Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis

Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis
ISBN-10
0202306607
ISBN-13
9780202306605
Category
Language Arts & Disciplines
Pages
223
Language
English
Published
2002
Publisher
Transaction Publishers
Author
David L. Altheide

Description

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 illustrates 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 attempts through the marshalling of significant data to interrupt that vicious cycle of fear discourse. David Altheide employs a method, which he calls "tracking discourse", to map how the nature and the extent of the use of the word "fear" has changed since the 1980s; how the topics associated with fear, the topics of media discourse, have also changed over the same period (for example, 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.

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