Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis

by David L. Altheide

Taking advantage of electronic information bases, Altheide, whose previous interpretive studies of the mass media are well known, uses a "tracking discourse" method to show how the nature and use of the word "fear" by mass media have changed over the years. His analysis examines how some of the topics associated with fear (e.g., AIDS, crime, immigrants, race, sexuality, schools, children) have shifted in emphasis, and how certain news organizations and social institutions benefit from the exploitation of fear.

This book is about fear and its expanding place in our public life. The author documents the rise of a "discourse of fear" in the present era: the pervasive communication, sym-bolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk surround us. Altheide offers explanations of how this occurred and suggests some of its serious social consequences. In doing so, he focuses on the nature and use of social power and social control. The mass media play a significant role in shaping social definitions that govern social action. Relatedly, his methodological and theoretical foundation in classical social theory, existential-phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and symbolic interactionism leads him to view social power as the capacity to define situations for self and others.

Creating Fear is focused on sorting out the ways that the mass media and popular culture help define social situa-tions. It helps understand the nature, process, and organiza-tion of mass media operations, including news procedures, perspectives, and formats. It recognizes the need to expand our methodological frameworks to incorporate new infor-mation technologies and databases and to ask different ques-tions. This volume, which attempts to break the circle of fear discourse, will be of interest to sociologists, communi-cations scholars, and criminologists.

238 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2002

Reviews

[Alex Swirsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

i’m rly glad i committed to finishing this even tho my thesis is done. first of all i felt it was a very accessible and informative read. it was definitely well researched. and i think it’s rly relevant for today. this is perhaps best exemplified by a paragraph i’ll provide from the last few pages:

“The discourse of fear has major implications for social justice and especially our standards of justice. Fear destroys justice. A just society can never come from fear. Every oppressive society — particularly in the modern era — has been consumed with fear of the “other” and has justified the extreme horrific and often genocidal actions that have been taken as necessary to deal with the evil other. Part of the fear industry promotes fear by offering solutions that attack the objects of fear. Promises of safety, restitution. and so forth are exchanged for justice. Criminal justice agency officials, politicians, and the numerous social scientists that engage in research and activities involving victim advocacy, for example, often are promoting narrow, self-serving agendas that destroy freedom and promote vengeance and social control.”

Two examples of why this is so relevant: 1. watching ppl close to me become so driven by narratives of antisemitism promoted by social media accounts that profit off of pushing such narratives, that those who ik to be rational, kindhearted people, are now so scared they are wholeheartedly supporting the genocide of the people of gaza. i live somewhere so jewish that i didnt know abt antisemitism until like late in middle school, but @StopAntisemitism and accounts of that genre have convinced my mom she’s so in danger that she took down our mezuzah! 2. on a less personal note, people are so terrified of illegal immigrants either taking jobs or killing innocent young girls, because fox news snd donald trump said it so it must be true, that we now have brand new concentration camps built to house these immigrants, who are largely innocent and undeserving of such treatment.

given context such as that, this book rly resonated with me. also bc of its discussion of how the pervasive discourse of fear has led people to be so supportive of increased policing, surveillance, and incarceration, because those who benefit from the expansion of such programs come on tv and tell us we should all be scared and that we should be happy to give up our civil liberties so we can be kept safe. people are constantly being told they have so much to fear, which leads them to support the growth of repressive institutions, much to the benefit of these institutions and the politicians who benefit from promoting such agendas as well.

[Salahuddin Hourani]

ملاحظة لي: لم اقرا الكتاب بعد - عن ان الفزع والتوتر من عدم الامن ونتيجة لسرعةالتغير هما ككرة الثلج، فيولدون انفسهم بانفسهم ، فالمزيد من الذعر والخوف والقلق المرتبطين بالحداثة لا يؤدون الا الى المزيد من الذعر والخوف والقلق