Fear Sells In The Media

“If a situation is perceived as real, it is real in its consequences,” W.I. Thomas once said, and his statement remains highly relevant today. As only a handful of corporations control all major news outlets, the diversity of content available to the consumer has declined rapidly in recent years. In such an environment, as well, network news programs have become a massive profit generator for their parent companies. Seeing only dollar signs, newspapers and television news programs have aimed their cameras and microphones at what sells best: fear.

After all, fear motivates people. Social research has shown that fear can lead to reclusive and dangerous choices such as taking drugs, “buying watch dogs, firearms, ant-burglary equipment,” according to a study by Liska, Lawrence, and Sanchirico in 1982. What better way to induce consumerism through fear than by showing the public what endangers them, and what they can buy to protect themselves? As Santa Cruz resident Travis Smith put it, fear in the news is “mostly aimed at making soccer moms afraid that their SUV is going to spontaneously kill their children, or that terrorists could be on every trip they make to visit Disney World waiting to brutally kill them,” even though their have been no terrorist attacks on American soil since September 11th, 2001.

Terrorism itself has been, in the minds of many, used as a never-ending scare tactic. Rohnert Park resident Doug Spackman says that media coverage of terrorism is “sensationalism, pure and simple, to breed fear,” and to “keep warm in the minds of people the “imminent threat” that we are led to believe we face. Such fear is used to justify American military action, such as the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which has been ongoing for over two years, at an expense of over $171 billion in tax revenues.
Another way in which fear-mongering media coverage betrays the American public is by placing scares over facts. Consider that the number of American military casualties in Iraq, placed at 1,644 according to the San Francisco Chronicle’s count as of May 25th, 2005. Compare that number to the estimated 2-3,000 Iraqis killed this past Saturday alone, but that number cannot be confirmed yet. “I think it’s pretty disgusting how they keep a constant toll of troop causalities, while generally ignoring the numbers of civilians and Iraqi police that are killed in much larger numbers” said Smith in a recent interview on the subject of body counts. This is another case that indicated the things we are told to fear have little relation to our daily lives.
Less immediately violent but still constantly employed by the news media to maintain a state of fear are medical concerns. One primary example is that of the infamous flu season. This year, stories told readers that “this winter, about five times more people will die for lack of flu vaccine as died on 9/11. Flu kills tens of thousands of people each year. Without vaccine, some 15,000 elderly Americans will needlessly die,” creating yet another bout panic-driven public hysteria. Commenting on media coverage of medical concerns, Rohnert Park citizen and Sonoma State University student predicted that “something new will crop up soon. The flu season was one of the worst,” in recent memory. Sonoma State senior Nicole Atkins took a position defying media scare tactics, saying “every year the media makes flu season seem like doomsday. It happens every year! Get over it!” In the ceaseless quest for profits though, the media cannot allow viewers to rest at ease. Comments from Los Angeles resident Cody Murray tie this symbiosis of fear and news together. Of the flu season epidemic he said, “As with most topics, the news likes to make people afraid because if something can kill you and the news has a story on how to not be killed....well, the average monkey...er…American is probably going to tune in. RATINGS!!!” and ratings rule the television news world.
One of the biggest concerns of many citizens, especially after the attacks of September 11th, is air travel safety. In the months following 9/11, commercial air travel declined significantly, but the fact remains that “the average person’s probability of dying in an air crash is about 1 in 4 million, or roughly the same as winning the jackpot in a state lottery,” according to statistics in Barry Glassner’s book The Culture of Fear. Glassner also writes that “dating back to 1914, fewer than 13,000 people have died in airplane crashes,” and “three times that many Americans lose their lives in automobile accidents in a single year”. While the safety of air travel is not always destroyed by careless media reports, the far greater danger of automobile travel is often underplayed. Substituting one fear for another, the news media manages to maintain panic without detracting from oil, gas, and vehicle revenues, surely of great interest to the corporations such that own the media.
Possibly the greatest failure of media coverage on air travel is its inconsistency. Cody Murray relayed his frustration with this inconsistency in that “one day it’s how safe things have become (thanks to GIs in airports with M-16s and full body cavity searches), the next it’s how some person got onboard with a switchblade, or a lighter,” or some other object that will threaten our lives. Murray here raises the issue of safety and security in comparison to invaded privacy. For many people, including Murray, the presence of soldiers with automatic weapons at airports is much more discomforting than the remote chance of airplane sabotage.
How does the mass media get away with this fear-mongering of remote dangers and omission of such tragedies as the slaughter of Iraqi civilians, or the recent genocide in the Sudan? How can news of flu vaccine shortages (that have now turned into surpluses), repeated coverage of terrorist threats monopolize our fears? When the news has transformed into info-tainment, and “the agenda of anything broadcast on television is to push ratings and gain advertisers,” as Annette Powell states, networks make the clear choice to promote dramatic, gripping stories based on anecdotal evidence rather than societal phenomena, we lose the ability to see and read stories about us, that truly affect us.
For many people, the state of our economy is a much more important issue than the potential threat of terrorism. For Travis Smith, the economy dominates his concerns because he is “right on the edge of graduating from college and the job market sucks pretty bad,” despite media efforts to assuage fears. While the media has worked economic stories into a positive light “to present favorably the Bush regime,” argues Doug Spackman. Cody Murray agrees, and believes that while terrorism and the Iraq war affect him as an American, they do not come to mind “as immediately as, say, looking for a job when the unemployment rate is higher than it’s been in decades,”.
Doug Spackman’s final comment on American news coverage is important when examining media scares. He says we are shown frightening, violent stories with little relevance to the majority of the American population because it works “to help sustain the U.S. culture of fear, and it is overly dramatic, to scare anyone who would try to learn about it,” when learning about it is exactly what can help alleviate and assuage media-induced panic. Arizona resident Savanna Carel recommended that “if you want to know the truth, do your own research. The only good thing about so many resources is that we have access to everything, so we can compile our OWN opinion”. If the desire for profits has given us anything besides fear-mongering, it is a near limitless supply of independent news media for us to inquire into.