When the brutal truth is a kindness

Ben H. Bagdikian / SF Chronicle 26oct01

Ben H. Bagdikian is a former assistant managing national editor of the Washington Post and
former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

ON OCT. 3, when the anthrax scare first attracted Congress, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W. Va., chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Human Services, had before him as a witness Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson.

Sen. Byrd asked Thompson if his department was fully prepared for the anthrax problem.

Secretary Thompson's answer was a firm: "Yes."

Sen. Byrd: "Will you still love me if I tell you that I don't believe you?"

Secretary Thompson had just committed the worst mistake he could have made - - papering over with reassuring words what was, in fact, a dreaded public fear.

Even in those early days before the spreading outbreak of lethal spores, the terrorists of September 11 had promised a second wave of disasters to come.

The White House and National Security Council made another mistake in their initial angry criticism of American media networks that aired a tape broadcast by the Arabic-language Al Jazeera television station, sometimes called the BBC or the CNN of the Islamic world. Al Jazeera had replayed, verbatim, a taped statement by Osama bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The White House should have known that Al Jazeera is the most trusted voice throughout the Islamic world, precisely because it has a reputation of playing no favorites, regularly offending Islamic state authorities.

Hundreds of thousands of loyal Arab Americans listen to it daily. Al Jazeera was established in 1996 as a joint venture of the BBC and the Emir of Qatar, considered friendly toward the United States.

It is still staffed by editors from the BBC. Today it is the most credible news source in the Arab-speaking world. When the White House asked our networks to self-censor the Al Jazeera broadcast at home, it would have left Americans ignorant of what most of the rest of the world knows.

Apparently, the White House officials learned from their mistake by Oct. 15,

when National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice gave a long interview to Al Jazeera that, translated into Arabic, went out to the same audience that had heard the bin Laden and al-Zawahiri taped speeches.

The White House asked U.S. news media not to run the bin Laden tapes verbatim in case they contained code words to hidden terrorists still among us to make a second attack. But whatever "secret" was in those tapes and their printed texts was a non-secret to the entire Arabic and English-speaking world outside the United States. Holding back the verbatim talks in fear of "code words" assumes that hidden terrorists still in the United States would not listen to the BBC, which carried the taped bin Laden taped talks. Thousands of Americans listen daily to BBC's World Service because it is the best global news in the English language.

In the 1930s and 1940s, should U.S. news services have kept secret from the American broadcast and print audiences the provocative speeches by Adolf Hitler? No one has ever suggested that a Hitler speech contained code words that gave the go-ahead to its ally, Japan, for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan needed no outside signal for its long-planned action.

If our present anthrax attacks spread, the initial appearance of the spores in one Florida building eliminated the "surprise." As one Washington official said: "We have been warned. The element of surprise is gone."

Secretary Thompson's mistake was more serious. When there is a serious public concern with a possible danger, the worst possible official response is to offer false reassurances. When you show first signs of cancer, no one wants the doctor to pat you on the head and say, "Now, now, there's nothing to worry about."

The "now, now, don't worry" approach is dealt with in the classic work on rumors and panic, "The Psychology of Rumor," written by Gordon Allport and Leo Postman, of Harvard, before World War II.

Allport and Postman did their work because they found that white communities in the Northern United States involved in race riots were filled with sinister mythologies about African Americans. Their lack of knowledge or its ambiguity increased their vulnerability to the wildest rumors and senseless action.

Lack of sophistication about large American ethnic groups also led to unnecessary suffering before World War II. In the 1930s, when Hitler delivered fiery speeches, many Americans of German descent found themselves shunned and suspected of sabotage. The uprooting and internment of West Coast Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor is now recognized as a mistake and gross injustice.

The government has warned us, quite reasonably, that definitive discovery and elimination of terrorism in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks will be prolonged, possibly years-long. This makes all the more important the perceptions of Allport and Postman.

The Harvard psychologists found that the amount of rumor, panic and other irrational behavior varies with the importance of the threat multiplied by the ambiguity of what the public knows about the nature and source of the threat.

The first part -- whether the public believes the threat to be real and important -- is close to absolute. It would be hard to find an American who isn't convinced that we have been -- and still are -- under an appalling threat.

The second part -- how much is known about the nature and source of this future threat is also very high.

The result is a high probability of hysteria and irrational behavior. Some of this has already appeared, if not on a mass scale, but enough to warn us that part of our population is already subject to panic and irrationality.

Already there have been attacks on Arab Americans and others "who look Middle Eastern." A Sikh was killed by a thug who didn't know the difference between an Indian and an Afghan. Rocks and worse have been thrown through store windows of shops run by Iranians and other Middle Eastern Americans.

There are false rumors galore and understandable fear.

We know that acts of terrorism, whether from within or from without, are real. But so far, ambiguity about where they come from, and where they might strike, and specifically who is doing them also is very high.

The remedy for keeping the country rational and able to endure the stress over a long period of time requires U.S. authorities to release as much information as possible about the real source or sources of our very realistic fears. Clearly, some of the investigative information will remain secret as law enforcement follows what trails it has. But short of jeopardizing the proper search for perpetrators, the public needs a steady supply of as much information as possible on what is known about the perpetrators and, just as important, what is definitively not true.

The country is in for a very long period of adjusting to our new grave world. It needs as much credible and timely information as possible to prevent the subversive creep of the worst outcomes predicted by the two Harvard psychologists more than 50 years ago.