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In addition, when a neighborhood's crime victims are portrayed as victims-sympathetically and without blame, as humans rather than as statistics-people living in other parts of the city are more inclined to support social services for the area, which in turn can reduce the crime rate.
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kids
teens-moms
minorities
drugs
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Barry Glassner |
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6195bd9
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge was right when he claimed, 'In politics, what begins in fear usually ends up in folly.' Political activists are more inclined, though, to heed an observation from Richard Nixon: 'People react to fear, not love. They don't teach that in Sunday school, but it's true.' That principle, which guided the late president's political strategy throughout his career, is the sine qua non of contemporary political campaigning. Ma..
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politics
fear
power
irrationality
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Barry Glassner |
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ce5cc3f
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Criminologists have documented that the amount of coverage a crime victim receives affects how much attention police devote to the case and the willingness of prosecutors to accept plea bargains.
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fear
teen-moms
minorities
culture
drugs
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Barry Glassner |
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90fe9e9
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Producers of TV newsmagazines routinely let emotional accounts trump objective information.
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Barry Glassner |
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dd110b5
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In TV newsrooms, if it bleeds it leads remains the watchword. A study of 559 newscasts in twenty television markets across the United States compared the crimes covered by local news to the number and types of crimes actually committed. Although crime had fallen for eight years prior to the 2004 study, in all twenty markets "audiences were told essentially the same story--that random, violent crime was a persistent and structural feature of..
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Barry Glassner |
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00a419a
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Michelle Obama, spoke to supporters in rural Iowa about why she agreed to let her husband run. "Barack and I talked long and hard about this decision. This wasn't an easy decision for us," she explained, "because we've got two beautiful little girls and we have a wonderful life and everything was going fine, and there would have been nothing that would have been more disruptive than a decision to run for president of the United States. "And..
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Barry Glassner |
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29b2455
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Television news programs survive on scares. On local newscasts, where producers live by the dictum "if it bleeds, it leads," drug, crime, and disaster stories make up most of the news portion of the broadcasts."
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Barry Glassner |
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7f9d645
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Flash forward to the 1980s and 1990s and it is not foreign fascists we have to put out of our minds in order to fall asleep at night, even if we do fantasize about hostile forces doing us great harm. (Witness the immediate presumption after the Oklahoma City bombing and the crash of TWA Flight 800 that Middle Eastern terrorists were to blame.) Mostly our fears are domestic, and so are the eerie invaders who populate them--killer kids, men o..
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Barry Glassner |
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1ede45c
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By the time George Bush's re-election campaign got under way in 2004, there was little doubt he'd make terrorism the focal point of all of his speeches and press conferences. His surrogates went farther still, overtly portraying a vote for his Democratic rival, Senator John Kerry, as an invitation to annihilation. "If we make the wrong choice," Vice President Dick Cheney warned a Des Moines audience, "the danger is that we'll get hit again-..
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Barry Glassner |
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4213c1c
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While a major focus of this book is fear mongering by journalists and others, throughout the chapters that follow I take note as well of reporters who bring to light serious dangers about which the public hears little from politicians, corporations, and most of the media. Indeed, again and again I find that it is reporters, rather than government oversight organizations, academics, or other professional truth seekers, who debunk silly or ex..
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Barry Glassner |
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62ccc42
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The more things improve the more pessimistic we become. Violence-related deaths at the nation's schools dropped to a record low during the 1996--97 academic year (19 deaths out of 54 million children), and only one in ten public schools reported any serious crime. Yet Time and U.S. News & World Report both ran headlines in 1996 referring to "Teenage Time Bombs." In a nation of "Children Without Souls" (another Time headline that year), "Ame..
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Barry Glassner |
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9f7b280
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Disproportionate coverage in the news media plainly has effects on readers and viewers. When Esther Madriz, a professor at Hunter College, interviewed women in New York City about their fears of crime they frequently responded with the phrase "I saw it in the news." The interviewees identified the news media as both the source of their fears and the reason they believed those fears were valid. Asked in a national poll why they believe the c..
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Barry Glassner |
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0a674b1
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Dennis Rome, "Stereotyping by the Media," in C. R. Mann and M. Zatz, eds., Images of Color, Images of Crime (Los Angeles: Roxbury,"
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Barry Glassner |
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7a8ef78
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In nearly every episode of fear mongering I discussed in the previous chapters as well, people with fancy titles appeared. Hardly ever were they among the leading figures in their field. Often they were more akin to the authorities in "War of the Worlds": gifted orators with elevated titles. Arnold Nerenberg and Marty Rimm come immediately to mind. Nerenberg (a.k.a. "America's road-rage therapist") is a psychologist quoted uncritically in s..
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Barry Glassner |
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0641acb
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Fear mongers make their scares all the more credible by backing up would-be experts' assertions with testimonials from people the audience will find sympathetic.
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Barry Glassner |