The Crisis Crisis

Picture a crowded bar. Three television sets hang from the ceiling, tuned in to the network feed. This is a high-tech joint, so there are competing amusements, as well: MTV on wall-sized monitors, dueling jukeboxes, video games with synthetic voices. On top of this racket, there's the festive roar of conversation.

That is, until the news comes on. Talk stammers to a halt and eyes are cast upward; they dart from screen to screen. The anchor men begin to talk loudly, and they're talking crisis—drugs, vanishing rain forests, terrorism, Armageddon. They're inflating stories to ten times their natural size, decrying the end of the world. Their graphics are flashier than video games, their footage better than MTV, their high-tension talk scarier than s-f.

In the face of this onslaught, the patrons can't concentrate; they can't even think. Aghast, afraid, they gulp their drinks as the hysteria level rises.

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When they've got a crisis to hawk, news magazines love to start stories in italics. In that type face, they can get away with anything: apocalyptic fiction that would otherwise be out of place in straight journalism, even overextended metaphors for American society like the one in the paragraphs above. Italic type can also clear the way for a single anecdote to stand in for the latest trend that's ravaging society, and it lays the groundwork for paragraphs that begin, "The sad story of Bob J. is all too familiar in America today. He represents an insidious epidemic that is sweeping...."

As it so happens, America today is suffering an epidemic of nation-sweeping events unseen since the Biblical plagues in Egypt. In the attack of the killer trends, we are terrified on Monday by a crisis we scarcely knew existed the previous Friday, and Monday's dark portent, in turn, gives way to the next week's hysteria.

In horrific succession, herpes anxiety is overtaken by the plague of AIDS, which is followed by the shocking specter of Third World debt. After a brief but chilly nuclear winter, we are threatened by our own national-debt crisis and devastated by starvation in Ethiopia; then it's back to our leaky ozone layer. Terrorists are suddenly in our midst, then the homeless—until all is swept away by crack mania.

The problems appear, the alarms sound, the cover stories and the special reports proliferate. Then the media lose interest, and it's on to the next disaster. The phenomenon is so pernicious, it's worthy of a cover story all its own: Call it the Crisis Crisis.

Nobody would tell you that our bloated national debt is a healthy sign, that AIDS is a passing annoyance or that crack is good for you. These are serious problems deserving of serious reporting and concerted follow-through—if only that would happen.

No, the Crisis Crisis is not a matter of what's reported, it's a matter of who reports the bad news and how it's reported. This new menace springs from the number of news outlets competing to force tragic trends down our throats and the vehemence with which they deliver the goods.

In the September 15, 1986, issue of Time, associate editor Evan Thomas told us that given the proliferation of drug abuse, "we really are in the midst of a national crisis." The previous spring, Time had decried the state of liability insurance in numbingly similar terms: "a rising flood of problems growing out of what has become a new national crisis." Newsweek easily matched the hysteria level of its competitor, asserting in the August 18, 1986, issue that radon gas is "the most dangerous source of radiation in America" (a window fan in contaminated homes turned out to be the solution). The radon scare followed a classic in slam-dunk Crisis Crisis delivery by no less a source than Newsweek editor in chief Richard M. Smith. In the June 16, 1986, edition, he wrote that drug abuse is "as pervasive and as dangerous in its way as the plagues of medieval times."

If the editor wanted to talk drug plague, he needed to look no further than the early 1900s, when cocaine use was far more commonplace than it is today. The editor was right to identify a plague, but it doesn't have anything to do with drugs, the use of which has remained pretty constant in the Eighties. The swarming critters gnawing on the landscape these days are not locusts but news-hungry journalists, and they are truly omnivorous beasts. Fueling their appetites is the intense competition for attention, both from the public and from the all-important advertisers.

It's no secret that Newsweek—the magazine that brought you the Hitler diaries—has been suffering a decline in ad pages. There's no dishonor in that; the past few years have been a tough time for many magazines. But when Newsweek's bottom line dipped, its hysteria level rose; suddenly, sunshine could kill the sexy babe it put on its cover and unmarried 40-year-old women were "more likely to be killed by a terrorist" than to find a husband. Newsweek told us that Richard Nixon was "back" (now, there's a crisis), and the magazine has driven the cocaine band wagon from the start, with three 1986 cover stories on the subject.

As The New Republic recently asserted, "Newsweek has vowed to pursue the lonely struggle against crack no matter how much money it makes." And the results have been good: Its "Kids and Cocaine" cover sold 15 percent better than average, and "Cocaine—The Evil Empire," the February 25, 1985, granddaddy of drug hysteria, weighed in with a whopping 37 percent bonus on the newsstand.

Time was in there slugging as well, nearly matching Newsweek's torrid pace on drug coverage with "The Enemy Within" and "Drugs on the Job," finding toxic waste in our water (and repeating a scary 1980 cover image in the process) and shrieking about the insurance crisis.

The television networks, suffering from a defection of 18 percent of their prime-time audience over the past eight years, may be the loudest contributors to the noise level. As ad revenues fall and corporate shake-ups rock the executive suites, news departments have become pressure points. The same competition that has escalated on-camera news positions into multimillion-dollar jobs is pushing these media superstars to lend their voices to inflated crises worthy of their inflated salaries.

So we watched Geraldo Rivera unveil American Vice: The Doping of a Nation (December 2, 1986), propelling the independent Chicago superstation WGN to a Nielsen rating of 18.1, doubling its average for the Tuesday prime-time period and trouncing the offerings from NBC and CBS in the Chicago market. On September 2, 1986, Dan Rather relived 48 Hours on Crack Street; a few days later, Tom Brokaw toured Cocaine Country. Rather's descent into drug-trend hell earned the highest ratings of any documentary in the past six years; 15,000,000 people tuned in.

Crack use was then, and still is, a local—not a nationwide—phenomenon and nowhere near as deadly as, say, drunk driving. But that mattered less than the public's hunger to know about the new form of cocaine, and CBS mainlined the sordid goods straight into their living rooms. Not surprisingly, a Newsweek poll in the August 11, 1986, "Saying No!" issue showed that public perception of the drug crisis—skewed by media overbad—rated crack and cocaine as close seconds to alcohol as threats to society. And from the press coverage, who would know any different? During the Crisis Crisis, the boring old news about the high societal costs of alcohol abuse just won't play. Clearly, the networks and the news magazines had given their customers what they wanted, which is the first rule of merchandising. But when the product being sold is the news, that age-old hustle takes on a whole new meaning.

Never mind that the public may actually believe the hyperbole that they see and read. The greater problem is that impressionable Government officials in Washington may believe it. Our legislators must have watched all 17 hours of drug programing on network TV during the first half of last year, because they rushed through some spectacular—and probably unconstitutional—drug legislation during the pre-election rush last fall.

Before crack mania, Federal antidrug initiatives had apportioned 1.8 billion dollars to catch dope smugglers, dealers and users, compared with $230,000,000 for education and rehabilitation of substance abusers, even though everyone from the President on down had said that we should attack this problem from the demand side. With the media drums pounding for action on the latest crisis, Congress responded to this serious problem not with a well-thought-out plan but with a proposed frenzied half measures and hocus-pocus. As New York Representative Charles Schumer said, "What happens is that this occurs in one seismic jump instead of a rational build-up. The down side is that you come up with policies too quickly and that the policies are aimed at looking good rather than solving the problem."

Savvy politicians play the hysteria game another way as well. Aware that the press is always up for a good scream, President Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz were able to score points against the Evil Empire in the hours after the downing of KAL flight 007, charging that the Soviets willfully shot down a planeload of Crisis Crisis innocents. In The Target Is Destroyed, Seymour Hersh pointed out that the Russians had simply made a tragic mistake and that our Government intelligence gatherers knew it had been a mistake, as did the President and Shultz. They wouldn't admit that in the glare of a crisis, mind you; why waste the spotlight?

During the Qaddafi hysteria, the press was fully lathered to accept State Department-manufactured assertions of Libya's intended terrorist activities, and it ate up the fiction that our bombing raid had weakened "Mad Dog" Qaddafi's grip on his government. The crisis machinery was already in place and functioning, waiting for the next bit of news to pump up. In a telling bit of timing, the strike itself took place at two o'clock in the morning Libya time, which was seven o'clock in the evening New York time. And there was Dan Rather, encouraging his Tripoli correspondent to hold his microphone out the window so the American public could hear the 12 minutes of mayhem. At 7:20, Larry Speakes was in the pressroom, waging media war.

Reflecting on the whole mess, House Majority Leader Jim Wright told The New York Times, "One of the unfortunate by-products of the television age is the short attention span of the American public. We walk along fat, dumb and happy until a crisis grabs us by the throat. Once it is off the front burner of nightly television coverage, we go back to sleep."

So it is that the wave beyond the Crisis Crisis takes shape: dismissal by cover story. Once Time covers the famine in Ethiopia, we can forget about it. After Newsweek looks at nuclear war, the bombs disappear. Under the new system, crises will spend their few minutes in the spotlight, grant interviews all around and then gracefully retire, like Joe DiMaggio.

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We're back in the bar again, as you can tell from this italic type. With all of the TVs blaring, the din of crisis-mongering has increased to a heavy-metal sonic boom. But the patrons no longer look frightened. They've stopped watching the monitors; they're numb to the very latest causes for hysteria. But that's what happens in noisy bars: Turn up the sound loud enough and you'll deafen the customers.