Altheide contends, along with other media scholars, that the mass media and popular culture, by marketing fear in both news and entertainment communications and by increasingly blurring the line between these two formerly distinct formats, have changed our social expectations and our daily lives in ways that are destructive to our communities, our well-being and our control over our lives. In the name of informing and/or entertaining the public, the media bombard audiences and readers with problem-oriented and often anxiety-provoking reports on a daily basis. Fear is no longer limited to specific objects or events. It is experienced as the background environment or context that specific acts or events simply illustrate and reinforce.
Who benefits from the marketing of fear? Certainly, the large media conglomerates do by drawing audiences that they can sell to advertisers. Also benefiting is the "fear industry" that sells us security services and equipment. But, perhaps most importantly, the formal agents of social control, primarily the police and other law enforcement institutions are the primary beneficiaries. Law enforcement agencies are the primary source of information to the media regarding crimes and, increasingly, their viewpoint tends to dominate media perspectives on crime and violence and frame public debate of these and related topics. Who loses? Most obviously, the unprecedented number of people (primarily low-income and members of minority groups) who have received increasingly harsh treatment by the criminal justice system during a period when crime statistics, including for violent crimes, have gone down. The taxpayer has, of course, borne the cost of dramatically increased policing, processing and incarceration while other critical social needs like health care and education have been seriously under-funded. Especially serious, from Altheide's perspective, has been the costs to all of us resulting from the transformation that has occurred in our effective environment. Appropriate awareness of specific dangers has been replaced by a generalized fearfulness that pervades our daily lives. Altheide notes that fear is corrosive of justice. Its pervasiveness causes us to seek solutions that involve serious consequences for public policy, civil liberties, and the health of our communities. He believes that this state of affairs has to be changed and that this will require broad understanding of the processes that have gotten us into our present predicament. This book is his latest effort to promote such understanding.
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