The Culture Of Fear

3 Pages 852 Words

Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear is a critique of pre-nine/eleven American culture. Published in 1999 by Basic Books, The Culture of Fear exposed Americans to their own misplaced fears. This book offers a new perspective of the American media machine and its effective fear mongering techniques.

Barry Glassner is Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. The Culture of Fear was written over the course of five years and is Glassner’s seventh book. His writings regularly appear newspapers and newsmagazines including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

The most impressive feature of this book is its methodical use of statistics and research. Every point Glassner makes is supported by thoroughly researched evidence. Over forty-five pages of footnotes are included in this 210-page book. Glassner use these statistics to systematically disprove the most common misplaced fears.

Glassner’s first topic is road-rage. In the late ‘90s the Los Angeles Times, ABC, USA Today, Time, and even Oprah Winfrey ran huge stories depicting the horrors of road-rage. In the Los Angeles Times page one story on road-rage, it was
“Only after wading through twenty two paragraphs of alarming first-person accounts…did the reader learn that a grand total of five drivers and passengers had died in road rage incidents in the region over the previous five years” (p. 4).
This is the same article that declared, “Road-rage has become an exploding phenomenon.”

Similar instances of overbearing journalists occur in the Political Correctness (or P.C.) wave that swept the American College campuses during the early 1990s. Another example of this is the murder of Anthony Riggs. After just returning to his suburban Detroit apartment from the Gulf war, Army Spec. Anthony Riggs was apparently killed in a car jacking outside his home. Journalists saw a perfect story and Mrs. Toni Riggs was soon seen sobbing on na...