The Culture of Fear
by Barry Glassner

ichael Moore's latest documentary film, Bowling for Columbine, highlighted a concept—"The Culture of Fear"—which was first explored in depth by Professor Barry Glassner. (Prof. Glassner is briefly interviewed in Moore's film.) Here, we revive a review of Glassner's 1999 release, now available in paperback.

n 1938, Orson Welles' dramatic radio broadcast adaptation of the War of the Worlds swept many Americans into a short-lived chaotic frenzy.

Ignoring announcements throughout the broadcast that would have made clear that Martian invaders had not, in fact, arrived to destroy civilization, American citizens piled into cars to drive away from the impending disaster, or else sat waiting to accept their doomed fates.

Sixty years after the infamous incident, University of Southern California professor and sociologist Barry Glassner believes that little has changed. In The Culture of Fear, written in 1999 (and recently revived in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine), Glassner suggests that Americans have traded their extraterrestrial monsters for other fears that are far less fantastic, but no less insidious.

Mainstream media's relentless emphasis on sensational stories in lieu of hard-hitting, far-reaching analyses of the pervasive problems that truly endanger the lives of millions of Americans—poverty, underfunded schooling and inadequate health care among them—will come as no big surprise to more media-savvy and politically astute readers. For those accustomed to approaching mainstream media with a critical eye, The Culture of Fear is most useful as a guidebook for deconstructing popular myths, providing clear insight into how and why America's obsession with inflated fears persist, to the ultimate detriment of social progress.

In numerous, fast-paced sections devoted to exposing the fallacy of persistent fear myths, Glassner touches on the topic of road rage (pointing out an average of 17,000 deaths caused by less-sensational DUI crashes versus the 200 deaths per year caused by road rage), to the well-worn anti-PC crusade of right-wing academics, politicians and conservative think-tanks.

Glassner also challenges his readers to think critically about the much-discussed problem of workplace violence. With headlines blaring stories of psychopathic postal workers and disgruntled workers on rampages, Glassner reminds his readers that the odds of being killed by someone you work with (or employ) are less than 1 in 2 million.

Indeed, aside from the newspaper-selling potential of scandal reportage, why devote so much attention to an issue that is far from being a bonafide national trend? Glassner replies with a thought-provoking answer: "Perhaps because workplace violence is a way of talking about the precariousness of employment without directly confronting what primarily put workers at risk."

Corporations given free license to hand out domestic pink slips while building overseas factories and NAFTA-enabled maquiladoras are hardly the kinds of stories that make the cut for shocking, primetime news magazine exposés. And so when attention isn't turned to the shooting rampage du jour, Glassner points out that the press turns, time and again, to juvenile offenders, teen moms, crime and drugs—with African Americans placed in a familiar starring role.

From disproportionate coverage of crimes committed by African Americans to the institution of mandatory minimum sentencing laws, the last two decades have delivered severe, if often unspoken, indictments to low-income African Americans ensnared by the criminal justice system.

Fueling national fears by reporting on drive-by shooters in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the media whipped many Americans into a state of paranoia about the odds that they, too, could soon be caught in the crossfire. "[But] drug violence, like almost every other category of violence, is not an equal opportunity danger,"
Glassner writes. "It principally afflicts young people from poor minority communities, and above all, young black men."

Glassner's work draws necessary attention to the underlying reason why our “culture of fear” shows no signs of abating: Terror-inducing national scares succeed precisely because they tap into our deep cultural anxieties which, at root, are rational fears gone awry.

"Mostly our fears are domestic, and so are the eerie invaders who populate them—killer kids, men of color, monster moms," writes Glassner. "The stories told about them are, like 'War of the Worlds,' oblique expressions of concern about problems that Americans know to be pernicious but have not taken decisive action to quash—problems such as hunger, dilapidated schools, gun proliferation, and deficient health care for much of the U.S. population."

By shedding light on a culture of fear that seems to hold so many of our nation's citizens as unwitting emotional captives, Glassner hopes to begin to shake that psychological paralysis loose. Our time and energies, he insists correctly, could be so much better spent.

Reviewed by Silja J.A. Talvi
01.15.03

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