Panic Attacks: Media Manipulation and Mass Delusion by Robert E. Bartholomew

by Robert E. Bartholomew

Examining the ability of the media to whip up a panic and our tendency to fall victim to mass delusion and hysteria, this title discusses America's "kissing bug" scare of 1899; Seattle's atomic fallout fiasco of 1954; the phantom slasher of Taipei in 1956; Belgium's recent Coca-Cola poisoning scare and the "mad gasser" of Mattoon, and more.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

Hardcover

First published May 1, 2005

Reviews

[Andrew Garvey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up a few years ago, having seen it on a couple of lists of 'must read' books for sceptics. Very happy I finally got around to it. Bartholomew and co-author Evans' book on how the media have manipulated populations and fed mass delusions is fascinating. The book's main section is devoted to eight chapters about different episodes of mass hysteria, collective madness and, usually the media's role in fostering them. Throughout, these stories are insightful, entertaining and well-researched. Many of them, I already knew something about but Bartholomew and Evans' eye for detail meant I learned something new from all of them.

Beginning with the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 (a deliberate and audacious media manipulation to shift copies which the authors note as the real beginning of tabloid journalism) they move onto 1910's Halley's comet scare. Again, deliberately sensational newspaper coverage (including the platforming the views of cranks and shameless self-promoters) created and fed popular fears that hadn't appeared with previous visits of the comet (and from what I recall, were absent for the next one in 1986) that poison gas from the comet's tail would wipe out the human race.

Chapters three and four detail the infamous War of the Worlds panic sparked by Orson Welles' radio broadcast, offering a slightly more sober, highly detailed reassessment of what happened, along with examples of similar panics, both in the US and elsewhere for decades afterwards. Most fascinatingly, the book also details a BBC Radio spoof news report from 1926 about an angry mob of unemployed men rampaging through London, toppling Big Ben, destroying the National Gallery and lynching the government's unfortunate Traffic Minister, one Mr Wotherspoon. While there was no mass panic, there was definite concern from people taken in by the usually staid BBC, especially given the UK's background of labour unrest that, just four months later, turned into the General Strike.

More details here: http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/t...

Chapter five covers a range of hoaxes and panics, including a 1970s New York zoo scare, a giant earthworm Texan motorists and the BBC's shockingly effective Halloween 1992 Ghostwatch hoax. Chapter six considers a pair of major European health scares and the media's role in them - supposedly posioned Coke in mainland Europe and Britian's Mad Cow Disease scare. These are both a little different to each other, and to the rest of the book. I well remember the Mad Cow Disease scare and while it was definitely overblown, people's worries and fears were a far more rational response than so much else that Bartholomew and Evans consider.

Chapter seven delves into the history of witch-hunting and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. This is another excellent overview of the subject, focused especially on the anti-scientific nonsense of False Memory Syndrome. Chapter eight covers a variety of terrorism scares spread over a few hundred years, including the wonderfully named 'Mad Gasser of Mattoon.'

Chapter nine deals with the inherently racist attitudes towards 'primitive' people that fed into a pair of famous hoaxes in the 1960s and '70s - the South Pacific Islanders who worshipped Lyndon Johnson and the 'lost' Tasaday tribe. Using evidence from anthropologists, Bartholomew and Evans savage the sort of lazy, racist reporting of major media outlets to convincingly explain the performative nature of tribal politics and explain just how many red flags journalists waved away in the ludicrous Tasaday story.

Finally, the book closes with some conclusions and a few thoughts on the future of media manipulation. While some of this is useful - "in the future we may have media-generated scares that are not simply limited to a single country or region" - this is by far the weakest chapter of an otherwise tremendous study. For one thing, that line was published in 2004, AFTER the disgraced not-a-doctor Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent and unethical 'study' on autism and the MMR jab had made headlines around the world and dented vaccine take-up. There's also no real consideration of the internet's role in the mass manipulation. But this one, disappointing chapter does nothing to stop me strongly recommending this important, thorough and entertaining book.

[Richard Bartholomew · Rating 3 out of 5]

[NB – I am not related to the co-author.] The title of this book is something of a sensationalising misnomer for a disparate collection of incidents in which the media either gave rise to or amplified popular misunderstandings. The jacket cover's subheading promises a "History of Mass Delusion", while the title page subheading goes for a slightly less grandiose "Media Manipulation and Mass Delusion". But is it really a "delusion" to mistake an audio drama or a pseudo-documentary for live news? Or when the media itself is hoaxed, or merely reflecting popular assumptions? Writing in 2004, the authors portentously declare that "to fully reach our potential we must heed the lessons of the past. This book is a starting point in that learning process." Twenty years later there's little sign that chronicles of past follies have had any such effect – indeed, the authors laughably hoped that the internet would help to counter the spread of false claims.

Two chapters of the book's ten are given over to what the authors call "the Martian Panic"; this gave the publishers the opportunity to give the book a sci-fi War of the Worlds-themed cover, along with a small file photo of Orson Welles. This isn't the book's starting point, but the impact of Welles's famous 1938 broadcast is probably the most (over?)familiar modern cultural memory of a "panic" caused by the media – although, as the authors note, many of those taken in thought the reports indicated a German invasion or some other disaster rather than actual Martians. The cover focus might suggest a derivative account, but the notes indicate that the authors trawled through contemporary newspaper reports and undertook their own interview work. They also highlight that it wasn’t just a one-off – subsequent remakes in the USA and elsewhere also created unrest, with one later broadcast in Ecuador provoking riots. "How Could it Happen Again?" asks one chapter title; "Whenever huge audiences are all tuned in to the same programme, reading the same newspaper column of internet site, the potential for mass manipulation looms large" is the somewhat pedestrian and plodding answer.

However, the War of the Worlds doesn't dominate the book overall. Chapter 1 is dedicated to "The Great Moon Hoax of 1835", which the authors identify as the birth of "the modern era of tabloid journalism". This happened not in London, but in New York, when one Richard Adams Locke wrote a story for the New York Sun that falsely claimed that Sir John Hershel had observed humanoid creatures on the Moon. The story caught the attention of Edgar Allen Poe, who judged that its novelty meant that various scientific inaccuracies were disregarded.

Next comes an example of newspaper sensationalism rather than outright fraud – wild speculation in 1910 that cyanogen gas in the tail of Halley's Comet would brush the earth, either wiping out life or least causing apocalyptic devastation. Such was the global panic that Pope Pius X "denounced the hoarding of oxygen cylinders". The authors trace how the story "snowballed" from "a single article in the New York Times", and there's perfunctory postscript that attempts to link the same kind "of comet hype" to the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide in 1996.

Passing through the War of the Worlds chapters we come to a motley round-up of "media-made 'monsters'": a hoax report of a Central Park Zoo escape in 1874; the "Great 'Kissing Bug' Scare of 1899", which the authors compare with the phenomenon of "tarantism" in Europe; BBC Television's famous 1992 supernatural pseudo-documentary Ghostwatch, which traumatised some viewers; and the "Texas earthworm hoax". These somewhat disparate threads are then brought together in a short section called "The moral of the story": "In our post-11 September world, where many people are already feeling on edge, members of the media need to tread carefully… and think through the potential effects on their audience."

The following chapter concerns scares over tainted Coca-Cola and "Mad Cow Disease". Here, the analysis is particularly weak: in 1996 scientists "predicted millions of people could develop new variant CJD", which was then downgraded to just 32 deaths predicted for 2002. The reason for the error was that it was not appreciated at first that the pathogen prion does not enter muscle tissue, meaning that eating the meat of afflicted animals does not spread the disease, so long as one avoids the brain. According to the authors, "these scares were fuelled by the mass media which exaggerated the threat based on speculation and fear, not science and reason". But it seems here that the media was following the science, which changed as more information came in.

Chapter Seven links the witch-hunts of old to "the sex abuse epidemic", meaning false allegations of abuse, including of the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" variety. The authors start with the impact of Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum in the fifteenth century, but it seems to me that the juxtaposition takes the general idea of "witch-hunt" too literally; the authors draw a strained parallel with The Courage to Heal, which promoted the idea of "recovered memory". There follows a discussion of "False Memory Syndrome", a term that has dated badly (the unreliability of memory is a normal fact, not a "syndrome" – see my review of Meredith Maran's memoir My Lie: A True Story of False Memory), followed by discussions of the McMartin trial scandal, the Satanic Ritual Abuse "moral panic" and "the sudden 'epidemic' of multiple personality disorder". Here, the fleeting reference to "moral panic" (via Jeffrey Victor) indicates a theoretical pathway not taken (see my review of Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britian).
Instead, all we get is that "to understand the present, we must understand the past. We have come full circle."

However, we are at last back in the territory of "delusion" as a psychological phenomenon, and this focus continues in the next chapter, on "terrorism scares". The authors start with "the Milan Poisoning Scare of 1630", moving on to "The 'Mad Gasser' of Mattoon" in the 1940s and then fears of poisoning in the West Bank. In each incident, people reported feeling ill as a result of reports about other people feeling ill. Bringing the story up to date in 2004 is the "Bin Laden Itch", a post-9/11 fear of anthrax attacks. The authors have another banal observation: "The first half of the twenty-first century seems destined to be filled with episodes of mass hysteria and social delusion related to terrorism."

There is then an abrupt change of focus as the book turns to reports from the Pacific region, describing how when Papua New Guineans expressed a wish for Lyndon Johnson to become their president the media interpreted this as the naïve fantasy of a cargo cult when it was actually a satirical comment about the Australian authorities. This is followed by how the media, including National Geographic were hoaxed into reporting that a lost tribe had been discovered in the Philippines, despite various implausibilities. The hook here is "primitive stereotyping", but while the media critique is certainly valid it's a strain to call it "mass delusion".

In a short conclusion, "media misinformation" is described as being "the real threat", and the solution is that journalists should be better trained and that the public needs to be "well-educated and informed". The book's limitations would perhaps have been less obvious had its aims been less grandiose; it is nevertheless informative and reminds us of some interesting precedents for the situation we now find ourselves in.

[Marty · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting read.