In addition, when a neighborhood's crime victims are portrayed as victims-sympathetically and without blame, as humans rather than as statistics-people living in other parts of the city are more incli...
Criminologists have documented that the amount of coverage a crime victim receives affects how much attention police devote to the case and the willingness of prosecutors to accept plea bargains.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was right when he claimed, 'In politics, what begins in fear usually ends up in folly.' Political activists are more inclined, though, to heed an observation from Richard Nixon...
Dennis Rome, Stereotyping by the Media, in C. R. Mann and M. Zatz, eds., Images of Color, Images of Crime (Los Angeles: Roxbury,
Disproportionate coverage in the news media plainly has effects on readers and viewers. When Esther Madriz, a professor at Hunter College, interviewed women in New York City about their fears of crime...
Producers of TV newsmagazines routinely let emotional accounts trump objective information.
Flash forward to the 1980s and 1990s and it is not foreign fascists we have to put out of our minds in order to fall asleep at night, even if we do fantasize about hostile forces doing us great harm....
Fear mongers make their scares all the more credible by backing up would-be experts’ assertions with testimonials from people the audience will find sympathetic.
Television news programs survive on scares. On local newscasts, where producers live by the dictum if it bleeds, it leads, drug, crime, and disaster stories make up most of the news portion of the bro...
While a major focus of this book is fear mongering by journalists and others, throughout the chapters that follow I take note as well of reporters who bring to light serious dangers about which the pu...
The more things improve the more pessimistic we become. Violence-related deaths at the nation’s schools dropped to a record low during the 1996—97 academic year (19 deaths out of 54 million children),...
Michelle Obama, spoke to supporters in rural Iowa about why she agreed to let her husband run. Barack and I talked long and hard about this decision. This wasn’t an easy decision for us, she explained...
By the time George Bush’s re-election campaign got under way in 2004, there was little doubt he’d make terrorism the focal point of all of his speeches and press conferences. His surrogates went farth...
In nearly every episode of fear mongering I discussed in the previous chapters as well, people with fancy titles appeared. Hardly ever were they among the leading figures in their field. Often they we...
In TV newsrooms, if it bleeds it leads remains the watchword. A study of 559 newscasts in twenty television markets across the United States compared the crimes covered by local news to the number and...