
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