The Media Is Helping Bush Scare the Populace

What I'm saying is that there has been fear-mongering, the likes of which we have not seen in a long time in this country. It happened early in the cold war. We got accustomed to it, we learned to live with it, we learned to understand what it was about and get in proportion. We haven't done that yet with terrorism.

And this administration is really capitalizing on it and using it for its political advantage. No question, the academic testing shows, the empirical evidence shows, that when people are frightened, they tend to go to these authority figures, they tend to become more conservative. So it's paid off for them politically to do this. -- John Dean, author of "Conservatives Without Conscience," on MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," July 10, 2006.

On Monday morning, the 11th of July, an historic townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side exploded in a spectacular fireball. It turned out that the cause was natural gas -- the doctor who owned the building was apparently trying to kill himself. But that's not what many New Yorkers thought at first. They were convinced it was terrorism.

One of them was CNN's famed evening talker Larry King, who was staying nearby and was thus one of the first journalists of any kind to arrive at the flaming rubble. That morning he said:

And I heard the loudest sound I've ever heard in my life, an incredible boom, obviously an explosion, I thought it was a bomb. First thing you think of is 9/11 naturally.

Naturally, the first thing that Larry King thought of was 9/11.

After all, he watches CNN.

So do we. And while we couldn't agree more with John Dean, that the climate of overhyped fear-mongering begins at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, there's also more to the equation than just the actions of the Bush administration. Anyone who watches TV news or reads a newspaper -- and who's seen street thugs elevated into global terrorists, or Internet chatter become an "intricate plot" -- knows what we're taking about.

And here's the thing, no matter what we do or say, the current crew in the White House will be whipping up these "terror threats," to paper over mistakes or to justify new military adventures, between now and January 2009. We can't stop them from throwing it out there.

But the media and its role as a super-enabler -- that's a different story. In theory, a news outlet would act as a filter, determining what terrorism stories are important and which ones carry the strong whiff of baloney. Instead, since Sept. 11, 2001, the media has become a giant amplifier, not a filter. When the subject is "the war on terror," no development is too small for wall-to-wall "breaking news" coverage, or a front-page scoop.

In the initial months after 9/11, that made sense. Over time, however, news directors and editors received plenty of evidence that not everything in what was unanimously called "the war on terror" was what it was cracked up to be.

As a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, I learned that lesson early -- and painfully. I wrote a front-page article on Sept. 19, 2001, with the screaming headline: DOCTOR; TERRORIST?; FBI SUSPECTS A YOUNG, WELL-LIKED RADIOLOGIST IN TEXAS. Residents were stunned that a mild-mannered doctor had been plucked from their suburban community -- and in hindsight they should have been. As Human Rights Watch later reported:

A medical doctor doing his residency in San Antonio, Texas, [Albader] al-Hazmi had no previous criminal record or interaction with the FBI. The government based its arrest of al-Hazmi on the fact that he shared the last name of one of the hijackers and had been in phone contact with someone at the Saudi Arabian Embassy with the last name "bin Laden" (which is a common Arabic name). After the government arrested al-Hazmi, agents searched his house for twelve hours, turning his house "upside down," with little regard for his wife and young children. He was detained for two weeks in jails in Texas and New York before being released. He never testified before a grand jury or court.