The Science of Fear

It’s not clear how much juice is in the fence, although I suppose it has to be the low-voltage, zap-and-get-rattled variety, or there would have to be another fence to protect the boy from the first fence. I also don’t know if the boy is inside the fence or out. Just who is being contained here? It doesn’t really matter, I suppose. The image appears on a banner put up by the fence manufacturer, and it clearly wasn’t designed to inspire questions. Its message is simple: The world is filled with lurking dangers, but you can protect those you love by taking sensible precautions such as installing a reasonably priced, seven-foot electrified fence. A company spokesperson would be happy to discuss the matter further.

Welcome to Security Essen, a trade show in Essen, Germany, where more than a thousand exhibitors, spread across roughly 250,000 square feet of exhibit space, shill for forty thousand visitors from fifty-five countries at the world’s biggest demonstration of what happens when capitalism meets fear. Military wares aren’t included at Security Essen—although that rule was stretched a bit by the Russian company exhibiting grenade launchers and a silencer-equipped sniper rifle (“for riots and more”)—but there’s just about anything else one could ever need to fend off the forces of darkness. There are batons, pepper sprays, uniforms, sprinkler systems, and handheld chemical analysis units that can detect everything from Ecstasy to anthrax. There is a vast array of home alarms, high-tech ID badges, retinal and fingerprint scanners, software to shut out hackers, shredders to keep identity thieves at bay, transponders that allow children to be tracked like FedEx packages.

But more than anything else, there are cameras. Everywhere I turn, I see my face captured and displayed on laptops and flat-screen televisions by exhibitors promising security through spying. One camera is a tiny thing that fits in a door’s peephole. Another, as big as a bazooka, can see for 18 miles. I turn a corner and my picture is being matched against a database of wanted criminals. Around another corner, an infrared camera generates a spectral image of my face highlighted by the veins pulsing beneath my skin. It can all be a little unnerving. Happily, feelings of twitchy paranoia can be eased with the purchase of a personal countersurveillance kit that comes in a slim briefcase suitable for travel.

For the more discriminating security shopper, Jaguar is displaying a sleek new model whose features include an ivory interior, leather steering wheel, DVD player, bulletproof windows, armored doors, and “under-floor hand grenade protection.” An onboard oxygen system is optional. Anyone that serious about security will also be interested to learn about the heavy steel road barriers on display in an adjacent hall—just the thing to stop suicide truck bombers—and the new filtration systems designed to keep chemical weapons from being slipped into a building’s air-conditioning system. Not that anything like that has ever happened. But you never know.

Not that the security business really needed a new market segment. Over the last twenty-five years, private security has expanded massively in Germany, the United States, and every other Western country. Tyco Fire and Security, an American company, has ninety thousand employees and $11.5 billion in annual sales. Securitas AB, a Swedish company headquartered in London, has more than 230,000 employees and operations in more than thirty countries. Group 4 Securicor, also headquartered in England, has 400,000 employees in 110 countries.

Most people know the security industry through its ubiquitous pitches for home alarms, whose essential message is usually little different than that of the banner in Essen. Some alarm ads are more visceral, however. One American TV spot depicts a pleasant suburban home bathed in warm, morning sunlight. A pretty housewife kisses her handsome husband good-bye while a jogger passes by on the sidewalk. The husband gets in the car and drives away. The wife goes back in the house, closes the door, and turns on her electronic sentry. The commercial cuts back to the jogger, who stops, flips up the hood on his sweatshirt, runs straight at the front door, and smashes it in with a kick. The alarm blares. The man freezes, turns, and runs. Finally, we see the grateful wife, smiling and safe once again, on the phone with the alarm company.

These ads are not designed to inspire a rational appreciation of risk. If they were, they wouldn’t depict such very unlikely crimes as a stranger smashing in the front door of a home in a prosperous suburban neighborhood at eight o’clock in the morning. (The few alarm ads that do address statistics and probabilities can be just as misleading, however. One ad on my local radio station told listeners they should buy a home alarm because “break-ins are on the rise!”—which the police told me was correct only if one defined the phrase “on the rise” to mean “declining.”)

If my description sounds a little extreme, consider how the unconscious minds of suburban housewives process the information in the ad. Gut can’t blow it off as a meaningless commercial because Gut can’t tell the difference between ads, the evening news, and what it sees out the front window. Gut simply knows it’s seeing or hearing something frightening, even terrifying. Something it can personally identify with. So Gut experiences a wave of what psychologists would call negative affect. Using the Good-Bad Rule, Gut concludes that the likelihood of the portrayed crime happening is high. The emotion may even be strong enough to cause probability blindness, so Gut recoils as if the crime were a certainty. And that’s just one way Gut can process the ad. It could also turn to the Example Rule. The vivid and frightening nature of the ad makes it more likely to grab our attention and form lasting memories. When suburban housewives later ask themselves how likely is it that they could be victims of crime, Gut will easily recall these memories and form the unsettling conclusion: It is very likely.

Of course, Gut doesn’t work alone. Head can always intervene, adjust, or overrule the intuitive judgments made by Gut. As we have seen, though, Head sometimes falls asleep on the job, or its involvement is halfhearted and inadequate. And even when Head does step in, tells Gut it’s wrong, and takes control of the final judgment, Gut keeps insisting there’s danger ahead. Nagging worry may be tormenting to those who experience it, but it is a marvelous marketing tool for companies selling security.

Many others find it handy, too. Politicians promote fear to win elections. Police departments and militaries do it to expand budgets and obtain new powers. And although we tend to think of public-service agencies and nongovernmental organizations as working entirely for the public good, they have vested interests just like every other organization—and many realize that fear is an excellent way to promote their issue, boost memberships and donations, and enhance political clout.

It would even be impossible to list all the corporations whose self-interest is served by marketing fear. We saw how a software company spotted a marketing opportunity in the “50,000 predators” said to be trolling the Internet for children. Lighting manufacturers talk up crime before revealing the good news that lighting is an effective way to defeat the dangers lurking in shadows. Companies that sell water filters like to mention the risk of getting cancer from chlorinated drinking water. The opportunities for finding a fear, promoting it, and leveraging it to increase sales are limited only by imagination. And corporate marketers are very imaginative.

Germs were a market waiting to be exploited. Filthy, dangerous, and invisible, germs could be anywhere. And the news is filled with stories about frightening new bugs like Ebola, West Nile virus, SARS, and avian flu, which may not be relevant to the question of what lurks in kitchen sinks and bathroom stalls, but that hardly changes the impression that the world is getting buggier—an impression a great many corporations are only too happy to enhance. The slogan of Purell—a hand sanitizer manufactured by Pfizer— is “Imagine a Touchable World.” It’s hard to miss the implication that the world in its current state is untouchable, a message underscored on Purell’s Web site, which includes a handy list of “99 Places Where Germs Are Likely to Lurk—99 Reasons to Use Purell Instant Hand Sanitizer.” Number 6: subway seats and poles. Number 18: calculator keypads. Number 58: thermostats. Number 67: shopping-cart handles. Number 83: library books. While there is solid evidence that the reasonable use of hand sanitizers in settings like classrooms and day cares is beneficial, Pfizer portrays virtually any object touched by humans as a potential threat and any contact with any such object as a crisis that calls for a squirt of Purell. Welcome to the world of Howard Hughes.

Purell was originally created for medical professionals but it was brought to the consumer market with a publicity blitz in 1997. A gold rush followed and there are now countless brands of hand sanitizers and disinfectant wipes. Commuters can hang on to subway poles with portable subway straps or antibacterial gloves. Shoppers can slip disposable covers onto the icky handles of shopping carts and slip disposable covers over doorknobs and toilet seats in the unfortunate event that they are forced to use a public washroom. Passengers on airplanes can relax and lean back on sterile headrest covers and they can hang “personal air purifiers” around their necks, ostensibly to reduce the risk of contaminated air slipping up their nostrils. Wholesale markets are opening up as well, as restaurants and bars seek to please germaphobic customers with sanitizer dispensers and boxes that automatically spray disinfectant on doorknobs every few minutes. There is even hope for the notorious germ vectors known as children: Germs Are Not for Sharing is a book for preschoolers that asks, “What are too small to see but can have the power to make us sick? Germs! They’re in the air, in food and water, on our bodies, and on all the things we touch—and they’re definitely not for sharing.” Frequent hand washing is important, kids are told. And it’s very important you don’t touch anyone when you play together. No more holding hands and high fives. Have fun but stay safe!

However hyped the risk of germs may be, it is at least real. Some corporations go so far as to conjure threats where there are none. A television ad for Brita, the German manufacturer of water-filtration systems, starts with a close-up of a glass of water on a kitchen table. The sound of a flushing toilet is heard. A woman opens a door, enters the kitchen, sits at the table, and drinks the water. The water in your toilet and the water in your faucet “come from the same source,” the commercial concludes. Sharp-eyed viewers will also see a disclaimer at the start of the ad printed in tiny white letters: MUNICIPAL WATER IS TREATED FOR CONSUMPTION. This is effectively an admission that the shared origin of the water in the glass and the toilet is irrelevant and so the commercial makes no sense—at least not on a rational level. As a pitch aimed at Gut, however, it makes perfect sense. The danger of contaminated drinking water is as old as humanity, and the worst contaminant has always been feces. Our hardwired defense against contamination is disgust, an emotion that drives us to keep our distance from the contaminant. By linking the toilet and the drinking glass, the commercial connects feces to our home’s drinking water and raises an ancient fear—a fear that can be eased with the purchase of one of the company’s many fine products.

Another, subtler form of fear marketing popped up in my doctor’s waiting room one day. A large poster on the wall entertained bored patients with “One Hundred Ways to Live to One Hundred.” Most of the one hundred items listed were printed in small, pale letters, and they were about as insightful and provocative as Mother’s Day cards. “Number 1: Enjoy yourself. ” “Number 73: Soak in the tub.” But seven items were printed in large, black letters that made them the visual focus of the poster. The first of these was “Number 22: Exercise regularly.” Hard to object to that. But then came “Number 44: Reduce the amount of cholesterol in your diet.” That’s a bit odd. Cholesterol isn’t inherently dangerous, so you may not need to reduce your cholesterol. It’s also hard to see why cholesterol would rank among the fundamentals of staying alive, along with exercise. It is not remotely as important as eating lots of fruits and vegetables, not smoking, and many other things that aren’t mentioned on the poster. So why does it get top billing over them?

Taken as a whole, the poster’s basic message is that pills are absolutely essential for a long life. That’s not a message you will hear from disinterested medical experts, but it is what you would expect to hear from a pharmaceutical company like the Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Group, identified as the maker of the poster in small print at the bottom left-hand corner. Bristol-Myers Squibb is also the maker of Pravachol, a cholesterol-reducing drug. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, American sales of Pravachol earned Bristol-Myers Squibb $1.3 billion in 2005 alone, and that’s just a sliver of the market for cholesterol pills. Worldwide, Pfizer’s Lipitor racked up $12.2 billion in 2005.

This sort of camouflaged marketing is typical of the pharmaceutical industry, and it’s not limited to doctor’s offices. Health lobby groups, professional associations, and activists are routinely funded by pharmaceutical giants. Much of this is uncontroversial, but critics say Big Pharma deliberately blurs the line between disinterested advice and sales pitches. “Would the pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars a year if they didn’t think it was valuable? Of course not,” said Dr. Jerome Kassirer, a professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine and former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. That’s troubling enough, but more disturbing than Big Pharma’s marketing methods are its goals.

It is not in the economic interests of a corporation selling pills to unhealthy people for people to be healthy, or rather—to be more precise—for them to perceive themselves to be healthy. Their actual physical state is irrelevant. What matters is whether someone believes there is something wrong that can be cured with a pill. If so, the corporation has a potential customer. If not, no sale. It doesn’t take an MBA to figure out what pharmaceutical companies need to do to expand their markets and boost sales.

Critics call it “disease mongering.” Australians Roy Moynihan and David Henry, a journalist and a pharmacologist, respectively, wrote in the April 2006 edition of the journal Public Library of Science Medicine that “many of the so-called disease awareness campaigns that inform contemporary understanding of illness—whether as citizens, journalists, academics or policymakers—are underwritten by the marketing departments of large drug companies rather than by organizations with a primary interest in public health. And it is no secret that those same marketing depart- ments contract advertising agencies with expertise in ‘condition branding,’ whose skills include ‘fostering the creation’ of new medical disorders and dysfunctions.”

The evidence assembled by Moynihan and Henry in their book Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients is extensive. A good illustration of the general pattern is a confidential plan to market GlaxoSmithKline’s drug Lotronex in Australia by transforming the perception of irritable bowel syndrome. “IBS must be established in doctors’ minds as a significant and discrete disease state,” notes the plan, written by a medical marketing company. Patients “need to be convinced that IBS is a common and recognized medical disorder.” This would be accomplished by moving on several fronts simultaneously, including the creation of a panel of “key opinion leaders” who would advise the corporation on opinions in gastroenterology and “opportunities for shaping it,” drafting “best practice guidelines” for dealing with irritable bowel syndrome, launching a new newsletter to convince the “specialist market” that the condition is a “serious and credible disease,” and running ads targeting general practitioners, pharmacists, nurses, and patients. Another component of the plan is to involve a medical foundation that is described as having a “close relationship” with the plan’s drafters. The plan also calls for a comprehensive media strategy because “PR [public relations] and media activities are crucial to a well-rounded campaign—particularly in the area of consumer awareness.” It all came to naught, however. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration received reports that Lotronex caused serious and even fatal adverse reactions. The big push was abandoned, and the drug is now prescribed only to women with severe symptoms.

This is much bigger than advertising. It is about nothing less than shifting the line between healthy and diseased, both in consumers’ perceptions and in medical practice itself. Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz, doctors and researchers at the Dartmouth Medical School, were among the first to analyze this process. In 1999, they published a paper examining proposals by various professional associations to change the thresholds for diagnosis of high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, and obesity. In every case, the new thresholds made it easier for people to be qualified as having these conditions. They then calculated that if all the new standards were put in place, 87.5 million otherwise healthy Americans would suddenly be deemed to have at least one chronic condition—and three-quarters of all Americans would be considered “diseased.”

Erectile dysfunction, female sexual dysfunction, hair loss, osteoporosis, restless leg syndrome, shyness: These are just a few of the conditions whose seriousness and prevalence have been systematically inflated by drug companies seeking bigger markets. Language is one of the most basic means of medicalizing a problem, the critical first step in getting people to ask their doctors for a pill. So “impotence” becomes “erectile dysfunction,” an impressively medical-y phrase that pushes away consideration of factors like stress and anxiety as causes of impotence that can be cured without a pill. Numbers are also key. People will be more likely to conclude they have a condition if they think it’s common, and so drug companies push statistics like “more than half of all men over forty have difficulties getting or maintaining an erection”—a number that is grossly misleading because it comes from a study not taken seriously by experts in the field.

“The rhetoric surrounding disease mongering suggests that it will promote health,” writes Iona Heath, a British physician, in the Public Library of Science Medicine, “but the effect is in fact the opposite. Much disease mongering relies on the pathologizing of normal biological and social variation and on the portrayal of the presence of risk factors for disease as a disease state in itself. When pharmaceuticals are used to treat risk factors, the vicious circle is completed because anyone who takes medicine is by definition a patient.”

There’s no better example of this than the warning about cholesterol on my doctor’s wall. High cholesterol is not a disease, merely a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. There are many such risk factors, including lack of exercise, smoking, an unbalanced diet, high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes. Most of these can be improved with simple lifestyle changes. Cholesterol, however, can be reduced with pills. And so drug companies singled out cholesterol and promoted it as if it were a disease in itself. In 2003, Pfizer led a major “public awareness” campaign, ostensibly to raise awareness of heart disease and heart attack in France and Canada. The ads were shockingly blunt. On Canadian television, a woman with two young children weeps in a hospital waiting room. A doctor emerges and says her husband is dead. Then time reverses. We see the man wheeled down the hospital hall, in the ambulance, and collapsing at a sunny picnic. It’s high cholesterol, we are told. Even if you seem healthy, it can kill you. Get tested. Then the man and his kids are shown smiling and laughing—their grim fate has been averted.

Responding to the French version of Pfizer’s campaign, Jonathan Quick and colleagues in the Department of Essential Drugs and Medicines Policy of the World Health Organization wrote a stinging letter to the British medical journal The Lancet. “Of all the major factors accepted as cardiovascular disease risks, only cholesterol is addressed—the campaign’s stated aim is not pursued. No mention is made of an actual medical product, but the campaign coincided with publication, in The Lancet, of [a study] showing reductions in major cardiovascular events after use of atorvastatin.” Atorvastatin is the proper name of Lipitor, Pfizer’s lucrative anticholesterol drug. “We believe the campaign could have worried patients, encouraging them to request a prescription for statins.” Quick and his colleagues added that the “information used contained misleading statements and omissions likely to induce medically unjustifiable drug use or to give rise to undue risks.” For that reason, Quick concluded, the ads “did not respect several of WHO’s ethical criteria.” Barbara Mintzes, a professor of health care and epidemiology at the University of British Columbia, was more pointed in an article in the Public Library of Science Medicine: Pfizer, she wrote, is using the “fear of death” to promote sales.

The subterfuge of public information campaigns is necessary in most Western countries because only New Zealand and the United States allow full, direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. But even in the United States, federal regulations require ads to follow public-interest guidelines, and the pharmaceutical industry insists that its advertising simply provides solid information and is therefore in the public interest. Many observers think this is nonsense. Writing in the Annals of Family Medicine, Douglas Levy of the University of Southern California School of Medicine and David Kessler, the former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, noted that drug company spending on TV ads in the United States “doubled from $654 million in 2001 to a staggering $1.19 billion in 2005. Nearly one-third of the 2005 spending was only one category: sleep medicines. Yet sleep disorders, however problematic and serious they may be, are almost inconsequential when compared to the major causes of death in the United States: cardiovascular disease, cancer and unintentional injuries. No matter how much the industry claims its advertising provides public health benefits, the amount spent promoting drugs for conditions of varying severity begs the question of whether the industry truly is acting for the public benefit.”

In 2007, a team led by Dominick Frosch at the University of California Department of Medicine published (in the Annals of Family Medicine) the first comprehensive analysis of the content of the thirty hours of drug ads the average American sees on TV each year. “Most ads (82 percent) made some factual claims and made rational arguments (86 percent) for product use, but few described condition causes (26 percent), risk factors (26 percent) , or prevalence (25 percent).” The researchers feel these omissions have an important consequence. “By ambiguously defining who might need or benefit from the products, [direct-to-consumer-advertising] implicitly focuses on convincing people that they may be at risk for a wide array of health conditions that product consumption might ameliorate, rather than providing education about who may truly benefit from treatment.”

Another matter that gets short shrift is lifestyle change. The first thing any physician will do when considering how to treat a condition is ask whether lifestyle changes—stop smoking, eat better, exercise—can do the job by themselves. In the Frosch study, 19 percent of ads mentioned that lifestyle changes could be made in conjunction with taking pills. But not one ad mentioned that lifestyle changes were a potential alternative to popping pills. In fact, almost 19 percent of ads went so far as to explicitly state that lifestyle changes were not enough. “Several ads for cholesterol-lowering drugs appeared to suggest that non-pharmacological approaches were almost futile,” the researchers wrote.

What drug ads emphasize is emotion. The Frosch study found that almost all ads—95 percent—contained a positive emotional appeal, while 69 percent played up negative feelings. “Most ads showed characters who lost control of their lives as a result of conditions and used medication to regain control. This loss of control extended beyond specific medical problems and often included an inability to participate in social, leisure or work activities. Characters typically regained complete control over their lives after using the product, whereupon they also received social approval from friends and family.” The fundamental message, then, is little different than that of home security ads and the image of the little boy playing soccer beside an electrified fence: You are in danger, but if you buy our product your life will be filled with smiles, sunshine, and pink-cheeked children at play.

“Disease mongering exploits the deepest atavistic fears of suffering and death,” writes Iona Heath. It also exploits the desire for happiness and social acceptance. The result is a neat emotional symmetry. Without our product, you will experience fear, disease, rejection, death; with it, you will have joy, vitality, acceptance, life. It’s hard to imagine a better way to rouse Gut and open a customer’s wallet.

An obvious question is whether pharmaceutical companies, security companies, and all the others who use fear and hope to press our psychological buttons fully understand what they are doing. Did they just stumble on this by trial and error? Or have they learned from the scientific advances of the last thirty years and put them into practice? There’s plenty of reason to think the latter is closer to the truth.

As far back as the 1970s, marketing researchers were discussing brands and the emotions that make them potent. At that point, a few pioneering psychologists had begun delving into the two-system—Head and Gut— model of human thought, and research on the role of emotion in decision-making had begun. But it would be a decade or more before these became hot topics in psychology and at least another ten years before they became predominant ways of thinking about thinking. And yet at least one industry was taking notes and drawing conclusions long ago.

“I was given some marketing documents from the tobacco industry going back twenty or thirty years,” says Paul Slovic, who was hired in 2001 as an expert witness in a lawsuit brought by the U.S. government against Big Tobacco. “It was stunning. It was shocking. Consultants for the tobacco companies were doing studies and reporting the results, and basically they were twenty years ahead of many of the cognitive and social psychologists in understanding the importance of affect. They basically had a good understanding of this concept of System One [Gut] thinking and the importance of images to which positive feelings are attached. And that was the basis of all of their advertising.”

What Big Tobacco figured out decades ago is surely understood today by the other major industries profiting from fear, for the integration of leading-edge psychological research with corporate marketing is itself a booming industry. In marketing journals and trade publications, the breakthroughs Kahneman and Tversky revealed in their famous 1974 paper—the Example Rule, the Rule of Typical Things, and the Anchoring Rule—are common knowledge, and the expanding scientific research on the role emotion plays in decision-making is followed with all the passion of a banker monitoring Wall Street.

Many business school professors with training in cognitive psychology operate private consultancies and charge corporate clients fat fees to apply the latest science to product launches and promotions. They include Gerald Zaltman, a marketing professor at the Harvard Business School, fellow at Harvard’s Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative, and author of How Customers Think. Corporations should treat the unconscious mind as the frontier of business, Zaltman writes. “Most influences on consumer behavior reside at this frontier; consumers encounter these influences and process them unknowingly. Firms that most effectively leverage their explorations of this frontier will gain crucial competitive advantages.” The sophistication that major corporations are bringing to these “explorations” is impressive. “Some companies, such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Hallmark, Syngenta, Bank of America, Glaxo, American Century and General Motors are beginning to conduct ‘deep dives’ on specific emotions in order to understand their subtle nuances and operation,” writes Zaltman. “For example, a study of the meaning of ‘joy’ conducted for one of the world’s leading brands identified more than 15 elements of this basic emotion. These insights are leading the firm to a major overhaul of the brand story.”

Even neuroscience is being brought to bear in the pursuit of sales, giving rise to “neuromarketing.” Instead of quizzing people in traditional focus groups—a flawed process because it’s never clear if answers are anything more than conscious rationalizations of unconscious judgments— marketers attach them to MRIs. When subjects are exposed to products or ads, their brains light up. Electrodes are also used to monitor heart rates, skin temperatures, and the near-invisible twinges of facial muscles that betray surges of emotion. Analysis of the results can reveal a great deal about emotional engagement and how feelings influence thoughts. This means, in effect, that marketers can access both Head and Gut. Done well, neuromarketing can give marketers an understanding of what happens inside a brain that not even the owner of that brain can match.

Here, then, is another answer to the question posed at the beginning of this book. We are safer and healthier than ever and yet we are more worried about injury, disease, and death than ever. Why? In part, it’s because there are few opportunities to make money from convincing people they are, in fact, safer and healthier than ever—but there are huge profits to be made by promoting fear. “Unreasoning fear,” as Roosevelt called it, may be bad for those who experience it and society at large, but it’s wonderful for share-holders. The opportunities for growth are limitless. All that’s required is that fears keep rising, and those who reap the profits know which buttons to push in our Stone Age minds to ensure that happens.

H. L. Mencken once wrote that “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Mencken penned this line in 1920, at the height of the first Red Scare. At the time, American anarchists were blowing up buildings and people at an alarming rate. The attorney general, Alexander Mitchell Palmer, twice escaped assassination attempts. In the crackdown that followed—the infamous “Palmer Raids”—gross abuses of civil liberties were committed but no Bolshevik conspiracy was uncovered. It was clear that, terrible as the violence was, it was the work of a tiny number of radicals. On balance, Mencken was right to think politicians were hyping the threat out of all proportion because it suited their interests to do so—but he was quite wrong to deny the bona fides of politicians who saw a Red under every bed. The beliefs were sincere, if misguided. The fact that the Red Scare was also wonderfully convenient for many politicians and officials—especially a young J. Edgar Hoover— didn’t change that.

Like Mencken, we often make the mistake of thinking that politicians rattle the rubes with scary stories then laugh about it over drinks. In reality, the fact that a politician may have something to gain by promoting a threat does not mean he or she does not believe the threat is real. This goes for the pharmaceutical industry, security companies, and all the others who promote and profit from fear. In fact, I’m quite sure that in most cases those promoting fear are sincere, for the simple reason that humans are compulsive rationalizers. People like to see themselves as being basically good, and so admitting that they are promoting fear in others in order to advance their interests sets up a nasty form of cognitive dissonance: I know I’m basically a nice person; what I’m doing is awful and wrong. Those are two thoughts that do not sit comfortably in the same head and the solution is rationalization: Suburban housewives really are at risk if they don’t buy my home alarm, and I’m doing them a service by telling them so. Self-interest and sincere belief seldom part company.

The marketing of fear for political advantage has become so ubiquitous that the phrase “the politics of fear” is almost a cliché, but still many doubt the power of fearful messages to influence voters. “Despite the best of intentions, election campaigns can quickly turn into a competition about who can most effectively frighten voters,” complained Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in a letter sent to Britain’s party leaders prior to the 2005 election. Don’t let this happen, the archbishop asked. It’s unethical and destructive. And besides, it doesn’t work. “Like a lot of other people, I suspect that voters don’t make up their minds primarily on the grounds of fear, and that this aspect of campaigning, while it certainly grabs headlines, may not be especially decisive. The technique is a bit too transparent and usually too over-the-top to be taken wholly seriously.”

Academic research on this point is surprisingly limited. Even the role of emotions in campaign ads—the most explicit and quantifiable means of deploying emotion in politics—has been little studied. But still, among campaign consultants and political journalists, there is “widespread agreement about the practices of selling candidates,” writes Ted Brader, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, in Campaigning for Hearts and Minds. “These political observers believe that emotional appeals are powerful staples of campaign advertising, embedded in music and images, that manipulate uneducated and uninformed voters.” To put this in psychological terms, when an educated and informed voter sees an ad, Gut may react but Head corrects and adjusts; when an uneducated and uninformed voter sees the same ad, Gut reacts but Head does not step in, and so that person is swayed by the emotional pitch. Or so the political experts assume.

Brader first tested these assumptions by conducting a large-scale analysis of ad content. “Almost all campaign ads appealed to the emotions of viewers and yet a substantial majority, 79 percent, also appealed to the viewers’ capacity to reason by encouraging them to draw conclusions from evidence,” Brader wrote. “Nevertheless, the reputation of political advertising as primarily emotional is well founded: in nearly 72 percent of ads, the appeal to emotions dominated the appeal to logic.” Only 10 percent of ads targeted a single emotion. Three-quarters included at least one enthusiastic appeal—Fred Jones for a brighter future!—while “nearly half of all ads include some sort of appeal to fear, anger and pride.” The ads Brader analyzed came from elections in 1999 and 2000, including the notably low-key presidential contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush. The 2004 presidential election was a far nastier affair, and it’s safe to say that fear was more widely deployed in that campaign. So were TV ads. “Americans in 2004 were collectively exposed to over a million campaign ads on television, ” Brader writes. “Candidates, parties and groups spent over $1 billion on advertising.”

Brader found that political ads use fairly predictable sounds and images to enhance emotional content. Enthusiastic appeals are drenched in bright colors, sunshine, smiling children, and soaring or sentimental music. Fear ads are often shot in black and white or very dark colors. They are “rich in visual cues associated with death, decay and desolation” such as old people and barren landscapes. Music is either tense or somber, or it’s simply discordant noise.

Although ads usually have a dominant emotional theme, one-third “contain appeals to both positive and negative emotions.” Brader notes this fits with how Rutgers professor Montague Kern described political advertisingin the 1980s: It is “the ‘get ’em sick, get ’em well’ advertising concept, in which advertisers try to create anxieties and then reassure people they have the solution.” This should sound familiar. It is the same message used in those cholesterol ads, home-security pitches, and the banner featuring a little boy playing soccer behind an electrified fence: You are threatened by something bad or scary, but if you buy our product—also known as the “candidate”—life will be delightful.

To see precisely who is influenced by these emotional appeals, Brader devised an ingenious series of experiments. Simply having people sit down and look at pretend ads for fake candidates wouldn’t do, he reasoned. People come to ads with prior beliefs and feelings. And they don’t see ads in isolation—they pop up amid news stories and McDonald’s commercials. Sometimes people notice them and pay attention, sometimes they don’t. To simulate this and produce reliable data is a challenge, but Brader found a way: In 1998, he recruited 286 volunteers through community-service announcements and flyers in eleven communities in Massachusetts. At the time, a primary election race was underway, with two leading candidates vying to be the Democratic nominee to be governor of Massachusetts. It was an “impressively lackluster” contest, Brader writes, with no major controversies or hot issues in a time of peace and prosperity. That was perfect for Brader’s purposes, because it made it a “fairly demanding test case for the ability of campaign ads to elicit enthusiasm, fear or any other emotion.”

As they arrived at the libraries, meeting halls, and churches where the experiments were held, people were asked to have a seat and watch a videotape of a newscast. The purpose of the experiment, they were told, was to figure out what people take away from the news. They then watched half an hour of a news show, including the commercials. One of the commercials was, of course, an ad for one of the two leading candidates for the Democratic nomination. These ads weren’t real, however. They were created by Brader using scripts he wrote, along with video clips and music taken from past political ads. There were four in all. The first ad featured a voice-over that was “enthusiastic” and positive, but the images and music were bland; the second ad used the same voice-over, but the words were matched with soaring music and images of sunny skies and grinning children. A third ad featured a fearful script about crime and drugs, but again it used bland pictures and music, unlike the fourth ad, which had the same script but paired it with ominous music and harsh images of guns, criminals, and drugs. The idea was to separate the effects of negative and positive information from those of negative and positive emotion—since both versions of the ads had the information but only the second versions were “juiced” with emotion. When the screening ended, participants answered a series of written questions about the newscast, the commercials, and the upcoming elections. The results were startling: People who saw the “juiced” version of the enthusiastic ad were more likely to say they would volunteer for a campaign, vote in the primary election, and vote in the general election than were those who saw the bland version of the same ad. Note that this was the result of a single, casual viewing of one short ad.

Fear seemed to be much less influential, however, as there was little difference between the answers of those who saw the fear-drenched ad and those who saw the neutral version. But Brader had also asked people to answer factual questions about the election, and he used that information to divide them into those who knew more about politics and those who knew less. That changed everything. It turned out that the effect of the emotional “enthusiasm” ad was universal—it influenced everybody, whether they knew anything about politics or not. But the effect of the fear-based ad was divided. It did not boost the rate at which those who knew less about politics said they would get involved. But it did significantly influence those who knew more—making them much more likely to say they would volunteer and vote.

Still, if the political experts were wrong about who is more likely to be influenced by fear, they were dead-on about the central role played by emotion in political marketing. “The audiovisual ‘packaging’ may be paramount to their effectiveness,” Brader writes. Remove the word “may” and replace it with “is” and you have the standard advice supplied by every political consultant. “A visual context that supports and reinforces your language will provide a multiplier effect, making your message that much stronger,” advisesRepublican guru Frank Luntz in his book Words That Work. But more than that, “a striking visual context can overwhelm the intended verbal message entirely.” Luntz makes his point by recounting a story Lesley Stahl relates in her autobiography, Reporting Live. In 1984, Stahl filed a story for the CBS Evening News that was so critical of the Reagan White House she feared her sources in the administration “would be angry enough to freeze me out.” But after the story aired, the deputy chief of staff told her the White House loved it. Stahl asked him, “Didn’t you hear what I said?” The politico responded: “Nobody heard what you said. . . . You guys in televisionland haven’t figured it out yet, have you? When the pictures are powerful and emotional, they override if not completely drown out the sound. I mean it, Lesley. Nobody heard you.”

Even in 1984, this was old hat. “The real question in political advertising is how to surround the voter with the proper auditory and visual stimuli to evoke the reaction you want from him,” wrote Tony Schwartz, a political consultant, in 1973. Five years earlier, the campaign of Richard Nixon ran a television ad in which pictures of a serene-looking Hubert Humphrey were interspersed with rapid-fire images of riots, street fighting, and destruction in Vietnam. Not a word was spoken; it was a pitch aimed exclusively at Gut. If an ad like that were run today, psychologists might see it as proof that spin doctors were learning from their work, but the truth is that spin doctors—like Amos Tversky’s “advertisers and used car salesmen”—figured it out first.

Activists, nongovernmental organizations, and charities are another matter. They have their own interests, as everyone does. And they, too, could use fear to expand memberships, boost donations, and increase their media profile and political clout. But unlike spin doctors and corporations, activists and others explicitly seek to advance the public good—it’s the very reason they exist—so it seems strange that they would scare the very public they wish to serve. And yet it is precisely that high-minded motivation that so often leads activists, NGOs, and charities to market fear.

Leaving my neighborhood grocery store one afternoon, I came across a poster featuring a sad-eyed boy wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words I’M HUNGRY. The caption read: “One in five Canadian children lives with hunger.” It was an appeal for donations to “The Grocery Foundation,” an organization established by the big grocery-store chains and food companies to support school breakfast programs and other programs for needy kids. The cause is irreproachable. But I’d never heard that statistic before and I couldn’t believe the situation was this dire. The wording was also odd. What does it mean that a child “lives with” hunger? Does that mean they experience it every day? Once a week? How is hunger defined and measured? I wanted to know more, so I e-mailed the executive director of the foundation, John McNeil.

In his e-mailed response, McNeil directed me to other nongovernmental organizations working in this field. But they didn’t know the source of the number, so I contacted McNeil again. This time he sent me an excerpt from a letter written by Sue Cox, the former head of the Daily Bread Food Bank and “an acknowledged authority on hunger and poverty,” according to McNeil. Cox’s case for the one-in-five statistic went like this: first, “child hunger and child poverty are inextricably linked”; second, Statistics Canada says the “current rate of child poverty is one in six”; third, the real number is likely closer to one in five because the telephone survey that was used to come up with the one-in-six number would not catch very poor people who can’t afford telephones.

What Cox didn’t mention is that Statistics Canada has no data on “child poverty” or any other kind of poverty. What the agency has is something called the “Low Income Cut-off,” or LICO. That’s where the one-in-six number came from. But the LICO is not a “poverty” number, as Cox claimed. It is a measure of relative deprivation only, intended to identify “those who are substantially worse off than the average,” in the words of Ivan Fellegi, the head of Statistics Canada. If the income of the top 10 percent in the country doubled tomorrow, the number of people who fall below the LICO would soar—even though all the people who suddenly dropped below that line would have exactly the same income they had before. The statistics agency has repeatedly stated that it does not consider LICO to be a measure of poverty. “Statistics Canada does not and cannot measure the level of ‘poverty’ in Canada,” wrote Fellegi.

A similar scenario played out in the United States in 1991, when an American activist group named the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) released a report claiming “one out of eight American children” had gone hungry at some time in the previous year. The report garnered widespread press coverage despite being fatally flawed by an unrepresentative survey sample and questions drafted too broadly to be meaningful. On the most precise question—“Did any of your children ever go to bed hungry because there was not enough money to buy groceries?”—just one-third of those counted in the report as “hungry” said “yes.” That alone should have cast doubt on the validity of the report, but almost every new story about the report passed along the statistic as if it were unchallengeable fact. (Someone at CBS Evening News not only accepted the study as hard fact, but misread it in almost comical fashion—which resulted in Dan Rather leading off the newscast by announcing, “A startling number of American children in danger of starving. Dan Rather reporting. Good evening. One out of eight American children is going hungry tonight.”)

In January 2005, Canadians awoke to full-page newspaper ads that declared the country is “losing control” of cancer. “Four in 10 of us will get it. In 10 years, it’ll be five in ten. It’s time to start controlling cancer instead of letting cancer control us. If we don’t, more of us will get cancer and more of us will die from it than ever before.” The ads were placed by the Campaign to Control Cancer, a consortium of cancer and health organizations formed to press the federal government to implement a national cancer strategy. All the statements in the ad were true. On current trends, more people would get cancer than ever, and more would die from it. But what the ad didn’t mention is that this is because the population is growing—more people means more cancer—and it is aging, which means more cancer because aging is by far the biggest risk factor for cancer. The ad also failed to note that the death rate from cancer is falling and expected to fall further, nor did it mention that the incidence rates of most types of cancer—after taking population aging into account—are flat or falling.

When Ian MacLeod of the Ottawa Citizen wrote an article laying out these facts in a straightforward, balanced news story, readers were furious. MacLeod was peppered with angry e-mails and phone calls. One man accused him of being “pro-cancer.” A letter to the editor argued, “It is worth the price of a few print ads, and the shock value of some tough language, to draw attention to the patchwork [cancer-care] system we have in place right now.”

Simon Sutcliffe and Barbara Whylie, two physicians with the Campaign to Control Cancer, also responded in writing. They didn’t dispute any of the facts MacLeod presented. “The Campaign to Control Cancer does not deny progress is being made,” they wrote, but the growing number of cancer cases would place terrible strain on the health-care system and much more could be done to ease that burden with simple prevention measures and other strategies. This is true. But the balance and reasonableness the doctors presented in the letter was wholly absent from the ad their organization placed.

In the summer of 2007, the American Cancer Society ran ads in fifteen women’s magazines featuring a young woman holding up the photograph of a smiling blonde. “My sister accidentally killed herself,” reads the headline. “She died of skin cancer.” The ad goes on to say that “left unchecked, skin cancer can be fatal.” It urged young women to “use sunscreen, cover up and watch for skin changes.” That sounds pretty reasonable until you learn that almost all skin cancer deaths are caused by melanoma, a rare type of skin cancer, and that scientists don’t fully understand the relationship between sun exposure and melanoma or what to do about it. “We do have pretty good evidence that sunscreen will reduce your risk of the less lethal forms of skin cancer,” Dr. Barry Kramer, associate director for disease preventionat the National Institutes of Health, told the New York Times, but “there’s very little evidence that sunscreens protect you against melanoma, yet you often hear that as the dominant message.” Dr. Leonard Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society, admitted to the Times that “we have taken some license in taking that message and using it the way we’ve used it because that’s the way to get the message to our target audience.” Another troubling point about those ads: Although the only logo that appears is that of the highly respected American Cancer Society, they were actually paid for by Neutrogena, a company owned by consumer-products giant Johnson & Johnson. One of Neutrogena’s main product lines is sunscreen.

That attitude is all too common and the result is a parade of half-truths, quarter-truths, and sort-of-truths. In the mail, I got a brochure from the government warning me that “car crashes are the number one cause of death for Canadian children!” That’s true, as far as it goes. But the brochure doesn’t mention that the rate of fatal car crashes is steadily falling and is now far lower than a generation ago (the number of fatalities dropped 37 percent between 1986 and 2005, despite rising numbers of people on the roads). Nor does it say that car crashes became the number-one killer of children only because the toll inflicted by other causes (notably infectious diseases) declined even more rapidly. It’s no mystery why this good news was omitted. The point of the brochure is to get me to install car seats for my kids, and information that puts the risk of car crashes into perspective isn’t going to contribute to that goal. It’s much more effective to use a misleading factoid to deliver a simple and scary message: Your children are in danger!

Sins of omission are far more common than active deceit in fear marketing, but out-and-out lies do occasionally come to light. Dick Pound, the crusading chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, caused a furor when he said one-third of the players in the National Hockey League were using illegal performance-enhancing drugs, so Michael Sokolove asked Pound (for an article that appeared in the New York Times) how he came up with that figure. “He leaned back in his chair and chuckled,” wrote Sokolove, “completely unabashed to admit that he had just invented it. ‘It was pick a number,’ he said. ’So it’s 20 percent. Twenty-five per cent. Call me a liar.’ ” A liar he may be, but Dick Pound is no fool. As Sokolove wrote, Pound is passionate about the fight against doping and he knows that “his best weapon is his brilliance as a formulator of quotes, his ability to make headlines and call attention to his cause.” Pound even wrote a book called High Impact Quotations.

Pound’s “high impact quotations” are one solution to a problem faced by every activist, NGO, charity, and consultant with a cause. To succeed, they need the public’s support. To get the public’s support, people must hear their message. But people are deluged with images, words, noise, and pleas for their attention, most of which is ignored. In that information maelstrom, how do you get people to stop, hear, and think about what you have to say?

Even multibillion-dollar corporations struggle with this, although the dilemma is considerably less challenging for those who have huge quantities of cash and the best marketing expertise money can buy. To an extent, that includes government agencies and the major nongovernmental organizations. They may not have the monetary resources of a Pfizer, but they do have budgets big enough to advertise widely and they can tap into the same pool of expertise used by corporations. In the United Kingdom, the Central Office of Information, a six-hundred-person agency that implements all the government’s public-information campaigns, is the nation’s third-largest advertiser; its CEO is Alan Bishop, formerly the chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi, one of the biggest ad agencies in the world. In the United States, the Ad Council is a privately funded organization that arranges for ad agencies to produce public-service campaigns on behalf of government agencies and others, which it then distributes. Much of the work done in these circles is as sophisticated as anything in the corporate world. Practitioners call it social marketing.

Vivid, frightening images abound in social marketing for the same reason that home-alarm companies show criminals kicking in suburban doors: They get attention, stir feelings, and form lasting memories—making Gut sit up and take notice—and so they are far more likely to influence behavior than an earnest request to “Please, wear your seat belt.” This thinking lay behind the American Cancer Society’s ads telling young women to use sunscreen or risk death. The ACS’s research found “young women as a group were oblivious to the risk and felt that skin cancer isn’t a serious problem,” Dr. Leonard Lichtenfeld told the New York Times. Women told the ACS that “to get the message through to me, you have to shock me and get my attention. ” So they did. Countless other groups have learned this lesson and the result is a steady escalation of what some have dubbed “shockvertizing.” “You have to try something new to get through,” an ad exec said in defense of his workplace-safety campaign, which featured graphic deaths and corpses. “It’s a never-ending arms race in the advertising business.”

An insidious new weapon in the arms race is the video news release, filmed and distributed by public relations companies. Raw video has always been made available to television news programs for use in newscasts, but video news releases are intended to look and sound like the finished product so television stations are able to them run them, in whole or in part, as news stories in their newscasts. And they do. For a 2006 report, the Center for Media and Democracy in Washington, D.C., tracked a sample of thirty-six video news releases and found seventy-seven television stations ran them without telling viewers the material was not produced by reporters. In one-third of those cases, the entire video news release was aired. This practice has erupted into public controversy several times—particularly in 2004, when the Congressional Government Accountability Office revealed that several federal agencies distributed video news releases that didn’t identify the source of this “news”—but still it goes on. For TV producers, it’s free. For marketers, it’s the ideal way to inject a message into the body politic without anyone seeing the needle.

Still, most activists, NGOs, and charities with a message they want the public to hear can only dream of deploying such sophisticated techniques. For them, there is only one option: Take it to the media. But there is a limited number of reporters, news pages, and airtime available—and vast numbers of individuals and organizations who have a message they want delivered to the public. Attracting the media’s attention is a major challenge.

One technique for getting noticed is the sort of camera-friendly stunt pioneered by Greenpeace—hang a banner from a bridge or climb a nuclear plant’s cooling tower. Celebrities also help. But for those who have neither the ability to scale major infrastructure nor Sean Penn on speed-dial, there is really only one way to grab the attention of distracted editors and reporters: Dispense with earnest, thoughtful, balanced, well-researched work and turn the message into a big, scary headline.

“What Danger Lurks in the School Cafeteria?” asks a January 2007 press release from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a Washington, D.C., consumer-advocacy group. “Conditions in America’s school cafeterias could trigger potentially disastrous outbreaks of food poisoning at any time, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which ranks food service operations in a new report released today.” Of course it is true that “potentially disastrous outbreaks” could happen “at any time,” just as it’s true that a school could be crushed by an asteroid any second now. The crucial question is how likely it is. The answer is hinted at near the bottom of the press release, where CSPI says it has documented “over 11,000 cases of foodborne illnesses associated with schools between the years 1990-2004.” That may sound frightening, but compare it to the Centers for Disease Control’s estimated number of food poisonings across the United States in a single year: 76 million. And 11,000 food poisonings in schools over fourteen years works out to 786 cases a year—in a student population of more than 50 million. That means the chance of a student getting food poisoning at school is about 0.00157 per cent. It seems the accurate headline for this press release would be “School Cafeterias Reasonably Safe”— but a press release with a headline like that will never get a second look inside a newsroom.

The competing demands of being accurate and being heard can be particularly hard on scientists. Stephen Schneider—a Stanford climatologist and an early proponent of the hypothesis that human activity was changing climate—spoke about this with admirable clarity in an interview with Discover magazine. “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but—which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings, as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”

Unfortunately, the language of science is the opposite of the simple, definitive statements the media want. In science, all knowledge is tentative, every fact open to challenge. Science never delivers absolute certainty. Instead, facts are said to be known with degrees of confidence. Is the earth getting warmer and is human activity the cause? In 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) answered that question with this statement: “The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on global climate.” In 2001, the IPCC said, “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.” And in 2007, with further research pointing to the same conclusion, the IPCC reported that “most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. ” The phrase “very likely” is about as strong as science gets. In the 2007 IPCC report, it was defined as meaning a 95 percent chance that it is so. That’s a common scientific convention: Something is taken as established fact if there is 95 percent confidence that it is correct.

When the national science academies of eleven leading nations got together in 2005 to issue a historic joint statement on climate change, the first sentence read: “There will always be uncertainty in understanding a system as complex as the world’s climate.” It goes on to say, “There is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring. . . . It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities. This warming has already led to changes in the Earth’s climate.” By scientific standards, that language is tough, and yet it still hinges on the phrase “it is likely.” Uncertainty is so central to the nature of science that it provides a handy way of distinguishing between a scientist talking as a scientist and a scientist who is using the prestige of his white lab coat to support political activism: Look at the language. If a scientist delivers the simple, unconditional, absolutely certain statements that politicians and journalists want, he is talking as an activist, not a scientist.

In January 2007, a group of leading scientists, including astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, announced that the hands of the “Doomsday Clock”—a creation of the board of directors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists—would be moved forward. It was “five minutes to midnight,” they said. A key reason for this warning was the fact that, according to the statement of the board of directors, “global warming poses a dire threat to human civilization that is second only to nuclear weapons.” Thanks to the prestige of the scientists involved, this statement garnered headlines around the world. But it was politics, not science.

According to the IPCC, there are still enormous uncertainties about the consequences of climate change, and it is very possible those consequences will be nothing like the civilizational crisis claimed by Stephen Hawking and his colleagues. Even the most basic consequences—things that activists typically assume will happen—are uncertain. The report says it is “likely” that drought will increase—meaning greater than a 66 percent chance. How great that increase will be if it happens is far less clear, and more work needs to be done before the degree of certainty improves. The report also states that it’s “likely” that sea levels will rise, but scientists debate how high they will go. We don’t hear about this uncertainty from activists, though. In a magazine ad from the World Wildlife Fund, a boy in a baseball uniform stands with his bat ready, waiting for the pitch, paying no attention to the fact that he is submerged in water up to his shoulders. “Ignoring global warming won’t make it go away,” says the ad. It’s an arresting image, but the IPCC estimates that, under a variety of scenarios, climate change will cause the oceans to rise somewhere between seven and twenty-three inches. That is serious, but it doesn’t lend itself to public campaigning, because a picture of someone shin-deep in water isn’t going to catch the attention of a bored woman flipping through a magazine in her dentist’s waiting room. A boy oblivious to the fact he is about to drown may be misleading, but it certainly gets the job done.

Some organizations certainly try to strike a balance between accuracy and effectiveness. A common way to do this is to prepare an informed, responsible,balanced report—and then publicize it with a simplistic and frightening press release. “Global cancer rates could increase by 50 percent to 15 million by 2020,” reads the headline of a press release announcing the publication of the World Health Organization’s World Cancer Report. Following this is a barrage of frightening statistics and statements—“Cancer rates are set to increase at an alarming rate globally”—that goes on for six paragraphs before this little sentence appears: “The predicted sharp increase in new cases . . . will mainly be due to steadily aging populations in both the developed and developing countries and also to current trends in smoking prevalence and the growing adoption of unhealthy lifestyles.” So the biggest source of the frightening headline is population aging, and population aging is partly the result of people living longer than ever before—which is actually good news, one would think. As for smoking, those of us living in the developed world can be heartened by the fact that smoking rates are declining and cancers caused by smoking are falling as a result. Put all this together and you get a sense of what the report actually shows: The truth about cancer is a mix of good news, bad news, and uncertainties that does not lend itself to a scary headline and shocking one-line summary. But WHO’s publicists know that a scary headline and some “alarming” facts are essential to getting media coverage, so they portrayed their report as the frightening wake-up call it is not.

If press-release hype stayed in press releases, none of this would matter. But it doesn’t, and this does matter. Reporters are increasingly asked to do more in less time and, as a result, they commonly do not read the studies they write about. What they read is the press release. It is the basis of the story, not the report. Savvy organizations know this, which is why press releases are written in a format that mirrors the standard news story: headline, lead sentence framing the issue, details, key numbers, quotations from officials and experts. Reporters pressed for time can whip out a superficially satisfying story in no time if they follow the press release’s structure and use the facts and quotations provided. Sometimes they do. More often, they’ll frame the story as the press release has framed it but add some comments from other experts or, perhaps, some facts and figures gleaned from a quick scan of the report. What the reporter is very unlikely to do, however, is read the study, think about the issue, and decide for herself what’s important and how the story should be framed. The press release settles that, particularly the press release’s headline and lead sentence—and since the headlines and lead sentences of press releases are so often sensationalized, so is the story.