News media hypes ‘fear’ according to Valley author   
by Kathleen Stinson

NORTH SCOTTSDALE – The number of news stories that promote readers’ fears has

skyrocketed in recent years, tightening the connection between government and the news media more than ever, according to one Valley author.

Professor David L. Altheide spoke Nov. 16 at the Foothills Democrats meeting held at Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale.

“The connection between the media and government continues to grow very strong,” he said.

Altheide, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Justice and Social Inquiry, is the author of “Terrorism and the Politics of Fear,” published this year.

In his talk Altheide discussed the role journalists play in carrying the message government wants communicated–often as a way to set the agenda for public dialogue.

“The news media are indirect allies, promoting a lot of these (government) claims without looking very deeply into them, and then hype it. For the most part, journalists benefit from stories about fear.”

According to Altheide, studies show the word “fear” in news stories increased 200‑300 percent over the past two decades. In addition, coverage of violent crime increased by 600 percent during the late 1990s, despite the fact that crime rates dropped. And stories addressing readers’ fears grew tremendously since the Sept.11 attacks and continue to increase. “It’s grown off the charts,” he said.

Altheide went on to say stories about terrorism, immigration and the Mexican border dominate the news media. As a result, those stories are pushing other stories about important issues, such as homelessness, poverty and affordable housing, off the front pages to a disproportionate rate.

 “Terrorism is now a condition of the world. We can’t win the war against it and we can’t say what it is or isn’t,” Altheide declared.

Further, “study after study” conclude that guests on broadcast news were “overwhelmingly selected from the administration.”

He also said the media reported extensively after 9/11 the assertion that the attacks could have been averted had the CIA and FBI communicated with each other more effectively; and yet the news media did not report why the federal government restricted the information flow between those two agencies in the first place.

This information wall was set up to protect people from inappropriate scrutiny, he said, referring to the Church Committee that was initially responsible for establishing the barrier. 

The Church Committee, as it was commonly called, was a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D‑Idaho) in 1975. The committee investigated illegal intelligence gathering by the CIA and FBI after certain activities had been revealed by the Watergate affair.

“All that was forgotten (post 9/11) because terrorism was a much bigger issue.”

Limits on legal protection for foreigners and Americans, denial of right of  habeas corpus, the Patriot Act and other restrictions on civil liberties are in some part the result of the politics of fear which developed post‑9/11, Altheide stated.

The government’s use of the media to report missing children in the mid‑1980s was cited as an example of how government manipulates the media.

News outlets reported about 1.5 million children are abducted each year by strangers, when in fact barely more than 100 children each year are actually abducted by strangers, according to Altheide. The government’s figures were skewed, he said, because those abduction statistics included runaways and children taken by parents involved in custody disputes.

Another story blown out of proportion by fear is coverage of online predators, he said.

“A fearful society is a dangerous society,”  Altheide stated, adding, if society is going to be emotionally concerned about something that harms us, we should be more careful to instead use words like ‘danger’ or ‘risk.’ The word “fear” raises the stakes unnecessarily.

Reach the reporter at kathleen@thedesertadvocate.com.