From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
Who Needs Horror Shows?
The fabulous world of fact, factoid and SARS.
Why does anyone go to horror movies anymore? A week's worth of news seems scary enough. SARS, which can kill you, is a household word. So is mad-cow disease. Also this week the government started flying the Code Orange terror warning again. Al Qaeda is back, blowing up buildings and people in Saudi Arabia, and suicide bombers are again killing civilians in Israel. And of course North Korea, having contracted mad-man disease, may be loading nuclear bombs onto ballistic missiles.
On Wednesday, President Bush denounced Europe for fostering fear of genetically modified food, calling their nightmares over Frankenfoods "scientifically unfounded." But probably a lot of people in Europe, home of Grimm's fairy tales, really are afraid, because they have read, or their public leaders have said, that its safety remains "unproven." Who can you trust? Similarly in the U.S., irradiating foods such as chicken and hamburger, which kills often dangerous bacteria, is harmless and would save lives, but many people are still unsettled by the unfortunate name; so a good technology is kept off the market.
It seems to be the case now more than at any time in memory that the real risks in life and the phony ones have congealed into an undifferentiated glob of uncertainty. On Tuesday, the same day the government issued the orange alert, an early-afternoon announcement in New York City's crowded Penn Station said no trains would enter or leave the station because of a "police investigation." The armed soldiers in the station started moving around, and some fire engines pulled up outside. The Saudi bombings had occurred just days before. But inside Penn Station virtually no one budged. Neither did I.
What was my calculation of risk inside Penn Station based on? Pretty much nothing. The Office of Homeland Security swears its warnings are based on "signals" or something, but absent anything resembling facts, who knows?
One might argue that this attitude simply reflects a healthy skepticism, but I think it reflects something less benign. It suggests that most people today live in a state of perpetual, low-grade confusion about much that goes on in the world. In terms of knowing what to believe and what not to believe, what's real and what's only sort of real, these are very strange times.
My impression is that most people find the story about Jayson Blair and the New York Times startling, but it doesn't shock them. It may be that after 25 years of post-modern history and humanities instruction, most people really do believe that events and news are mostly just a "narrative." From Michel Foucault to Jayson Blair to wherever this logic was headed--the Iraqi information minister?
Still, there are hold-outs. When I give talks, someone almost always asks, "Where do you get your facts?" This isn't a challenge; it's a request to learn where they can get access to a simple set of unadulterated facts about what is happening around them.
Who can blame them? In the world of media, at least, it's a rare fact that is allowed to stand on its own short legs anymore; instead, the little factling has to be poked, pinched and shaken until it gives up its "meaning." Much cable news consists almost wholly of earnest anchormenschen asking a never-ending stream of experts what something that we just saw with our own eyes really means, or better yet, what it's going to mean. "Whaddaya think's gonna happen here, Jim?" People who watch fortunetellers every night are likely to believe, or not believe, anything.
Even most newspaper stories across the U.S. today are an increasingly odd amalgam of fact, hypothesis and prediction, and it's a little hard to see how anyone in the news business could be surprised that the day would finally arrive when a Jayson Blair, product of an era in which facts came to be known as factoids, would decide he might just as well sit home and connect the fact-dots however he pleased. One commentator suggested that even if Blair got a lot of facts wrong, his take on many events was essentially "true." Spin wins.
Until SARS. This deadly new virus may be forcing the pendulum of public knowledge away from opinion masquerading as something else and back toward an interest in harder stuff. Like the HIV virus, which at first had a tough time convincing people that some behavior was in fact dangerous, SARS is showing itself to be quite impatient with a world more willing to esteem political propriety than hard data. Unlike almost any other issue in the news nowadays, SARS looks immune to spin, moralizing and the delights of demagoguery.
SARS scientists are tunneling into this problem with the most exacting and precise questions about the nature of the virus. It matters greatly if SARS came from an animal virus or derives from a human coronavirus. Much of the reporting and commentary on SARS has been careful and one might even say humble in the face of what it is possible to know, a k a the facts.
Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Drs. Richard P. Wenzel and Michael B. Edmond said: "We simply do not know where we are on the epidemic curve. Some fear is rational, but the 4.9% mortality rate is in fact similar to that seen generally with community-acquired pneumonia in the United States." But the precision of the analysis really does matter, insofar as many people may die if we get it wrong. No one who flew through college on the imaginary wings of grade inflation need apply to work on this project.
SARS, like a lot else now, may be scary, but on this one at least, we're managing to scare ourselves in the right way.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
