Havin'-a-column Syndrome: Squid Gaming school kids, 'needle spiking' and why British journalism loves a moral panic...
Who needs proof when you've got terror?
As I was sitting down to write this edition of the newsletter I heard Times Radio’s Aasmah Mir doing a trail: “And we’ll be asking — how do we protect women from being ‘spiked’ in nightclubs?” She went on to say, without caveat, that the show would be discussing “the awful development of women being jabbed in nightclubs with needles containing drugs”.
In the past week, a series of claims of ‘spiking via injection’ in nightclubs has been conflated with suggestions from the police of a rise in drink spiking to create a story that an epidemic of ‘needle spiking’ is haunting the UK. But the evidence is far less clear than the anxious newspaper headlines suggest.
The Times this morning goes with Students tell of ‘spiking by syringe’ on the dancefloor with those inverted commas covering its arse even as the headline stokes up the fear. Meanwhile, its tabloid sibling The Sun, carries another story of a student who believes she was ‘needle spiked’: 'COMPLETELY VIOLATED' I was on a night out with pals when I collapsed – the next morning I discovered I had been ‘spiked’ with injection.
The Sun copy recounts the woman’s story alongside quotes from two others who believe they were ‘needle spiked’. This isn’t about disbelieving the women when they say that something happened to them but that reports like The Sun’s don’t contain quotes from experts and entirely accept the concept of “needle spiking” without question or caveat.
The Sun’s report uses phrases like “the latest in a worrying string of suspected injection spiking attacks”, “fears young women are being targeted by spikings, directly injected with a type of drug”, “a worrying number of women have reported similar experiences” and “targeted with a mystery liquid” which are likely to increase a reader’s fear without any relation to facts.
The Times and Daily Mail alike go heavy on the line that Priti Patel “has asked police chiefs to investigate urgently how widespread the form of spiking with needles is after reports of several incidents at nightclubs and house parties.” Again that sounds scary until you ask the follow up: Is ‘needle spiking’ actually a thing? If it’s not then Patel may as well be asking “police chiefs” about the threat of vampire unicorns.
Sophia Smith Galer of Vice World News has done what many reporters — hyped up on the folk panic — have not; she’s actually spoken to experts about whether ‘needle spiking’ would work and if it’s likely to actually be occurring:
Guy Jones, senior scientist at drugs charity the Loop, said: “Injecting adds a big ‘what?’ factor to the whole thing because few drugs would be able to be injected like this. Where drugs can be injected non-intravenously, there are specific injection sites that do not work well. The back is one of these unsuitable sites due to the low fat-muscle content, and high concentration of pain receptors.”
… David Caldicott, an emergency medicine consultant and founder of drug testing project WEDINOS, said:
“There are a couple of things that are disconcerting about this story. The technical and medical knowledge required to perform this would make this deeply improbable. It is at the level of a state sponsored actor incapacitating a dissident, like the Novichok incident.
The idea that a clubber would do this to a fellow clubber seems highly unlikely to me. It’s really hard to stick a needle in someone without them noticing, especially if you have to keep the needle in there for long enough, maybe 20 seconds, to inject enough drugs to cause this. If you were malicious there would be half a dozen much easier other ways to spike someone.”
Caldicott rightly says that any incident where a person believes “something has happened that has deprived them of their cognitive liberty [is taken] seriously and [investigated] to the hilt.” He also sensibly suggests that there could be people sticking needles into others but that “the association between sticking needles into people and people being intoxicated and collapsing seems far-fetched at the moment.”
All responsible reporting should contain those caveats. But newspapers, as well as TV and radio programmes, are not reporting responsibly on this story.
It’s the great ‘killer’ clown panic of 2016 all over again; a shocking idea taken up by the press and amplified over and over without the basics of the claims being interrogated. A report in September 2016 of a “creepy clown” jumping out of bushes to scare children was followed by reports of half a dozen similar incidents. By October 5 2016, the tabloids were warning of “a terrifying clown craze” and as the stories, which hit a potent mix of childhood fear, Steven King nostalgia, and worries about “stranger danger”, got clicks, the papers kept pumping them out.
The ‘needle spiking’ story seemingly takes something that is real and horrifying — spiking — and ratchets it up to another level. With nightclubs reopened but the pandemic still raging, it catches a mood of ambient anxiety and combined with other real stories — the murder of Sarah Everard among them — it feels very real and in line with a society where violent misogyny is prevalent. But stories that present ‘needle spiking’ as a fact as exploiting fear over facts.
Just as the American security establishment are gripped by Havana Syndrome, hunting a mysterious weapon when most experts believe it’s a classic case of psychogenic contagion1, the British press always prefers the scariest explanation available; call it Havin'-a-column Syndrome.
As I write, media rubbish dump scrabbler ‘Stig’ Abell has just commented during the Times Radio discussion on ‘needle spiking’ that he’d “never heard of this before the last few days", but the sudden arrival of a spate of “needle spikings” did not lead him to question whether they’re actually a thing at all. Once a phenomenon is talked about enough in the press it almost ceases to matter if there’s any truth to it, the sheer volume of comment brings it to life.
In the same radio discussion, a contributor said, “We’ve seen quite a few sources on social media reporting this over the past few days…” as if that was proof of anything. Despite there being a substantial library of academic research into folk panics and sociogenic phenomena — including the recent exaggerated claims of TikTok ‘giving’ young girls Tourette’s Syndrome — many reporters, presenters, and columnists seem to believe if someone says something is happening it must be.
In The Times report, quotes from Dominic Raab (“[he] described the tactic as “despicable” and pledged that attackers would face “the full force of the law”.) and Sarah Crew, acting Chief Constable of Avon snd Somerset Police and National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesperson on rape and adult sexual offences (“[she] said it was a ‘fair assumption’ that the injection spiking was being driven by a sexual motive.”) are presented without any analysis or balance. The story is just too ‘good’ to question much.
Is it possible that attacks with needles are happening? Yes, it’s possible but the evidence as presented so far doesn’t lead directly to that conclusion. By writing news stories and columns that accept, without question, that “needle spiking” is a widespread and insidious trend threatening “our kids”, newspapers may lathe the ‘trend’ into existence; the troll instinct to leap on these suggestions is strong. It’s unrealistic to expect reporters and columnists to apply the Sagan standard (“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”) but a mild level of scepticism2 should be a minimum requirement.
I know why newspapers aren’t sceptical about stories like the ‘needle spiking’ though. Folk panics drive attention which drives clicks which drives revenue. Better for a paper to jump on the bandwagon of a “worrying trend” and then later do a long read about ‘how ridiculous all the panic was’ than to get in the way of the profitable fear in the here and now.
It’s the same mentality that has tabloids and ‘quality’ papers alike in a Prince Andrew-style sweat about Squid Game and its influence on children. That some schools are sending out letters telling parents not to let their kids watch the Netflix drama — being aware that children are being allowed to watch violent content is a potential safeguarding issue — was always going to be enough for a Daily Mail scare story and other papers have followed suit. Squid Game is SEO gold right now and if you can combine it with a Helen Lovejoy howl of “won’t somebody think of the children?” you’re onto a winner.
The first moral panic I remember3 ricocheting across the front pages was the worry that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would turn children into violent mobs. It was 1990 and I was six. Evan Smith’s excellent Tribune article from earlier this year (When the Right Tried to Cancel the Turtles) collects some of the hysterical headlines from the time:
The Daily Mail published a story of a four-year-old who ‘nearly bled to death after karate-kicking a glass door as he mimicked his television heroes in the Ninja Turtle cartoon cult’. Over at The Daily Telegraph, Victoria Mather claimed that ‘youngsters have been rescued from the sewers where they have been either seeking their scaly heroes or the necessary rat and user-friendly patch of radiation to turn themselves into pizza-powered warriors’.
The Daily Express reported that ‘a nationwide warning to children about the dangers of imitating the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles’ was issued the government’s Health and Safety Executive, concerning children playing in the sewers. An appeal was to be made on Going Live by Philip Schofield and Sarah Greene. The same newspaper also ran a story warning children not to binge on pizza like the Turtles, quoting a doctor who said ‘Eating junk food is going to turn the kids into aggressive echoes of the turtles’.
The media campaign (tied to the government’s Sun-pleasing attacks on “video nasties”) led to the chad Ninja Turtles being replaced by the virgin Hero Turtles for years. However, when a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon began in 2012 its title was unchanged for UK broadcast, the papers’ ‘concern’ about the word “ninja” being long since forgotten.
The turtle panic also produced one of my favourite British Board of Film Classification notes4, an admonishment to the filmmakers of 1991’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze:
After turtle takes down sausages and uses them as a flail. Reduce to minimum dazzling display of swinging sausages indistinguishable from chainsticks.
The approach of the British media’s approach to the ‘needle spiking’ story is reflected in a lot of its output. Take for example Sky News’ deputy political editor Sam Coates tweeting a long thread about a “plan to exclude Jeremy Corbyn permanently from the Parliamentary Labour Party” which ended with the line:
TL:DR Something might happen or it might not - so stay tuned
While there’s perhaps something commendable5 about that honesty, it illustrates a tendency in the WhatsApp-powered, Twitter-addicted age of British journalism: Social media and the endless pulse of updates from ‘sources’ has given British political hacks permanent verbal diarrhoea.
The fear of missing a story means many journalists endlessly live-tweet abject bibble and tenuous lines from sources that would be seen as transparent bullshit by anyone with a brain that hadn’t been reduced to pure grey jelly.
Another example yesterday came from generic Dad’s Army extra playing a spiv who tries to sell Mrs Pike some hooky nylons, Evening Standard columnist and Times Radio Chief Political Commentator Tom Newton-Dunn.
Newton-Dunn, who splashed a conspiracy theory based on neo-nazi sources on the front page of The Sun, pretended it wasn’t quickly deleted from the paper’s website, and rather than apologising for doing so now denies it ever happened, pushed out an Evening Standard column headlined MPs know how much they are hated. It’s time to rebuild faith in politics. There’s more naked gall in that than a hardcore Asterix porn parody.
Newton-Dunn — described as a bully who stole contacts and credit for stories by former Sun Whitehall Correspondent, Clodagh Hartley, at the Old Bailey in 2014 — writes:
Hating our MPs may satisfy at times, and a few do deserve condemnation for their venal self-service. But perhaps we could admit that rebuilding faith in politics and reversing the vicious spiral is an ambition we should all have.
So what’s to be done? The bottom line is each of us can do our bit.
I’ll start with mine. Political journalism is often far too quick to leap to judgment, and too wilfully uninterested in understanding often immensely complicated challenges. I take my trade’s share of the blame.
The public also need to stop and think a little more. Don’t just swallow the next anger-filled tweet or meme you see on social media because it gives you a kick. First consider what the motives of the person posting might be.
That’s conspiracy theory-peddling Newton-Dunn, a long-time employee of Rupert Murdoch, offering advice on checking the motives behind any given story. It makes sense, I suppose: He’s a proven expert in bad faith who cost The Sun £30,000 in libel damages after he falsely claimed that Labour MP Richard Burgon had recorded a song with a band that “delighted in Nazi imagery”. The band had simply parodied a Black Sabbath album cover.
While the ‘needle spiking’ story is far from clear, what’s entirely transparent is that disingenuous hacks like Newton-Dunn will only ask you to “consider the source” when it suits them. The rest of the time, they’ll try to harness your emotions — especially fear — while pretending to care deeply about the facts.
Imagine a demonic Derren Brown at work.
In its original, un-UnHerd related meaning.
The history of British moral panics is long, just ask the undead John Rentoul, who was around when Victorians worried that racy novels were causing children to grow up too fast and robbing them of their childhood.
Yes, I have several favourites.
(and quite funny)