Merchants of Fear

I should have known it all along but, for some reason, it has always eluded me. I knew that watching the news did not foster a sense of informed awareness. Even the local channels’ evening broadcasts could raise my blood pressure twenty points.

Part of what drives my anxiety when watching the news is, well, the news. The shooting of teenager Ralph Yarl, guilty of finding the wrong address and of being Black, drives me mad. He’s a model citizen: top of his class academically, musically talented, athletically gifted, according to one of his teachers, “just the nicest young man in the world.” The elderly White shooter says he was frightened by Yarl’s presence because, you know, Ralph Yarl is Black and racism is real.

In upstate New York, the car in which Kaylin Gillis, age 20, was riding mistakenly went to the wrong address. As they tried to turn the car around the homeowner, Kevin Monahan, 65, came onto his porch and fired two shots into the car. Kaylin and the shooter were both White. Fear blended with guns is real.

Just writing about these stories stirs my rage. My country has more guns than people. So far in 2023, we’ve had more mass shootings than days. We elect lawmakers who make no laws against guns, and governors like South Dakota’s Kristi Noem who proudly told a National Rifle Association convention that her two-year-old has already been given two guns and a pony named Sparkles. What could be more American? Or more infuriating?

Seven decades ago Senator Joseph McCarthy created the Red Scare. He spotted communists everywhere: in the government, in the military, in your local mayor’s office. Aided and abetted by his slippery attorney, Roy Cohn, McCarthy was famously stopped by a single question, “Sir, have you no shame?” McCarthy had no more shame that his modern incarnation, Donald Trump. Thinking about it is incredibly frustrating.

My point? There’s plenty of bad news to go around. Black motorists fear being stopped by White cops with guns. Teachers who used to carry chalk and attendance charts are told they should carry a 45 automatic. Immigrants fear deportation after they’ve crawled through snake-infested deserts for a job in America; they’re branded “rapists and murderers” and more than 40% of the country’s poor children are children of immigrants (NYT, 4/8/23). All bad news.

I have no sympathy for Tucker Carlson. I wish he’d been fired before he was allowed – encouraged, actually – to convince his two million viewers of lie upon lie upon lie. It’s no surprise that he privately detested the ex-president while publicly spreading the myth that Trump was his friend. Carlson was never asked the right question: “Sir, have you no shame?”

Ridding Fox News of Tucker Carlson won’t rid me of the low-level angst and high-level dread I experience when receiving the news. There’ll be a new Carlson in a moment, and the new Carlson will follow the formula that drove the old Carlson: We make money by generating fear.

A dozen years ago Psychology Today (6/7/2011) warned about fear-based media: “News is a money-making industry,” we were told, “one that doesn't always make the goal to report the facts accurately. In truth, watching the news can be a psychologically risky pursuit which could undermine your mental and physical health.” No kidding. Twelve years later, I get it.

Fear-based news stories prey on the anxieties we all have and then hold us hostage. …In previous decades, the journalistic mission was to report the news as it actually happened, with fairness, balance, and integrity. However, capitalistic motives associated with journalism have forced much of today's television news to look to the spectacular, the stirring, and the controversial as news stories. It's no longer a race to break the story first or get the facts right. Instead, it's to acquire good ratings in order to get advertisers, so that profits soar.

It was a prophecy fulfilled by Rupert Murdoch and his family, the capitalist puppeteers pulling Tucker Carlson’s strings and cashing their checks.

Here’s how it works:

News programming uses a hierarchy of if it bleeds, it leads. Fear-based news programming has two aims. The first is to grab the viewer's attention. In the news media, this is called the teaser. The second aim is to persuade the viewer that the solution for reducing the identified fear will be in the news story. If a teaser asks, "What's in your tap water that YOU need to know about?" a viewer will likely tune in to  get the up-to-date information to ensure safety.

In a strange way, I’m comforted. It isn’t just me. It’s everyone. We’re vulnerable because some news really is bad, because we’ve been separated from our neighbors by a pandemic, because racism and other isms are evil. And our vulnerability is manipulated by a “news” formula specifically created to make us afraid. We stay tuned. We turn the page. We get hooked. It’s a system run by merchants of fear who profit from our vulnerability. And it’s enough to raise everyone’s blood pressure.

School teachers in Florida dread the tyranny of Ron DeSantis; as the Orlando Sentinel reports, they’re “leaving in droves.” Parents tremble when sending their children to the local grade school lest its their school’s turn to become a bloody shooting range.

And Tucker Carlson will be replaced by someone else whose interest is not to inform, not even to entertain, but to generate ratings and profits by creating suspicion and fear.

At some point, someone needs to ask: Have you no shame?

Honored

Thank you @nycaidsmemorial. I’m honored to be remembered and the fight continues.

Shhhh

We’re less than two months into 2023 and the 2024 elections are already upon us, attracting candidates and crying out for donors. I have at least one friend in the race, and I expect more may follow. In the struggle for Democrats to hold the Senate, I plan to be quietly supportive. I do not want to be caught up in the maelstrom. As the primaries appear and Democratic candidates wage war against each other, I hate the sound of good people eating their own. I retreat into a safe silence.

Looking back, there was little room for a silent retreat by the time I took the dais in Houston at the 1992 Republican National Convention. By then, the most combative issue in America was the virus that I had contracted: HIV.

Beginning in July 1981 with what were described as “strange cancers” or, in some quarters, “gay cancer,” HIV/AIDS had become the most deadly scourge ever to impact America’s gay men and hemophiliac children. What made the issue combative wasn’t actually the virus; it was the reality that in America, unlike most other issues, HIV/AIDS had broken out first among gay men. The virus raced through the gay community with lethal speed. And as it did its work, shrinking the bodies of young men and strewing the damage in every direction, most of America’s “leaders” looked the other direction. Some clucked about sex. Some thought “they’re getting what they deserve.” A few knew compassion.

The word “gay” was enough to generate beliefs and behaviors rooted in nothing but discrimination. Parents of gay sons wrote obituaries that identified cancer as the cause of death; AIDS would have been a cause of shame. The brutalities and ignorance were so profound that in some cities we could not find a mortuary to handle AIDS victims. For the entirety of his term in office, as tens of thousands died, Ronald Reagan refused to say “AIDS.” In the community I was soon (1991) to join, his was a thundering silence.

The hush of death in those days was challenged by the screams of ACT-UP, founded by my friend Larry Kramer. In parades and conference rooms, on the streets and in healthcare conferences, Larry and his compatriots identified silence as the enemy. Those who heard the cries and turned a deaf ear included families, congregations, and political leaders. By their silence, said the activists – among whom I was numbered – were giving their consent.

When I spoke in ’92, I resented that silence. Even my keynote’s title, “A Whisper of AIDS,” evoked the sound of silence. I reminded all who would listen that millions of innocent people had been herded into the Nazi’s camps and chambers, and we did not protest. Black children were excluded from decent schools and public swimming pools, and we did not object. And now it was gay men – sick and dying – who looked to America’s leaders for some comfort only to be treated to silence.

Watching the debacle known as DeSantis in Florida evokes another kind of silence. What do I have to say to his shameless pandering to Trump’s fickle base? How does one characterize the burning of books and the politicization of school boards without reference to Hitler’s Germany?

If I’m silent while watching the newscasts of my ex-home (Florida) it’s because, as I’ve said here before, I don’t know what to say against such hypocrisy and stupidity. I shake my head, mutter “WTF,” and pick up my knitting. My silence is shock, not complicity.

This week I learned that a book was recently published in which there’s a passing recollection of me at age 18. It was not a handsome period of my life, and the book’s description isn’t handsome either. I don’t intend to sue. I’m planning no fight with the author or regret about who once I may have been. I intend to shrug my shoulders, let some silence shroud the painful memories of those days, and invite my grandchildren to climb onto my lap for a snuggle. It’s what might be termed “strategic silence.”

I sometimes worry about President Biden’s 80 years of age; I love what he’s done, think he’s not given the credit that’s due, and still I worry. When I read about the President’s courageous trip into Ukraine, riding a slow locomotive through a long night in the barren, war-savaged countryside, I was in awe of him. I sat in the silence that awe deserves. I took it in.

This past week hosted Ash Wednesday, a holiday of sorts that follows the raucous bacchanalia of Mardi Gras. For many of our Christian friends, it’s a time for reflection on the cadence of life and death. Their foreheads bear the mark that reminds them, and us, that dust we are, and to dust we shall return. In the face of our own mortality, silence does seem like the right place to go.

Maybe my growing ambivalence about silence comes with age. The vast majority of my years are behind me. I’ve lived longer than imagined possible 30 years ago. It doesn’t make me sad or depressed. But it does summon me to moments of quiet conversation with friends and family. I wrap up lots of days in quiet hours of reflection.

I’m convinced that, In the face of throbbing evil, silence is still the enemy. But in the place of awe, gratitude for life and those with whom I share it, reflecting on the miracle of grandchildren who love us without inhibitions – when such moments rise, silence isn’t cowardice or the endorsement of something vicious. Not at all. In such moments, my silence is the sound of gratitude and love. It’s a very, very blessed quiet.