Hype Makes Fight
By Ralph Reiland

The big news in Port St. Lucie, Florida a few Sundays back was that a 70-year-old woman tossed a knife she had been using to cut meatloaf fat her husband--because he opted to sit in front of the TV watching football instead of preparing for Hurricane Isabel.

 

Imagine the scene. He’s in his easy chair hollering about an incomplete pass and she’s seen a gigantic swirling monster on TV heading straight for the U.S. coast. The television meteorologists were warning that it was no time to be a slacker: “Things are looking more ominous than yesterday for the East Coast. If you’ve been lax with your hurricane preparations, now’s a really good time to catch up.” The anchors kept mentioning that Hurricane Mitch killed more than 10,000 people in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua in 1998. “The argument began,” reported the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, because “the wife was insisting he make hurricane preparations for Isabel. He refused and said that he’d get to it at halftime.” Half-time! When the cops arrived, they found 71-year-old Robert Harris sitting in a “large pool” of blood on the bathroom floor. There were also hack marks on a bedroom door.

 

While door and husband were being stabbed, mind you, the hurricane was still some 900 miles off the coast. And not even headed for Florida. Apparently that’s what a relentless media drumbeat can do to you.

 

Now, I don’t want to let Mrs. Harris off the hook. But any sensible consumer of news might understand how today’s constant over-hype, in which breathless reporters repeatedly turn regular occurrences into “events of the century,” might make someone go a little nuts. Especially if all the other husbands on the street are already outside nailing up their plywood.

 

It was an overdose of global warming hype that caused some people to attack a bunch of Hummers in California in August. “In the middle of the night,20 new Hummer H2s worth about $50,000 apiece were set aflame,” according to the New York Times. “Fifty other vehicles were damaged at the same dealership and others in the suburbs east of Los Angeles. Many of the vehicles were spray-painted with the words ‘gross polluter’ and ‘fat, lazy Americans.’ Some had the letters ‘ELF’ spray-painted on them, and the Earth Liberation Front, a militant environmentalist group, later claimed responsibility.” A few weeks earlier, ELF had taken credit for a $50 million fire that destroyed 1,500 apartments under construction in San Diego.

 

It wasn’t much different at the World Trade Center. In that case, radicals who had been inundated with anti-American hype by the Middle Eastern media responded with homicide.

 

And the volume has hardly been turned down since then. Open the Saudi daily newspaper Al Riyadh, for example, and you can read a story that says Jews use gentile blood to make cookies for the holiday of Purim. Columnist Dr. Umayma Ahmad Al-Jalahma of King Faysal University wrote recently that, “For this holiday, the victim must be a mature adolescent who is, of course, a non-Jew, i.e., a Christian or a Muslim. His blood is taken and dried into granules. The cleric blends these granules into the pastry dough.” Al-Jalahma goes on to describe the “great delight” that “the Jewish vampires” take in collecting the blood of their victims.

 

Those words are written to create killers. That’s the kind of lying hype that causes people to cheer in the coffee shops of Damascus as they watch secretaries jump to their deaths from the top floors of burning buildings in Manhattan.

 

The lesson in these disparate examples of hyped mass communication? Simply that media exaggeration hurts. And sometimes even kills.