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Murray is the director of the Statistical Assessment Service and
author, with Joel Schwartz and S. Robert Lichter, of It
Ain't Necessarily So: How Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture
of Reality.
Kathryn Jean Lopez: No child has ever
been harmed by strangers contaminating candy on Halloween? Even
if no kid ever got hurt, does it hurt to have the warnings, and
to have hospitals voluntarily checking candy every Oct. 31?
David Murray: A study of national criminal
data back to 1958 found only 76 reports of any kind of tampering,
almost all of which were fraudulent or mistaken. There have been
three reported cases of children dying from tainted candy. The first
case involved parents trying to cover up after their child ate the
father's stash of heroin. The second case involved a father intentionally
poisoning his son then blaming it on tainted candy. The third case
involved a child who suffered a fatal seizure while trick-or-treating.
She suffered from a congenital heart condition and no evidence of
tampering was ever found. Although her parents immediately notified
the authorities about their daughter's heart condition, the media
ran shocking news reports of yet another incident of poisoned Halloween
candy.
In protecting children from an unproven threat, parents may not
just be taking some of the fun out of childhood but also raising
children in an unhealthy atmosphere of paranoia. Besides, repeating
myths like these every year may ultimately elicit a "copycat" effect,
inspiring deranged individuals to carry out previously non-existent
crimes.
Lopez: "Every 12 seconds another woman
is beaten." Bill Clinton said that in a radio address. Then it was
taken back by his staff. Then he used it again. But if that were
true, the total number of beatings would exceed the total number
of all violent crimes. How does that happen? Should people be skeptical
of all numbers? Even when they come from the White House?
Murray: In areas like crime there are
all sorts of numbers out there. One of the problems with crime specifically
is that not all crimes are recorded by the police, so the FBI figures
don't tell the whole story. In order to find out what the true level
of crime is, we have to conduct surveys, which are very like opinion
polls. But, as with opinion polls, the wording of the question makes
all the difference when people give their answers. And when pressure
groups that want to highlight what they perceive as social ills
are asking the questions, the results can be driven by those prejudices.
So, in the case of domestic violence, there have been surveys that
have included people shouting at their partners or even "stomping
off" in their definition of violence. It's from those surveys that
the number of "every twelve seconds a woman is a victim" comes from.
But that's a very different thing from a woman being "beaten" that
often. More reliable surveys indicate a woman is seriously attacked
by an intimate once every 2 minutes and 20 seconds — less than
one-tenth the president's figure.
Now because there are so many figures out there, the nuances and
differences between them tend to get confused as they are transmitted
from the academics and experts who compile them to senior figures
like the president — they go through more and more "filters"
of simplification to satisfy the demands of very busy people who
simply cannot be experts on every subject. Some figures are simple
enough to be understood easily and get through successfully. Others
get conflated or have important provisos dropped. Generally, therefore,
the more a figure a politician delivers feels like a "soundbite,"
the more people should be skeptical of it. Perhaps especially so
if it comes from somewhere as busy as the White House — whoever
is in charge.
We do have our suspicions about this particular incident, though.
The figures quoted and language used in 2000 were virtually identical
to the case in 1995. It sounded suspiciously like someone had found
an old briefing document and simply dusted it off before handing
it to the president — the figures were well out-of-date as
well as not adding up. Now that's not malicious, it's just lazy.
Lopez: So, too, with breast cancer.
In the book, you report that the risk of breast cancer, which is
popularly accepted as one in eight or one in nine women, is actually
much lower. Do people — like women who are needlessly exposed
to radiation or who spend more money than they have to on mammograms
— get hurt in the process?
Murray: Women face far greater health
risk from heart disease than they do from breast cancer (about ten
times as many women die each year from cardiac causes), yet women
fear breast cancer far more, and elevate it to the top of their
health-care concerns. The primary reason is that media, egged on
by well-meaning advocates, have failed to provide the complete picture.
What follows are calls for political action to address the problem,
which brings forth disproportionate funding by the federal research
centers (relative to other, more pressing health needs) because
politicians need to show that "they care," all of which then leads
to the inevitable search for villains who must be responsible and
who need to be put in a media stockade. Witness the current crusade
against the so-called Long Island Cancer Cluster. It's great activism,
but it does not lead to great public health, because we have a tendency
to misdiagnose our real health risks, and hence, misallocate efforts
that might actually make things better. Attacking media-enhanced
but imaginary dragons, we miss the opportunity to dispatch some
very real lizards that are actually more dangerous.
Lopez: Are there topics that the media
is more likely to misrepresent or hype than others?
Murray: The most serious and regular
misrepresentation takes place whenever a particular science claim
either gets explicitly politicized (global warming, stem-cell research)
or becomes captive of one position or another in the so-called culture
wars (AIDS, day care, illegitimacy). In that case, one's position
with regards to the science begins to be treated symbolically, as
though there were a referendum being held on some moral or cultural
problem. The science then becomes treated as a proxy for your moral
posture. Needless to say, once that happens it becomes almost impossible
to conduct rational debate based on the evidence.
Lopez: Can you say that in most cases
the media is just out of their league, so they reply by deferring
to someone's press release? Or are they toeing a particular ideological
line that sways their reporting?
Murray: It varies, of course. Sometimes
simple ignorance or carelessness end up shaping a bad story; sometimes
a desire to "help the cause," whatever it might be, overrides good
judgment. Very often, journalists under pressure take the "path
of least resistance," which is to simply repeat a story line offered
to them by people that they have judged to be reliable and reasonable
in the past. That is, journalists are often insufficiently skeptical
of those to whom they assign "white hats." That said, it is possible
to arrange media coverage by ideological leanings, but there is
only a limited value in so doing. There are stories (and emphases)
that liberals pursue, just as there are counterpart stories and
differential selections stressed by conservatives. By and large,
however, most ideological problems in the press are not due to conscious
decisions or agendas, but rather slip by as unconscious presuppositions,
the sort of cultural assumptions about what is normal and proper
and what needs explaining. Noticing manifest political difference
can be useful, but it really only tells us how media can be different.
What may be more instructive is to discover how they are the same,
even given the ideological pressures. That is, both the liberal
and the conservative press are in many regards equally vulnerable
to certain kinds of problems and misunderstandings that turn out
to be inherent in the nature of the media. The weaknesses and blind
spots are shared in many instances, and examining that fact was
one of our most important contributions in the book. What emerges
is the realization that the principles of science and research are
oftentimes incompatible with the underlying principles that drive
media as an enterprise, regardless of who signs the paychecks.
Lopez: You have a monthly newsletter
that routinely exposes many of these frauds. Is it your experience
that generally people tend to be discriminating when watching or
reading the news?
Murray: Not sufficiently. They can
be lulled by familiar expectations, and too often turn off their
skeptical radar. Much depends upon the "framing" of the news story.
If offered by a celebrity or in conjunction with apparent scientific
authority, people are more willing to accept claims at face value.
If warned that something is considered "contentious" or "fraught
with peril," they naturally perk up and evaluate. Of course, it
is by using such "framing" devices selectively that a news reporter
can condition our likely reaction for or against a particular claim.
Most problematic are those claims that are so deeply "backgrounded"
in the presentation that they are seen as just "given" and natural.
In fact, a lot of very dubious claims about our world sneak into
our received opinion because they were presented as narrative dramas
and soap operas, rather than as research reports. Those who condition
conventional wisdom know this well, and oftentimes achieve their
best effect by giving us story lines, such as Erin Brockovich,
rather than propositional arguments against which we might offer
defense. But people can be trained to become better and more discriminating
consumers of news if they acquire just a few tools of common sense
and remember to activate them. Keep your guard up; read several
different news accounts of the same thing and compare the coverage.
Watch for editorial and "staging" effects that shape our reception.
In short, to borrow a barbarous term from contemporary university
lit-crit, learn to "interrogate" your daily news before you swallow
it whole. A good watchword phrase is, caveat lector; that
is, "let the reader beware."
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