I live in Manhattan, in Chelsea, on 27th Street between 6th and 7th, the same block in which the second IED was found. It was a surreal weekend, but it is increasingly becoming depressing as the media moves from providing information to stoking fear, the exact response that makes these events so effective. I’m not afraid of bombs. I’m afraid of cars. And I’m increasingly becoming afraid of American media.
After hearing the bomb go off on 23rd and getting flooded with texts on Saturday night, I decided to send a few notes that I was OK and turn off my phone. My partner is Israeli. We’ve been there for two wars and he’s been there through countless bombs. We both knew that getting riled up was of no help to anyone. So we went to sleep. I woke up on Sunday, opened my blinds, and was surprised to see an obscene number of men in black with identical body types, identical haircuts, and identical cars. It looked like the weirdest casting call I’ve ever seen. And no one else. No cars, no people. As always, Twitter had an explanation so we settled into our PJs and realized it was going to be a strange day.
As other people woke up, one thing became quickly apparent — because folks knew we were in the middle of it, they wanted to reach out to us because they were worried, and scared. We kept shrugging everything off, focusing on getting back to normal and reading the news for updates about how we could maneuver our neighborhood. But ever since a suspect was identified, the coverage has gone into hyperventilation mode. And I just want to scream in frustration.
The worst part about having statistical training is that it’s hard to hear people get anxious about fears without putting them into perspective. ~100 people die every day in car crashes in the United States. That’s 33,804 deaths in a year. Thousands of people are injured every day by cars. Cars terrify me.And anyone who says that you have control over a car accident is full of shit; most car deaths and injuries are not the harmed person’s fault.
The worst part about being a parent is having to cope with the uncontrollable, irrational, everyday fears that creep up, unwarranted, just to plague a moment of happiness. Will he choke on that food? What if he runs away and gets hit by a car? What if he topples over that chair? The best that I can do is breathe in, breathe out, and remind myself to find my center, washing away those fears with each breath.
And the worst part about being a social scientist is understanding where others’ fears come from, understanding the power of those fears, and understanding the cost of those fears on the well-being of a society. And this is where I get angry because this is where control and power lies.
Traditional news media has a lot of say in what it publishes. This is one ofthe major things that distinguishes it from social media, which propagates the fears and anxieties of the public. And yet, time and time again, news media shows itself to be irresponsible, motivated more by the attention and money that it can obtain by stoking people’s fears than by a moral responsibility to help ground an anxious public.
I grew up on the internet. I grew up with the mantra “don’t feed the trolls.” I always saw this as a healthy meditation for navigating the internet, for focusing on the parts of the internet that are empowering and delightful.Increasingly, I keep thinking that this is a meditation that needs to be injected into the news ecosystem. We all know that the whole concept of terrorism is to provoke fear in the public. So why are we not holding news media accountable for opportunistically aiding and abetting terroristic acts?Our cultural obsession with reading news that makes us afraid parallels our cultural obsession with crises.
There’s a reason that hate is growing in this country. And, in moments like this, I’m painfully reminded that we’re all contributing to the culture of hate.When we turn events like what happened this weekend in NY/NJ into spectacle, when we encourage media to write stories about how afraid people are, when we read the stories of how the suspect was an average person until something changed, we give the news media license to stoke up fear. And when they are encouraged to stoke fear, they help turn our election cycle into reality TV and enable candidates to spew hate for public entertainment. We need to stop blaming what’s happening on other people and start taking responsibility.
In short, we all need to stop feeding the trolls.
