New York Times: Words Create Unjustified Fear

New York Times reporter Scott Shane just might be one of my new heroes. In seemingly centrist news articles, he’s dropping hints of a radical critique of America’s national security state. “The possibility of overreaction to perceived threats is by now a familiar problem in the age of terrorism,” he wrote recently, in a story about the Arab diplomat whose mid-flight joke created a false “terrorism” alarm. Though Shane concluded that the reaction was not excessive in this case, that one sentence is especially meaningful from a writer who has called questioned the very term “terrorism.”

In an article on the front page of the Times’ News of the Week in Review section, Shane pointed out that the words “terrorism” and “terrorist” are used as political weapons. When there’s violence that we disapprove of, we call it “terrorism.” When we do approve of the violence, we find a nicer word to describe it. That’s pretty radical stuff for the flagship of America’s centrist mass media, which normally treat “terrorism” and “terrorists” as if they were objective realities, as obvious and easy to spot as chair or a tree.

And Shane went so far as to hint, at least, that the U.S. was actively sponsoring terrorism in the Reagan years — an even more radical move for a mass media journalist.

When he put the spotlight on “the possibility of overreaction to perceived threats,” he again reminded Times readers that “terrorism” and its purported threat as well as its supposed evil are relative terms, very much in the eye of the beholder.

Now Shane is dropping radical hints again. His latest article shows that the threat President Obama trumpets as the greatest of all — “terrorists killing tens of thousands of Americans with a stolen or homemade nuclear device” — is nothing new. President and government officials have been issuing the same warning since the dawn of the nuclear age. (The Times website offers a small treasure trove of documents to prove the point.)

There is one big difference, Shane points out:  During the cold war, the U.S. knew its adversaries had weapons; the mystery was whether they might use them. Today, Al Qaeda leaders have suggested publicly that they would use a nuclear weapon, “but as far as we know, Al Qaeda hasn’t even come close to building a bomb.” So it sounds like Obama’s fear-mongering is even less justified than his predecessors’.

Shane concludes on a seemingly paradoxical note:  “’Knowing the history of periodic panics about smuggled nukes offers a kind of reassurance in the face of a horrifying danger,’ said [Micah] Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations. ‘If you consider that the threat has been around for more than 60 years,” he said, “you don’t get overwhelmed by fear.’”

But the underlying lesson in all of Shane’s recent articles is that Americans do get overwhelmed by fear all too easily, even when there is no concrete evidence to justify it. “Words can be weapons, too,” he said in the first sentence of his article about the words “terrorism” and “terrorist.” What he left unsaid, but clearly implied, is that the words are effective weapons because they inspire fear. Now he’s clearly implying that the power elite have long been making those words even more frightening by combining them with the apocalyptically loaded word “nuclear.”

The importance of unmasking politically potent language has been a staple of the academic world for decades. Every so often it finds its way into an op-ed or book review in the mass media.  But to see the New York Times letting one of its news reporters pick up this theme three times in two weeks is an event worth noting.

The message is itself masked; if it weren’t, I doubt the NYT editors would put it in print. Still, it invites us to read between the lines, which isn’t very hard once you get the hang of it.  And anyone who has taken any number of college humanities courses in the last quarter-century or so probably has the hang of it. I hope Scott Shane is counting on that. And I hope he keeps on educating the masses (the NYT website is by far the most popular news site in the U.S.) about the power of words to induce insecurity by hiding or distorting reality.

To paraphrase Mr. Zenko: If you consider that the dire verbal warnings of threat, in the absence of any proven threat, have been around for more than 60 years, you are less likely to get overwhelmed by fear.