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, sym-bolic awareness, and
expectation that danger and risk surround 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 situa-tions. It helps
understand the nature, process, and organiza-tion of mass media
operations, including news procedures, perspectives, and formats.
It recognizes the need to expand our methodological frameworks to
incorporate new infor-mation technologies and databases and to ask
different ques-tions. This volume, which attempts to break the
circle of fear discourse, will be of interest to sociologists,
communi-cations scholars, and criminologists.
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