The Culture of Fear : Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things

Rating:
Summary: good but not great
Review: Along with Emile Durkheim's examination of suicide, and countless other assessments, Barry Glassner, with his book titled, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, adds himself to a list of sociologists addressing social problems. A professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, Glassner is specifically interested in debunking social problems that have been exaggerated and over-played in America causing unnecessary fear. On most accounts, he successfully refutes many of America's fears about crime, deviance, and social dysfunction, and his book reads smoothly and easily. For the numerous Americans who remain blinded by politicians and the media, it is certainly an eye-opening and worthy read. However, Glassner's book does not come without fault. I could not rid myself of a growing disapproval as I continued towards the end of the book. It seems that, instead of providing a thorough analysis of America's culture of fear, as his book title hints, he remains caught up in listing numerous specific case complaints towards the media and others who are to blame for misleading the populous. Therefore, while filing numerous complaints towards the media etc., he fails to enter into any real depth of social analysis. At times, Glassner also reports some seemingly tainted inconsistencies in his writing. In end, I concluded that while Glassner's book serves as a good tool in popularizing somewhat necessary skepticism towards the media, it does little to make a profound contribution to sociology.
Glassner's book begins with a question that underlies the entirety of its pages. Specifically, he asks, "Why are so many fears in the air, and so many of them unfounded?(XI)" Glassner seeks to answer why our fears are disproportionate to our everyday life, and at least, why are they so misplaced. Consequently, Glassner bombards the reader with numerous cases where fear has been used and abused. He then begins debunking such cases by quoting several media sources and the like, which have overblown certain events. For example, in Glassner's first case in point, the "road rage" scare, he uses a source from an ABC 20/20 announcer who is quoted saying, "They're all around you(people with road rage), everywhere you drive, waiting to explode.(3)" Similarly to this 20/20 newscaster, Glassner repeatedly points to the ability of the media to twist stories and make incidents seem far more imminent than they really are. He says, "People's stories seldom make the simple or singular point that journalists profess they do.(143)" Then, after illustrating this ability of the media, he attempts to find the method or meaning behind their madness.
In essence, Glassner says that continually the same reasons are found behind these scares. First, Glassner points to the "if it bleeds, it leads" motto of those relaying the news. This is cause for countless cases where emotion is seen to trump accuracy. Glassner also notes the selfish reasoning behind this thinking. For example, he says that media organizations tend to exaggerate stories, or select specific news because they seek readers, or more specifically money. Also, he says that politicians twist their news in search for votes or other selfish reasons.
Secondly, Glassner says that these media scares are cover-ups for much larger underlying social problems. Glassner hypothesizes that, "Our fear grows with our unacknowledged guilt(72)." In essence, fears are promoted as we continually hide in shame towards the social ails which truly plague society. He says that, "In just about every contemporary American scare, rather than confront disturbing shortcomings in society the public discussion centers on disturbed individuals.(6)" This offers explanation for the scares that run untamed. For example, as Glassner discusses the crack baby scare, he says, "A by-product of social and economic distress, crack became the explanation for that distress (136)." Or in the case of road rage, Glassner notes, there are 17,000 deaths caused by DUI crashes versus the 200 deaths per year caused by road rage. Glassner says we are spending a great deal of time and money focusing on something as minuscule as road rage, when DUI's and easy access to guns are constantly being overlooked. Similarly, we worry about "Gulf War Syndrome" instead of worrying about shortcomings of the military, or we worry about violence at work when we should worry about the millions of jobs lost each year, and so on. Adding credibility to Glassner's arguments, he backs up his theories and debunking with a plethora of outside sources that provide statistics and valuable quotes.
Therefore, Glassner successfully argues against numerous scares time and time again. He has an organized plan that he effectively uses, and he also proves to have given many hours of research into his project with statistics and quotes galore. However, as said earlier, his book does not come without fault. As his book developed I kept waiting for Glassner to switch over from his continuous scare cases and complaints into chapters devoted to discussing the actual culture of fear. Much to my dismay, it never happened. Nearly up until the books completion he speaks about the scare of plane wrecks, and even after he finally completes that episode, he still only devotes the last five pages to what he calls "Final Thoughts." I couldn't help but feel like I had just watched a Jerry Springer episode where after a half-hour of arguing and fighting, Mr. Springer devotes the last thirty seconds to stepping back and delivering his "final thoughts." Consequently, the downfall of this book as a contribution to sociology lies in its inability to spend considerable time evaluating the culture of fear as a whole. Glassner spends little time in deep social analysis, and even less time in hypothesizing how America can rectify the situation (and no mention is made to why people haven't tried to do so previously). While the back cover of the book places it in the current affairs/ sociology section, it is apparent that it leans much closer to the current affairs classification than it does to sociology.
Furthermore, Glassner sometimes seems to fall under ideological spells and tainted views similar to the very ones he criticizes. The foremost example comes as Glassner repeatedly points to America's lax gun policies as the underlying reason for violence in America. He points to the fact that many killings could be avoided if people didn't have such easy access to guns. However, with this explanation and no proof backing it, I found it hard to swallow his thinking as factual. Perhaps, with this current of thought, Glassner should have also promoted getting cars of the road or at least addressed the question- Is access to cars correlated to automobile crashes in the same way that gun access is correlated to violence? In another occasion, tainted gun views once more caused for inconsistency in his thoughts. That is, Glassner criticizes politicians for capitalizing on famous child-abduction cases to get feel-good laws passed to boost their popularity, but he championed Scotland for passing a reactionary law banning .22 caliber weapons in response to a rare occasion that a man used one to shoot someone at school.


Rating:
Summary: Great at defining the problem, but not as to why it exists
Review: Barry Glassner does a solid job of showing that Americans are afraid of the wrong things; each chapter in "The Culture of Fear" describes a perceived social malady (crack babies, plane crashes, road rage, etc...) and explains why it's not as bad as many Americans perceive it to be.

While "The Culture of Fear" does an excellent job of defining the problem, like many books of this genre, only a small portion of the text is dedicated towards explaining why this problem exists, and barely a nod is given towards how society can rectify the situation (and no mention is made of why people haven't tried to do so already).

Furthermore, Glassner never delves into why the media is so hellbent on trying to scare us - sure, what scares us is symptomatic of a greater social concern, that is more difficult to address. But what's in it for the fear mongers? While he does give lip service to "if it bleeds, it leads" he never gets into how much money media outlets make by scaring the bejesus out of us or that fear is good for their
advertisers as well.

The book is great for the information you can throw at your news-junkie friends, however. And, while you are probably already aware of some of the ways in which the media tries to frighten the public, you'll pick up on some other scare tactics and become more media savy.

Rating:
Summary: The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong T
Review: Excellent book. The researches various fears and their associated propaganda.



Rating:
Summary: look askance at major media
Review: Glassner took 5 years off from teaching sociology at USC to write "Culture of Fear." It certainly shows. This book is a meticulously-footnoted indictment of mass media's distortion of reality. Among the things that Glassner skewers is the media's portrayal of teen moms & young black men as destroyers of American society, road rage, plane crashes, & health woes related to breast implants. The basic premises that Glassner covers are these:

1) Mass media creates panics & hysterias from a few isolated incidents. 2) Anecdotal evidence takes the place of hard scientific proof. 3) The experts that the media trots out to make comments really don't have the credentials to be considered an expert. 4) Entire categories of people are christened as "innately dangerous" (like the aforementioned teen moms and young black men)

Sometimes Glassner's tone towards media is very snide, which may turn the reader off. Nonetheless, I came away with a new distrust of nightly news magazines, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and others. Glassner goes for breadth rather than depth; many of the topics that he covered could be books in their own right. If you lean towards the Christian Conservative side, you won't like this book. Same goes for 2nd Amendment proponents, some Republicans and Libertarians.

Rating:
Summary: big scares hide our failure to address deeper problems
Review: Glassner's criticisms of the tendencies of our media and our politicians to hype alleged dangers fall on both the right and the left. Perhaps most important, he shows how America's leaders, and the people who elected them, are using these big scares to avoid talking about the real things wrong with our society. We worry about road rage instead of addressing serious transportation issues; worry about child kidnapping instead of about the lack of adequate food, housing, and health care for many of the nation's children; worry about crack cocaine instead of the vast numbers of people abusing alcohol and the lack of treatment for almost any drug problems.

One warning: if you love your gun, you won't like the book, because Glassner emphasizes that for many of our alleged violence problems, "IT'S THE GUNS, STUPID."

A quote that sums up the book: "We waste tens of billions of dollars and person-hours evry year on largely mythical hazards like road rage... on programs designed to protect young people from dangers that few of them ever face, on compensation for victims of metaphorical illnesses... We can choose to redirect some of those funds to combat serious dangers that threaten large numbers of people. At election time we can choose candidates that proffer programs rather than scares. Or we can go on believing in martian invaders."

Rating:
Summary: Well researched and even more relevent now
Review: In the course of reading Barry Glassner's "The Culture of Fear," I was surprised that Glassner took a more balanced view than I had at first expected. After being featured in left-wing muckracker, Michael Moore's latest film, "Bowling for Columbine," I had assumed Glassner, too, had produced a one-sided liberal rant about the corporate-controlled media interests. I was wrong.

While some of Glassner's conclusions may be questionable, like his statements without clear evidence that the availability of guns are almost entirely to blame for the nation's violence, much of his book is filled with example-after-example of familiar media-propagated scares of the 1990s along with well-researched statistics to debunk the myths. After reading the book, the pattern became clear of how the media spins its stories to make them deliberately misleading in order to sell fear and keep viewers and readers plugged in. I believe this educational experience has made me a more savvy and skeptical consumer of the news.

While Glassner's primary target in "The Culture of Fear" is the media, other groups are also shamed along the way (and they aren't all conservatives, either!) For instance, he spends a fair amount of time accusing feminists of propagating the silicone breast implant scares for symbolic gains even as study-after-study, some very large, involving tens of thousands of women showed no increased evidence of medical problems due to the implants.

One trend that I found amusing in many of the scares is that genuine experts are often ignored in the propagation of the fears. When genuine experts are consulted and disagree with the media's spin, their rational hard-facts explanations are often dismissed with a brush of the hand from the interviewer and followed by a, "but what about all the children?" or "but you can't deny people are suffering?" when there may be no connection between the suffering and the purported cause or the chances of the threat occurring being several times less likely than being struck by lightning. Instead, for airline safety stories, we rely on "seasoned traveler" Joe Blow, as if by riding an airplane a couple times a month Joe is an expert or we rely on college student and self-proclaimed researcher, Marty Rimm, for all that is known about Cyberporn and our children's exposure to it. (Rimm achieved earlier fame by manipulating the media in high school with a trumped-up scare of teenagers spending time in New Jersey casinos. Later debunked, you'd think the media would be more skeptical of him when he applied his manipulation tactics again.) The pattern is similar: when reporters are trying to propagate a scare, they find whomever they can to agree with their pre-decided point-of-view, not matter their dubious qualifications, and ignore anyone who casts doubt on the sensationalized arguments, regardless of their authority.

Yes, I am sure there are conclusions within the book that will make conservatives irate, like the observation that it is poverty that causes crime, not race or crack, but it is interesting to find out that in an era when crime rates were dropping, coverage of crime increased 600%, thus creating an impression on the public that crime is out of control. And, no, things aren't any worse now than they were before...a lot of bad things happened in the past, too, like kids killing kids, but it is the media coverage, not the trend that is growing.

Overall, it is a good read and well-documented. Most of the spin is transparent enough to separate it from the interesting factual data contained within it. If you are living in fear of terrorism or any of the other scare-du-jour, this book is definitely worth a read.

Rating:
Summary: Chicken Little USA
Review: It's amazing that many Americans even have the guts to get up in the morning. In a nation where, statistically speaking, people have the most risk-free and least danger-prone standard of living in the world, Americans are ridiculously prone to being scared of things that have no reason to be scary. Classic examples are rising fears of crime and drug use, which are actually falling, and the curiously American obsession with illnesses and domestic threats that don't even exist. Barry Glassner studies this phenomenon with a great no-holds-barred investigative style and plenty of stinging social criticism.

As you can expect, Glassner's top culprits are corporations and the media. Guess what - there's money to be made from public panics and that's when the corporations move in. Pharmaceutical companies won't bother to tell you that the "epidemic" of depression in America has little or no scientific evidence to back it up, when they can make handsome profits selling the associated drugs. Meanwhile, in the media's obsession with advertising dollars, they are duped to play along with that trend uncritically. Also, ratings points are gained by bombarding the public with scare tactics about how everything is such a threat to their well-being. But we find that these tactics almost always involve isolated incidents that are portrayed as trends with dire consequences to all of society, plus "expert" testimony that is really personal anecdotes from propagandists and self-appointed moral watchdogs.

Above Glassner's treatment of those phenomena, he has an even better big-picture theory. Media and public fascination with insignificant and nonexistent threats allow us to evade painful examination of real root causes and social problems. For example, the media jumped all over Gulf War Syndrome, which has never been proven scientifically, to criticize the military establishment, after being too scared to criticize the actual war. We are obsessed with minor teenage drug use and crime so we don't have to face the deeper social conditions that lead to those outcomes, especially poverty and inequality. In this book Glassner does a terrific job explaining why Americans will always obsess over the symptoms while pretending that the underlying diseases don't exist.

Rating:
Summary: A great reading material for the media addict !
Review: Mr. Glassner has writtten a great expose about our delusional and paranoiac media system that perpetuates illusions, delusions, and partial truth, placing us in a constant imbroglio, and rendering our society into a bewildered, scared, narcissitic, paranoid, homophobic, split/schizophrenic, and brainwashed society.
Mr Glassner will provide you in his book with truthful material that will encourage the average person to cogitate, instead of simply absorb what the venomous media imbues in our minds.
Media 101 teaches that fear works and gets ratings. "instill fear in them and they shall follow."
The airwaves belong to the public and we should claim it back. We should contact our FCC and demand unbiased, honest, and decent programming.
Fear is the driving force and the major psychological component of terror. Fear incapacitates people and renders them impotent. Fear is conducive to regressive behaviors by responsible adults. Fears justifies our willingness to relinquish our most intimate and sacred rights in order to feel safe. Fear is primal. It brings out the primitive and reptilian part of our humanity.
It is tragic that the media outlets dictate our lives, educate our children, and shape our daily opinions.
We are treated as frightened, dependent, and ignorant children that will follow their parents anywhere to
survive. Walter Lippmann (a media Guru) has called us (the people) the perfect name "the bewildered herd." Or are we? The culture of fear makes a great reading that would help us dispel the myth behind our glamorous media !




Rating:
Summary: Sleep easy...
Review: One knows to always take something with a grain of salt, but I never knew how big a grain it should be until marvelling at the level of detail and research the author put into this book. Although the overriding conclusions at the end of the book were themselves a bit of a reach and I didn't necessarily agree with them, the facts speak for themselves.

Reading this has made me immune to fear the mongering we experience everyday from the media, commercials and politicians. Now that my eyes (and ears) are open to these fear inducing "tricks", it is absolutely astounding how pervasive their use is--so much so I regularly laugh at the evening news and perscription drug commercials!

Buy the book and rest easy.

Rating:
Summary: Be Careful, Junk Science
Review: The author obviously has an agenda to protect Hollywood. Ill bet he lives in an upscale neighboorhood where all the police have to worry about are cats in trees. He tries to convince the reader that violence in the USA is because of the News. He steers you away from vulgar RAP music, the Gangsta culture, senseless violent movies, schools that are purposely dumbing down kids and the glorification by the media of alternate lifestyles, which are designed to weaken the family structure thus producing more crime. I recommend Four Reasons for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander, it is much more objective.