Urban Nightmares: The Media, The Right, And The Moral Panic Over The City

by Steve Macek

For the past twenty-five years, American culture has been marked by an almost palpable sense of anxiety about the nation's inner cities. Urban America has been consistently depicted as a site of moral decay and uncontrollable violence, held in stark contrast to the allegedly moral, orderly suburbs and exurbs. In Urban Nightmares, Steve Macek documents the scope of these alarmist representations of the city, examines the ideologies that informed them, and exposes the interests they ultimately served. Macek begins by exploring the conservative analysis of the urban poverty, joblessness, and crime that became entrenched during the post-Vietnam War era. Instead of attributing these conditions to broad social and economic conditions, right-wing intellectuals, pundits, policy analysts, and politicians blamed urban problems on the urban underclass itself. This strategy was successful, Macek argues, in deflecting attention from growing income disparities and in helping to secure popular support both for reactionary social policies and the assumptions underwriting them.Turning to the media, Macek explains how Hollywood filmmakers, advertisers, and journalists validated the right-wing discourse on the urban crisis, popularizing its vocabulary. Network television news and weekly news magazines, he shows, covered the inner city and its inhabitants in ways consonant with the right's alarmist discourse. At the same time, Hollywood zealously recycled this antiurban bias in films ranging from genre thrillers like Falling Down and Judgment Night to auteurist efforts like Batman and Seven. Even advertising, Macek argues, mobilized fears of a perilous urban realm to sell products from SUVs to home alarm systems.Published during the second term of an American president whose conservative agenda has been an ongoing disaster for the poor and the working class, Urban Nightmares exposes a divisive legacy of media bias against the cities and their inhabitants and issues a wake-up call to readers to recognize that media images shape what we believe about others' (and our own) place in the real world-and the consequences of those beliefs can be devastating.Steve Macek teaches media studies, urban and suburbia studies, and speech communication at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.

Genres: Urban Studies, Nonfiction, Cities, Geography

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

For at least the last quarter of a century, American culture has been gripped by a tangible sense of fear and uncertainty about its inner cities.

This perception of the inner city as a dark, depressing and amoral place is not a new phenomenon; think Charles Dickens and Victorian England. More recently, there was a "liberal" period in the early 1950s; books like Michael Harrington’s "The Other America" helped bring about Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. Aside from that, the end of World War II brought about the beginning of white flight to the suburbs. The difference in income between whites and blacks grew wider and wider.

After the 1960s riots, and especially since the Reagan Administration, conservatives have gone on the offensive, painting the city as some sort of evil, horrible place full of people who don’t think or act like "we" do. Welfare programs cause poverty and dependency. Inner city residents lack a sense of ethics or morality. While federal subsidies to cities were being slashed, that money was used to build more prisons. Minor crimes like vagrancy or graffiti were suddenly being treated much more seriously. Remember how "welfare queens" were supposed to be the cause of America’s problems? Remember the teenage "super-predators" who were supposed to flow into the suburbs like a tidal wave, leading to a huge increase in gated communities and the purchase of home security systems?

Advertising and the movies are just as guilty of giving the perception that the inner cities should be simply walled off and forgotten. Evidently, things like the moving of jobs to the suburbs, police racism, the ending of "welfare as we know it," and the lack of mass transit to get to those suburban jobs have nothing to do with the present state of America’s cities.

This book does a fine job at showing the latest attempt to find a scapegoat, to blame the poor and downtrodden, for America’s problems. More importantly, this book is quite readable; the author keeps it from sounding like a dry, academic tome. It is very much worth reading.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written by a friend of mine, who teaches out in Naperville, this is a great look at how the media has demonized cities and the (black) people who live there. One part intellectual history (great bibliography), one part summary of the fights over the issue in the 1980's and 1990's, and one part film critic, this is a great book that helps to understand the way things are today. Well written, quick read. For those of us who were organizing inthe 1990's but a little behind on the academic and public discourse part of it, this book is priceless.

[Michael Linton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating book in which I didn't get the point till the end. Everyone's focus is on the danger of the inner city ignoring how the city got to be in the first place.

[Mitchell Szczepanczyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm biased here since I'm friends with the author of this book. But trust me: the book is a jolly good read. Very informative, talks about the confluence of the media with urban policy in recent American history, and how the latter was shaped by the former.

[Liam Philbin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid argument on how conservative intellectuals, the media, and popular culture rationalized and legitimized the abandonment and condemnation of US urban centers along class/racial rhetoric.

Also a pretty helpful overview of the rise of conservative politics and centrist “New Democrats” from the 1960’s onward.