| Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis Contributor(s): Altheide, David L. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0202306607 ISBN-13: 9780202306605 Publisher: Routledge OUR PRICE: $54.40 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: May 2002 Annotation: Taking advantage of electronic information bases, Altheide, whose previous interpretive studies of the mass media are well known, uses a "tracking discourse" method to show how the nature and use of the word "fear" by mass media have changed over the years. His analysis examines how some of the topics associated with fear (e.g., AIDS, crime, immigrants, race, sexuality, schools, children) have shifted in emphasis, and how certain news organizations and social institutions benefit from the exploitation of fear. This book is about fear and its expanding place in our public life. The author documents the rise of a "discourse of fear" in the present era: the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk suround us. Altheide offers explanations of how this occurred and suggests some of its serious social consequences. In doing so, he focuses on the nature and use of social power and social control. The mass media play a significant role in shaping social definitions that govern social action. Relatedly, his methodological and theoretical foundation in classical social theory, existential-phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and symbolic interactionism leads him to view social power as the capacity to define situations for self and others. "Creating Fear is focused on sorting out the ways that the mass media and popular culture help define social situations. It helps understand the nature, process, and organization of mass media operations, including news procedures, perspectives, and formats. It recognizes the need to expand our methodological frameworks to incoporate new information technologies and databases and to ask different questions. This volume, whichattempts to break the circle of fear discourse, will be of interest to sociologists, communications scholars, and criminologists. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Media Studies - Social Science | Sociology - General - Language Arts & Disciplines | Communication Studies |
| Dewey: 302.230 |
| LCCN: 2001045913 |
| Series: Social Problems and Social Issues |
| Physical Information: 0.56" H x 6.32" W x 8.68" (0.72 lbs) 238 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Altheide, David L.: - David L. Altheide is Regents' Professor in the School of Justice Studies at Arizona State University. A former president for the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, he has focused much of his work on the role of mass media and information technology for social control. Among his previously published books are two from Aldine de Gruyter: Media Worlds in the Post journalism Era (with Robert P. Snow) and An Ecology of Communication. |