Bryan R. Smith/AFP/Getty Images | Getty Images Fourth Estate Was the Terror Coverage More Explosive Than the Bombs? Goaded by politicians and cable, a safer-than-ever America goes into full red alert mode.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

In a rational world, we would interpret the inept crimes of accused pipe bomber Ahmad Khan Rahami as evidence that 15 years after the big one, the terrorist threat in America is akin to a brush fire—the kind of thing that inevitably flares up and causes some damage before the experts put it out. Instead, thanks to the cable news channels and some in the Web and print space, we’ve turned it into a mighty conflagration. Donald Trump, ever the opportunist, sounded this alarm Saturday shortly after the bomb went off in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. “Nobody knows exactly what’s going on. But boy, we are living in a time—we better get very tough, folks,” Trump said, when the shrapnel was still sizzling.

The cable news channels jumped on the story in a galvanic fashion for a number of reasons. First, the story happened in their New York backyard. It is an unwritten rule of assaults, murders, natural disasters and other injurious acts that their news potential is inversely proportional to the distance from the news organization’s headquarters. For example, if a pipe bomb went off in Kansas City, the news response of the New York-based networks would be middling. But if a New York City cop broke his toe kicking a suspect in the butt, we’d be just a few chyrons away from a breaking news alert.


Second, the detonation of one bomb is an indicator that additional bombs might exist until proved otherwise. In this case, they did, in alarming numbers. The multiplicity of devices—one bomb exploded in New Jersey on Saturday morning, a second bomb was found (undetonated) in Manhattan, and then early Monday in New Jersey a third bomb went off in the face of a police robot—gave the story additional velocity like booster stages on a rocket. Third, the date 9/11 has made us all a little anxious about a repeat attack in September, and this anxiety helps to stoke coverage of any such incident—especially in New York. Even if the networks were based in Chicago, the story would have become big news: Terrorism is to New York as hurricanes are to Miami. Even the near-misses are big stories.

So, measured by the usual yardsticks, nobody can deny that the New York bombing story and the capture of the accused were big stories. I’d be the last person to say the press “over-covered” an incident in which 29 people were injured. But neither am I carrying a load of dread that the next pipe bomb will ignite in my world—the Washington, D.C., metro area, another bull's-eye for terrorists. Living, as I do, in a rational world, I interpret the clumsy bombing and misfire, and the speedy apprehension of the suspect, as evidence that the genuine threat from terrorists is low. Very low. I feel safe unless I start watching TV, after which, if I let my reptilian brain take over, I feel a bit panicked. You probably feel the same way. After all, there’s no cost to overreacting to the minor threat of terrorism. The payoff for overreacting could be the preservation of your life.

President Barack Obama has tried to convey this gist of the low threat a number of times, but whenever he tries to assure the country, it comes out sounding like he’s counseling us to put our heads in the sand. Then, opportunists like Trump do us no favor by inflating the event into something it isn’t. “Once again someone we were told is OK turns out to be a terrorist who wants to destroy our country & its people—how did he get thru system?” Trump tweeted Monday afternoon. The fact that the 28-year-old Rahami, born in Afghanistan, is the naturalized son of an immigrant seems not to have penetrated Trump's coiffure. If Rahami “got through the system,” he did so as a youth.

The current spate of violence doesn’t even come close to the volume of bombings recorded by FBI statisticians in an 18-month period spanning 1971 and 1972, Bryan Burrough reports in his book Days of Rage. Despite more than 2,500 domestic bombings in that period, the nation did not lose its marbles; no demagogue campaigned on the peril they posed.

Because fear is not rational, wonks never get too far with the public by explaining that backyard swimming pools, quick drives to the supermarket for bread and milk, obesity or falling furniture are more likely to put your in death’s cross hairs than an act of terrorism. In the current atmosphere, every terror-motivated crime has come to feel like a dire assault on the homeland, exploding in the news with much more success than the actual bombs involved. Though the fear is understandable, the result has a huge distorting effect on our national psyche and politics. The culture appears to be too scarred by the 9/11 attacks to place pressure-cooker bombs of the type that Rahami is alleged to have built in their proper perspective. Maybe the next generation, one with no direct memory of the attack, can guide us out of our paranoia.

The fact is, everywhere you look in modern life, we’re safer. Airline flight is safer, cars are ridiculously safe, violent crime has fallen through the floor, the food supply has never been safer, and consumer devices come with so many safety doodads attached that it takes an act of determined negligence to cut off a finger or put out an eye. Helmeted to avoid concussions, GPS'ed up the wing-wang to make it impossible to get lost in the forest, protected by surveillance cameras around the clock, we now live in a fully airbagged world, where accidental death is blocked by technology at almost every juncture. The paradox of all this safety is that it ends up making a lot of us feel all the more unsafe when we’re reminded that random tragedies do happen—and to clamor for an even bigger airbag when they do, even though the rational mind tells us we’ve reached a diminishing point of returns on that investment.

I’m not counseling anybody to “get over” 9/11 and slough off new attacks as if they’re pinpricks. But neither am I encouraging everybody to throw themselves into a full 9/11 wallow every time a bomb explodes, even if it blows up right in Manhattan. The low, low risk that a terrorist attack might injure you may not deserve the round-the-clock coverage the current incident is getting. It deserves some, and the press should feel free to pick on the 9/11 scab as much as it likes—but it’s not too much to ask the press to toss a little ointment and a bandage on the wound every now and then.

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My autobiography will be titled A Little Ointment and a Bandage. Send your titles via email to [email protected]. My email alerts self-detonate. My Twitter feed has a short fuse. My RSS feed burns like a grease fire.