Description
The creative use of fear by news media and social control organizations has produced a "discurse of fear" - the awareness and expection that danger and risk are lurking everywhere. Case studies illustrates how certain organizations and social institutions benefit from the explotation 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 resutl 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.
Table of Contents
1: Give the Devil His Due: Fear in Its Place; 2: Tracking Discourse; 3: The Problem Frame and the Production of Fear; 4: The Discourse of Fear; 5: Journalistic Interviewing; 6: Policing Crime and Fear in the News Media; 7: Children and the Discourse of Fear; 8: The Lens of Fear
