Media hype, perception, and reality around violent crime and terrorism

I wrote this up in response to an inquiry as to my thoughts about the ever-growing amounts of violence and terrorism that make 2015 so much more dangerous than it was for people who grew up in the 1950s or 1960s. I thought it was worth capturing and sharing here.

Hype and perception doesn't match reality in a lot of areas, especially gun crime, violence, and terrorism. Broadcast and cable news have a lot to gain in ratings from making people afraid. And so they do. Here's some of what that means:

1. In terms of murder both America and New York State are now as safe or safer than the 1950s or 1960s. There is no massive growing crime wave. Murder rates peaked in the early 1970s and declined greatly starting in the early 1990s.

Check out the attached graph that I generated from FBI crime statistics.

2. People don't believe that violent crime has decreased greatly because media coverage of murder and violence has increased enormously since the early 1960s. This is especially true for cable "news" since it has so much time to fill. Generating fear generates television ratings.

3. If your "news" sources are telling you that you should be afraid because everything is now more dangerous than it was, they are lying to you. Find other news sources.

4. The Muslims you have met in the past or currently know in your day-to-day life are much more representative of a "Muslim mentality" -- if there is such a thing -- than anything related to the current scapegoating of all Muslims for Middle Eastern based terrorism. There is no more a "Muslim mentality" that predisposes Muslims to terrorism and violence than there was an "Irish mentality" that predisposed the Irish or Irish Americans to terrorism and violence. Don't forget, just a few short decades ago the Irish were the terrorism champs.

5. Along those lines, the notion that "they hate us for our freedom" is a load of dung. They (specifically Middle Eastern terrorists) hate us because we've been bombing the crap out of them for more than 20 years while supporting governments that do not always have the best interests of their people in mind. That's a guaranteed recipe for terrorism. It was true in Cambodia and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. It's true today.

6. There is an "idiots with guns" problem in this country. There probably was 50 years ago, too, but it got a lot less publicity back then. Just because you didn't see it visibly back then doesn't mean it didn't exist. By the same token, the amount of news coverage it gets now doesn't mean that it's a new phenomenon. You might recall about fifteen or so years ago when there was a sudden wave of shark attacks along the coast? In fact, shark attacks were down statistically that year. But cable news ratings were sagging, so the fear machine got cranked up.

7. Statistically speaking, in the US you are more likely to be killed by a toddler with a gun than a terrorist act.

The post in which this week's media obsession leads me to a brief rant

After a sordid week in the news I would like to state for the record that I have as little interest in the sex lives of our heterosexual soldiers as I have in the sex lives of our homosexual soldiers.  And I find none of it to be particularly relevant to the job at hand, fighting and winning wars.

I know that the military has enjoyed a completely chaste reputation throughout all history -- especially sailors on shore leave, renowned for their tendency to attend a brief church service before sipping a cup of tea and returning to their ship -- but I find it hard to fathom that in 2012 A.D. we are tossing generals overboard because of what they're doing with other consenting adults.  It's hard enough to find a good general, so frankly I don't care if he spends his off-hours hanging by his ankles from the ceiling at Mistress Crunchita's House o'Pain as long as he's doing a good job with his chunk of the war.

This seems a good time to remind everybody that by what seems to be our new standard, FDR and Eisenhower were unfit to lead us during World War II.  I'm just as happy we didn't throw them overboard for the second string.

Here's what I think these straying generals deserve: a few months on the couch, some frosty stares from their wives, and a few jokes at their expense.  (Yes, it is fair that "Hey there, hot stuff, want to write my biography?" is now America's favorite new pickup line, finally knocking, "Hey there, hot stuff, let's hike the Appalachian Trail," off its lofty perch.)

I will also admit that I have no idea what to make of the shirtless FBI guy, but as always with these sorts of things, it's mostly a question of whether the photo in question was welcomed by its recipient or unwanted.  Again: consenting adults.

As long as the media and Congress seem to have infinite time and resources to investigate sex scandals in the military, here's a real sex scandal for them:  the Defense Department estimates that 19,000 sexual assaults occurred in the armed forces last year, but only 3,000 service members reported being assaulted, and about 240 cases were prosecuted.

There, there's your real scandal.  Go spend some ink on that.

In the meantime, we're still a nation at war, and it would be nice if everybody spent more time focusing on that instead of indulging in all this prurient hand-wringing over these pecadillos.

The Gray Lady with a Gray Saturday Sunrise

I woke up well before sunrise this morning, which isn't as remarkable an accomplishment as it may sound, since the sun rose at 7:55 am today. Nonetheless, it's a bit unusual for a renowned late-nightnik like me. But after a long, busy week, I was flat-out bushed last night, went up to bed at 10:30, and fell to sleep almost immediately.

I woke up at seven, refreshed and ready to meet the day, only to find that the day had not shown up at all. In fact, it showed every sign of being tardy, since it was dark and wet outside, with only a far-off streetlight to light my way as a shuffled out to the curb to pick up our Saturday New York Times. I fired up the coffepot, sat at the table with a cup of coffee and the paper, and kept an eye out for the approaching dawn as I enjoyed the unusual luxury of a free morning with some time for a nice quiet read of the news.

There were a few genuinely interesting and unusual stories in there, and I'd like to recommend a couple:

From the obituaries: Ignacio Ponseti, Hero to Many With Clubfoot, Dies at 95.

Ponsetti was a surgeon for the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War who made his way to America, specialized in orthopedics, and developed a non-surgical intervention for children with clubfeet that is both less invasive and more successful than surgical correction. The treatment was generally scorned by surgeons for decades, but eventually became the preferred treatment, has helped thousands of children worldwide, and has been especially valuable in underdeveloped countries where it can help children at a much lower cost. He died Tuesday of a stroke while working in his office at the age of 95.

An extraordinary life.

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While we're visiting the obituaries, I should also at least mention the obituary for Soupy Sales: Soupy Sales, Flinger of Pies and Punch Lines, Dies at 83.

I mention it, however, not because Soupy's obituary is as surprisingly gripping as Ponsetti's -- which seems to call for a Hollywood biopic -- but because while I was speaking at last night's Village Appreciation dinner Linda Champagne called out for a moment of silence for Soupy Sales, and I failed to think of the appropriate response in time. To make amends, I present it now: "I believe the situation calls instead for a memorial pie in the face."

Sorry, Soupy. You deserved better quick-wittedness of me. You surely would have delivered it.

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Another very interesting story came in the sports section: N.F.L. Data Reinforces Dementia Links.

The available data shows that former NFL players suffer dementia at a rate four or five times the average, probably as a result of repeated blows to the head. Since I just had a particularly absent-minded week and suffered more than my own share of concussions in my own football career, I've been following the developing news on this point with great interest. This is particularly noteworthy because the NFL is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of football and head injuries. Only about a thousand players at a time play in the NFL, and as a group those players surely suffer the most concentrated series of blows to the brain. But tens of thousands of players play college football every year, and hundreds of thousands of boys play high school football. And concussions, often repeated concussions, happen at all of those levels.

I seem to recall (but then again, is my recollection trustworthy, given my concussion history?) that back in the 1980s the NCAA had an imposed limit of five reported and diagnosed concussions. And I do remember at least a couple of players on our team at Cornell who hit that limit and were forcibly retired while I was there. But that total of five only included reported and diagnosed concussions, and I am sure that many more went undiagnosed than were diagnosed, including my own. A concussion is a traumatic brain injury and the evidence continues that mount that acute traumatic brain injuries have serious long-term effects.

While the current debate seems to center on NFL players, it won't be long until somebody decides to start studying former college and high school players. I'll be very interested to see what they discover.

If football is indeed making large numbers of American males dumber it would at least explain the longstanding success of Jackass on MTV.

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Also worth your read in this morning's paper: The Saturday Profile: From U.S. to Africa, With a Fortune and a Tractor.

Howard G. Buffett, a corn farmer and the son of billionaire investor Warren Buffet, is shifting his philanthropical efforts in Africa from wildlife to people. Warren Buffett's efforts to teach his children philanthropy as they grew up is one of the interesting features of this article. I was also struck at the end of the article by Howard Buffett's description of the plight of some Africans in conflict zones.

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In the more "newsy" news there were a couple of items that I think support by own take on what's happening in Washington these days, so I reckon I'll mention them, too, with a useful quote or two below in italics.

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More support for my theory that the Congressional end-game in health-insurance reform will involve putting the "public option" into the House/Senate reconciliation bill, which will only need 50 votes to pass the Senate: Pelosi Intensifies Pressure for Public Health Plan.

Ms. Pelosi said that in shaping the House bill, she was already thinking about “the endgame.” If the two chambers pass disparate bills, as Democrats expect, negotiators from the House and the Senate would try to reconcile the differences.

When it appeared that the Senate bill might not have any government insurance plan, Ms. Pelosi said, it was essential for the House to pass a strong public option, as a counterweight to the Senate. Now, she said, she will consider an alternative favored by some centrist Democrats, who contend that the government plan should not set prices but negotiate payment rates with doctors and hospitals, as private insurers do.

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If anybody's wondering about the benefits of multilateral negotiations, treating the international community with respect, or even Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, here's an article to cite: NATO Ministers Endorse Wider Afghan Effort.

Defense ministers from NATO on Friday endorsed the ambitious counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan proposed by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, giving new impetus to his recommendation to pour more troops into the eight-year-old war.

...

The United Nations special representative for Afghanistan, Kai Eide, who also flew to the Slovakian capital to meet the ministers, stressed that “additional international troops are required.” He also told the allies, “This cannot be a U.S.-only enterprise.”


It's a mistake to distill a complicated mess like Afghanistan into a single sentence. Nonetheless, I shall do so: international cooperation is more effective than unilateral aggression.

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And finally, I would steer you all to this column from the Business section (Talking Business: Short Memories at Goldman) lest you think that Wall Street learned some humility from the 2008 economic crisis. But frankly, I don't think anybody believes that Wall Street learned any humility from the 2008 economic crisis.

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The sun did eventually rise this morning, or so I suppose, since the darkness outside has now gained a lighter shade of grey. No delicate pinks and salmon clouds with tweeting birdsong, this sunrise: it has instead been an affair better suited to damp possums and sullen mallards. Nonetheless, I shall move on with my Saturday. Enjoy your weekend, everybody, and I hope that you find your next visit with your newspaper as interesting as I found my own this morning.

Media Stardom Looms for the Patio Boat

I thought folks might enjoy this snippet of an e-mail conversation between myself and Bryan Anderson. The conversation started with fantasy football, of course, but eventually led to a statement of a sad but concise truth about our current media culture:


Bryan Anderson wrote:

So, do you think footballguys or CBS (gives worse fantasy football advice?) I'm thinking CBS.


John Magee wrote:

On the fantasy baseball site I subscribe to we have an ongoing thread mocking CBS's fantasy advice.

The real problem is that they obviously have an editorial mandate to add fantasy analysis to every news item, no matter how inconsequential. It's a thousand-monkeys-at-a-thousand-typewriters approach to fantasy analysis.

This means that one day one of them may advise that "Shakespeare is an adequate wordsmith in a good theatre company, but his lack of upside and polish limits him to strictly a role as a Playwright 2 or perhaps a Flex Poet."


Bryan Anderson wrote:

That made me laugh. You are right, but does the editorial mandate extend to saying dumb things?


John Magee wrote:

Saying dumb things is a natural consequence of having a huge space to fill, be it inches of space or hours of airtime, and not having enough smart things to fill that space.

Career success in the modern media seems to have little to do with saying smart and informative things, and is instead predicated upon simply having no sense of shame over the ridiculous things you say to fill three hours of time.

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Since I obviously have no sense of shame over the ridiculous things I post to fill this blog space, I expect to become a huge media superstar any day now.

General Weirdness in Today's News

Perhaps it's just that this is the first Sunday in quite a while that I've had opportunity to lounge about in the morning and read the Sunday papers long enough to make it to the news sections of the papers -- I always try to ease my way into the day by starting with the sports and comics before I get to the silly sections -- but lately the news seems to be weirder than the comics.

Let's take it from the top. In the midst of this summer's silliness around the health-care debate comes this sobering news: Blue Cross hits customers with 22% rate hike.

The good news? Blue Cross tried to make it a 56% rate hike, but couldn't get that past the Michigan attorney general's office. In defense of Blue Cross, their basic problem is that right now the private insurers are shedding sick folks as fast as posssible and shoving them over to Blue Cross, which is required by state law to cover everybody.

And yet a vocal minority still thinks we don't need fundamental health care reform in this country.

Speaking of the health-care tempest. I do owe the right-wing crazies one apology. It seems that we are on the verge of death panels: Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance. From the story:

The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return — though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.

Forget government bureaucrats with death panels. Wall Street investors will now have a vested interest in seeing you dead.

Yes, this was the winner in this morning's "make John feel as if he's arrived in a strange science-fictional future" contest. Given the chronic shortfall in state government budgets, can it be long before we see a state lottery offering based on a similar death-pool premise? A reality TV show can only ensue.

I'm tempted to pass over the most ridiculous partisan tempest in this weekend's teapot of recent news weirdness: the bizarre right-wing movement to boycott an Obama speech to schoolchildren that will undoubtedly urge controversial positions like studying hard and brushing teeth.

But instead I will ask this. Isn't this the same group of pundits and reactionaries who spent the last eight years telling me that disagreeing with George W. Bush on any point of policy made me a deeply unpatriotic traitor to America because he was the President and we all had to support the President in a time of war?

Bartender, a round of mirrors for the house. Hypocrisy, thy name is the increasingly deranged right-wing punditocracy. Seriously, there used to be serious, thoughtful people in the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Where did they go? And who left the nutcases in charge?

Finally, our survey of the Sunday paper returns to the topic of my sports-and-comics morning habit. After first deciding that they didn't want to bother with delivering my morning paper more than three times a week, the Detroit Free Press has now decided to cut another six comics (including my good buddy, Spider-Man!) from the tattered online remnants of my morning comic page yet again. You told us what features you wanted, and we listened.

I'm pretty sure that I didn't tell them to lop another half-dozen comics out of their already shrunken lineup. Stranger yet, they are now officially recommending that I go to other online sources to feed my morning habit. From the article: "If we discontinued your favorite comic, there are many free Web sites that run comic strips. "

So, my morning paper is no longer delivered in the mornings and is no longer paper. And now it recommends that I just go straight to better online sources for what they used to provide. Then they wonder why their circulation is plummeting.

Um, okay. GoComics.com, you've got yourself another "My Comics Page" registrant.

Speaking of GoComics.com, I started there a few months agp after Gil Thorpe got cut from the lineup. There are a few comics aggregators out there. They just happened to be the one that carried Gil Thorpe. But my list over on GoComics is now starting to look like a better bet than the Free Press's comics page. Here's what I'm reading over there:

Bloom County
Calvin and Hobbes
Pickles
The Quigmans
Gil Thorp
The Fusco Brothers
Tank McNamara
Candorville
Garfield Minus Garfield
Liberty Meadows
C'est la Vie
The Norm
Too Much Coffee Man
The Argyle Sweater

Beward, Free Press. That list is starting to crowd you out for reading goodness.