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Why not cool down the terrorism rhetoric a little?ASK THIS | September 23, 2005Excluding the year 2001, fewer people have died in America from terrorism than have drowned in bathtubs. John Mueller argues that risk and comparative probability should be guidelines in coverage of terrorism. By John Mueller Q. Why aren't failed predictors of doomsday held to account? Q. Why isn't alarmism about terrorism critically evaluated? Q. How should the press handle claims that the absence of evidence is evidence of existence? The media appear to have a congenital incapacity for dealing with issues of risk and comparative probabilities—except, of course, in the sports and financial sections. If a baseball player hits three home runs in a single game, press reports will include not only notice of that achievement, but also information about the rarity of the event as well as statistics about the hitter's batting and slugging averages and about how many home runs he normally hits. Why do front pages never stress, or even note, that in every year except 2001 only a few hundred people in the entire world have died as a result of international terrorism? For all the attention it evokes, terrorism, in reasonable context, actually causes rather little damage and the likelihood that any individual will become a victim in most places is microscopic. Indeed, outside of 2001, fewer people have died in Some news organizations used to resist sensationalizing crime reporting because they didn’t want to create a climate of fear. Well, that’s the climate too often created when terrorism is reported without context. That, plus some ugly politics. Reporters need to be alert to both. The costs of terrorism commonly come much more from hasty, ill-considered, and over-wrought reactions, or overreactions, to it than from anything the terrorists have done. Even in the case of the 9/11, the economic costs of enhanced security runs several times those of the event itself, and the reaction to 9/11 has even claimed more lives than were lost in the terrorist attacks. For example, out of fear, many people traveled by automobile rather than by airplane. According to a study by Michael Sivak and Michael J. Flannagan, the chances are that between 9/11 and the end of 2001, more than 1,000 people who wouldn’t have been in autos at all had there been no 9/11 ended up dying in traffic accidents. Even in the amazingly rare efforts to try to put terrorism in context, the process never goes very far. For example, in 2001 the Washington Post published an article which attempted quantitatively to point out how much safer it was to travel by air than by automobile even under the heightened atmosphere of concern inspired by the September attacks. The author reports that the article generated a couple of media inquiries, but nothing more. Gregg Easterbrook's cover story in the October 7, 2002 Why aren't failed predictors of doomsday held to account? In 2004, the terrorism industry repeatedly insisted that some Big Terrorist Event was likely in connection with a) the Athens Olympics, b) the Democratic Party convention in If terrorism is so easy and terrorists so omni-competent, why isn't there more of it? For example, why don't they snipe at people in shopping centers, collapse tunnels, poison food, cut electrical lines, derail trains, set forest fires, blow up oil pipelines, cause massive traffic jams? Why do fear-mongers get so much press? Members of the terrorism industry routinely and repeatedly argue that terrorists present an "existential" threat to the Ultimately, then, are we as suicidal as the terrorists and is the enemy us? Harvard-based Michael Ignatieff assured us in May 2004 that "we can confidently expect that terrorists will attempt to tamper with our election in November." Undimmed by that failed (and unremembered) prediction, he moved on to warn that "a group of only a few individuals equipped with lethal technologies" threaten "the ascendancy of the modern state" and that "inexorably, terrorism, like war itself, is moving beyond the conventional to the apocalyptic." Why isn't such alarmism critically evaluated? Is it because hysteria and alarmism often sell so well and therefore, in Tocqueville's words, "the author and the public corrupt one another at the same time"? Shouldn't the public know how many airliners would have to crash before flying becomes as dangerous as driving the same distance in an automobile? The answer, as it happens, is that there would have to be one set of 9/11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out. Shouldn't there be at least some discussion of the almost completely unaddressed, but seemingly obvious, observation that, in the words of risk analyst, David Banks, "it seems impossible that the Nonetheless, notes Banks, "enormous resources are being invested to prevent this remote contingency." There is a distinction, he argues, "between realistic reactions to plausible threats and hyperbolic overreaction to improbable contingencies." While a "dirty bomb" might raise radiation 25 per cent over background levels in an area and therefore into a range the Environmental Protection Agency officially considers undesirable, shouldn't there be some discussion about whether that really constitutes "contamination" or indeed much of a danger at all given the somewhat arbitrary and exceedingly cautious levels declared to be acceptable by the EPA? One prominent member of the terrorism industry likes to begin articles with such dramatic lines as "the Why don't the media question the "I think, therefore they are" spookiness from our officials? Thus in congressional testimony in February 2003, FBI head Robert Mueller proclaimed that "the greatest threat is from al-Qaeda cells in the
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