In his 1999 book, The Culture of Fear, sociology professor Barry Glassner posited that Americans, due in part to a constant barrage of sensational news stories, were afraid of all the wrong things, even as the world around them improved.
Drugs, crime, plane crashes, minorities—you name it, in the late ’90s, Americans were afraid of it.
The media of course plays a huge role in this, but it’s not alone, Glassner wrote; businesses, advocacy organizations, religious sects and political parties all promote and profit from fear.
“A group that raises money for research into a particular disease is not likely to negate concerns about that disease. A company that sells alarm systems is not about to call attention to the fact that crime is down,” Glassner wrote. “News organizations, on the other hand, periodically allay the very fears they arouse to lure audiences.”
The so-called culture of fear is a complex and fascinating topic, and Glassner’s book (updated in 2009 for its 10th anniversary) holds up today. But if you want the to-the-point conclusion, it’s a predictable one—and it’s the same insidious cancer that is seemingly at the root of all of society’s ills: greed.
“The short answer to why Americans harbour so many misbegotten fears is that immense power and money await those who tap into our moral insecurities and supply us with symbolic substitutes,” Glassner wrote.
And all of this before 9-11, which signaled a new modern era of rabid, jingoistic fearmongering.
Following the devastating terror attack in New York City, the George W. Bush administration—aided wholeheartedly by the cheerleading news media—coined a somewhat abstract phrase that would go on to define the decade: The War on Terror.
“The little secret here is that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors,” wrote former U.S. national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in an op-ed in the Washington Post in 2007.
“Constant reference to a ‘war on terror’ did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue.”
I arrived at the topic for this week’s Opening Remarks in a somewhat roundabout way, as I contemplated Earth Day (taking place Friday, April 22) and the impacts of climate change.
I sometimes hesitate to broach certain topics, as I’m acutely aware of the oversaturation of those topics in people’s feeds.
At the same time, the last thing I want to do is ignore the real challenges facing all of us, or put “lipstick on a pig,” to put it crassly.
So where to draw the line between important, need-to-know information and fearmongering, or sensationalism? It can be a fine balance, and it’s a longstanding debate in the industry.
In 1997, as emerging technologies began to have real impacts on media, 25 of the top minds in American journalism gathered at the Harvard Faculty Club to discuss the future of their craft.
“Instead of serving a larger public interest, they feared, their profession was damaging it. The public, in turn, increasingly distrusted journalists, even hated them,” wrote journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, in their 2001 book The Elements of Journalism.
By 1999, just 21 per cent of Americans believed the press cared about people, down from 41 per cent in 1987, the authors wrote.
Following that meeting in 1997, those 25 journalists set out to conduct a careful examination of their craft and what it was supposed to be.
Three years and hundreds of hours of interviews later, a set of core principles was decided on, the first being that the purpose of journalism is to provide people with the information they need to be free and self-governing.
Some of their other principles are at the core of my own professional philosophy: that journalism’s first obligation is to the truth (or the closest approximation, arrived at through strict verification), and its first loyalty to the citizens.
It shouldn’t have to be said, but the reason you don’t see your favourite conspiracy theories or alternative narratives in the “mainstream media” or your local newspaper is because real journalists don’t publish things that can’t be verified—a standard not applied to the blogs, social media accounts and hyper-partisan online rags of the modern internet.
(For the uninitiated, the rule of thumb is triangulation, or confirming a piece of information with three unrelated sources before running with it.)
Keep in mind both of the above referenced works were published before the dawn of high-speed internet and social media, both of which have amplified the fear factor by an order of magnitude.
These days we’ve all got smartphones, and it’s safe to say we are each and every one of us consuming far more news, current events and half-baked hot takes than the human brain was ever wired to handle.
And in recent years, the news has been heavier than in living memory: climate change, COVID, Ukraine, inflation—these are all complex, challenging topics that by their very nature inspire anxiety, depression and, yes, fear.
We can’t just ignore them, or downplay them. But we can’t let our lives and decisions be dictated by fear, either. We all have a responsibility to engage the news honestly, with an open and critical mind.
So please, inform yourself. Think critically about what you’re reading and watching. Do your best to triangulate the information you come across before blindly buying into it.
But above all, don’t panic.
