WHILE CLAIMING TO to deliver “just the facts,” the daily news actually reflects our fears, hopes, and prejudices as a society—not, as many believe, through conscious manipulation, but through the highly unconscious way that editors decide what matters.
When it comes right down to it, custom and consensus have the final say in what editors consider newsworthy, rather than any objective standard that can be measured scientifically. Journalists are human, so we tend to see reality through the filters of our own environment, education, habits, acquaintances—and exposure to media itself. We think we are hyperaware from having seen how the sausage get made. It doesn’t make us any less likely to bite.
That’s why I was probably the last person in Dog World to recognize that it was, in fact, the media that built the anecdotal case against pit bulls starting in the late 1980s—a collection of myths that persist in the face of scientific evidence, expert testimony, and the personal experience of a large segment of the dog-owning population.
It all appears to have begun with a rash of stories, all mysteriously dating from July 1987, attesting to the inborn “viciousness” of pit bulls—in Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, New York Times—followed by an epidemic of breathless accounts over the next decade of the latest “tragic pit bull mauling.” Not only did every dog bite suddenly become news (in direct contradiction to what young reporters are taught), every dog that attacked suddenly became a pit bull.
I bought into this story, completely and unconsciously, at a time when I knew very little about dogs. When I was twice bitten by dogs while jogging, I immediately pinned the attacks on pit bulls—not because I had any idea about what breed of dogs they were, but because I knew (being well-informed) that such attacks are caused by pit bulls.
Journalists are all the more susceptible to media influence because we believe our cynicism protects us. In fact, we are just as likely as anyone to cry foul about the stories that don’t play to our individual fears. The hyperventilating over Ebola struck me as totally ridiculous given that the disease has been transmitted exactly three times in the United States. But when it comes to mass shootings, I don’t understand why the media doesn’t cover them enough. Gun violence is one of my fear points; communicable diseases are not.
It is human nature to exaggerate our own fears and downplay others, especially the ones that are inconvenient. An interesting study in the November Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that the reason political conservatives deny climate change is not because they dispute the scientific evidence, but because the proposed remedies seem painful to consider. The researchers found the same tendency among liberals when the problem presented was violent crime, and the proposed remedy was more guns in the home.
The flipside of denying a problem exists is overreacting to the ones we fear, which is how we get policies like building a giant wall along the border with Mexico, giving offenders “three strikes” before throwing them in jail forever, killing every dog that looks like a pit bull. Humans seem hard-wired to grasp at scapegoats, whether it’s Communists, welfare mothers, crack addicts, homeless people, immigrants, terrorists—or pit bulls. They just have to be “outside” enough to make a credible “them” who is threatening “us.”
That’s why it is no longer so easy, as it was in 1987, to blame pit bulls for our social ills. Today, dogs are family. Dogs are off the table.
Coyotes, however, are another story. And then there are feral cats, whom we are told have single-handedly caused the steep decline in native songbirds. It is still OK, and even fashionable, for nature-lovers to harbor a murderous hatred of alley cats.