THE MONKEY-MAN OF DELHI AND SUMMER OF THE SHARK: MEDIA, MASS HYSTERIA AND THE UNCRITICAL PUBLIC

 The spring and summer of 2001 saw two cases of mass hysteria take hold of two countries, halfway around the world from each other. But both in India and the United States, the press jumped on the frenzy, evidence, rationality and integrity be damned. Exploitative media is, of course, still very much alive more than twenty years later but the two cases of 2001 are an intriguing window into a world still unfamiliar, much less preoccupied, with the term 9/11. In a matter of months the world, and the media, would change.

Mass hysteria was nothing new in the spring of 2001. In December of 1997 a number of children in Japan became dizzy after watching an episode of Pokémon featuring the use of strobe lighting. Hospitals later revealed that while a few kids did suffer mild epileptic seizures after viewing the episode most were the result of mass hysteria.

Still, it baffles the mind how easily the press in India turned the story of the Monkey-Man of Delhi into national panic without even the crudest of tangible evidence. It began in May of 2001 when rumors began circulating around New Delhi that a creature resembling an ape was attacking locals. Descriptions varied with the animal ranging in size from four to eight feet and some even claimed in wore armor, though the simian features remained consistent. Nothing, not even the usual rudimentary tracks, fuzzy photos or obscure sounds, however, was brought forth. At most some attack victims demonstrates bite marks and scratches but they looked no worse or different from the bite marks of any number of small animals.

Of course, this was all the press needed to stir a city into a panic that caught global attention. The New Delhi police had no choice but to take the hysteria stirred by the case if not the substance of it, seriously, setting up hotlines for witnesses which soon became favorite venues for practical jokers and hoaxers.

Undoubtedly a portion of the public truly did believe a strange creature was running amuck in the village, with two locals dying trying to pursue what they believed was the animal (one jumped off a roof and another fell down a staircase).

By the end of May the panic of the Delhi’s Monkey-Man had died as quickly as it had began. To calm the public’s fears, city officials rescinded a power-out mandate began earlier in the season to conserve energy as a heat-wave was striking the city. Tellingly, the panic started just as the power-out mandate took effect and ended just as it was rescinded.  All it took was one unsubstantiated rumor for the masses to believe that any creature or sound they could not identify in the darkness must have been the Monkey-Man.

By comparison, the Summer of the Shark which terrorized beachgoers a month later and for the rest of the summer of 2001 in the United States was a far more rational and understandable concern. Nonetheless, it remains in many ways one of the all-time test cases of how both the media and the uncritical public can take facts that are not untrue unto themselves and turn them into an undue cause for alarm.

Indeed, the Summer of the Shark was launched by an incredible story of survival. On July 6 of that year, eight-year-old Jesse Arbogast was bitten by a bull shark while wading in the shallow waters of Gulf Island’s National Seashore. Arbogast would lose his arm in the attack before a bystander pulled him out of the water. The ease with which Arbogast’s uncle was able to kill the shark and drag it to shore indicates it was a sick or older. Miraculously, the Arbogast’s arm was recovered from the shark’s mouth and surgically reattached. Despite the loss of blood, Jesse Arbogast recovered.

A number of attacks followed in the ensuing weeks. Not far from where Arbogast was attacked 48-year-old surfer Michael Waters suffered a bite from what he and doctors presume to have been a shark. Two other victims survived shark attacks in Florida that week with a few fatalities occurring by the end of summer.

The sensationalist nature of the media’s coverage of the ensuing shark attacks during the summer of 2001 (likely inspired once it had whetted its appetite with the Jesse Arbogast story) created a frenzy culminating in TIME magazine dubbing it (as the cover story) “The Summer of the Shark”. The Summer of the Shark is a particularly interesting study case because throughout it facts were never fabricated. Nothing necessarily untrue was said, numbers were not manipulated. But they were, however, released without perspective or explanation. It is this kind of case that is harder to deconstruct for a terrorized public (since the facts are not wrong in the obvious sense) and therefore far more harmful.

For instance, in mid-August various news outlets released helicopter footage of “hundreds” of sharks swimming up the Florida coast, painting the phenomenon as a “shark epidemic” but, as Loren Coleman said in The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger Mayhem in Tomorrow’s Headlines, “Television news people categorized it as a major scare for life and limb, but shark migrations occur annually and are as natural as birds flying south for the winter.”

About decontextualized numbers? The summer of 2001 saw 76 shark attacks and so was dubbed “Summer of the Shark”, but the 85 shark attacks of the summer of 2000 caused little stir. Further, the attacks of 2001 resulted in five fatalities, the attacks of 2000 in twelve.

How, then, to account for the attacks of 2001 creating such a stir? John Stossel perhaps explained the phenomenon best. “Instead of putting risks in proportion, we hype interesting ones. Tom Brokaw, Katie Couric, and countless others called 2001 the "summer of the shark." In truth, there wasn't a remarkable surge in shark attacks in 2001. There were about as many in 1995 and 2000, but 1995 was the year of the O.J. Simpson trial, and 2000 was an election year. The summer of 2001 was a little dull, so reporters focused on sharks.”

Tragically, before September was over the world would realize how far shark attacks were from being the biggest threat to safety and how we longed for the days of a slow news season

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SALVATORE MARANZANO: THE KILLING AND ERASING OF A MOB BOSS

  The modern Mafia was born with the assassination of Salvatore Maranzano on September 10, 1931, and yet not a single photo of Maranzano alive has surfaced. There is but one verified photo of Maranzano, after he was stabbed to death by Lucky Luciano’s gang at Maranzano’s office in New York Central Building, a bloodied corpse spread on the floor with his face mutilated beyond recognition. From this photo a face impression was recently stitched together by computer wizards but the limits of technology show. One mystery the technicians, with all their skill, could not crack is the identity of the assailants who brought Maranzano down.   This lack of record is baffling considering the pivotal role Maranzano played in the history of the Mafia, his rise to power coming at a pivotal time in its transformation. Maranzano saw opportunity playing upon the growing rift between the new generation of mobsters and the old guard but instead became its second victim and kicked off a purge o...
Read more

MY UNFINISHED NOVEL

 Perhaps what fascinates me most about unfinished works is that they leave so much to the speculation. What is left to us are clues to a mystery that, if they could be solved, would tell the full story that exists only within the artist’s imagination. I make a point of seeking out examples of works left incomplete deliberately (a decision often born out of artistic frustration) or as casualties of finances, destruction or death of the artist. It’s become a hobby to fit these tantalizing pieces into an artistic canon and patching together what the artist envisioned. What if Jane Austen had finished Sanditon and what was the true ending (though letters left behind have officially confirmed the identity of the murderer) of Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood ? Though it takes turns conventional and breathless soon after Henry James’s The Sense of the Past begins so atmospherically one wishes the author had not abandoned it. Even cinema has its ghosts. Existing scraps from Orson Wel...
Read more

Mark Twain and the Introduction of the Time Travel Novel

  Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was one of the earliest time travel novels and yet Twain writes with a polish that has apparently long since disappeared in the genre. A decade later H.G. Wells’s Time Machine would use time travel as a cautionary tale and popularized many of the tropes familiar to science-fiction and fantasy lovers today. Indeed, time travel novels have seldom strayed far from warnings of dystopia. In this regard , A Connecticut Yankee started the mold by telling of things to come but, writing before the genre developed its own expectations, Twain had some wiggle room. The Past Middle Ages paints an unflattering parable to then contemporary America and Britain. Twain swims through the as yet unestablished laws and conventions of time travel fiction with remarkable ease for a pioneer in the genre. Arguably, the embryo of time travel fiction was Dickens’s Christmas Carol and, though the future looked bleak enough to warn Scrooge of h...
Read more