Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis (Social Problems and Social Issues)

Fear is pervasive in the United States. Numerous opinion polls indicate that American citizens remain fearful despite clear evidence that most citizens are healthier, safer, and happier than ever before. Why? Dr. Altheide, whose interpretive studies of the mass media are well known, provides an answer based on a variant of frame analysis of news reports and popular culture.

Availing himself of electronic information bases, Altheide employs a method, which he calls "tracking discourse," to map how the nature and extent of use of the word "fear" has changed since the 1980s; how the topics associated with fear, the topics of the media discourse, have also changed over the same period (e.g., the emphasis "moves" over time across AIDS, crime, immigrants, race, sexuality, schools, and children); and how certain news sources prevail over others, thus protectively insulating themselves from criticism of the premises of their discourse frames.

The creative use of fear by news media and social control organizations has produced a "discourse of fear"—the awareness and expectation that danger and risk are lurking everywhere. Case studies illustrate how certain organizations and social institutions benefit from the exploitation of such fear construction. One social impact is a manipulated public empathy: We now have more "victims" than at any time in our prior history. Another, more troubling result is the role we have ceded to law enforcement and punishment: We turn ever more readily to the state and formal control to protect us from what we fear. This book, which attempts through the marshalling of significant data to interrupt that vicious circle of fear discourse, will be of interest to sociologists, communications scholars, and criminologists.