The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things [Paperback]

Barry Glassner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 16, 2000

There has never been another era in modern history, even during wartime or the Great Depression, when so many people have feared so much. Three out of four Americans say they feel more fearful today then they did twenty years ago. The Culture of Fear describes the high costs of living in a fear-ridden environment where realism has become rarer than doors without deadbolts.Why do we have so many fears these days? Are we living in exceptionally dangerous times? To watch the news, you’d certainly think so, but Glassner demonstrates that it is our perception of danger that has increased, not the actual level of risk. The Culture of Fear is an expose of the people and organizations that manipulate our perceptions and profit from our fears: politicians who win elections by heightening concerns about crime and drug use even as rates for both are declining; advocacy groups that raise money by exaggerating the prevalence of particular diseases; TV newsmagazines that monger a new scare every week to garner ratings.Glassner spells out the prices we pay for social panics: the huge sums of money that go to waste on unnecessary programs and products as well as time and energy spent worrying about our fears.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Americans are afraid of many things that shouldn't frighten them, writes Barry Glassner in this book devoted to exploding conventional wisdom. Thanks to opportunistic politicians, single-minded advocacy groups, and unscrupulous TV "newsmagazines," people must unlearn their many misperceptions about the world around them. The youth homicide rate, for instance, has dropped by as much as 30 percent in recent years, says Glassner--and up to three times as many people are struck dead by lightening than die by violence in schools. "False and overdrawn fears only cause hardship," he writes. In fact, one study shows that daughters of women with breast cancer are actually less likely to conduct self-examinations--probably because the campaign to increase awareness of the ailment also inadvertently heightens fears.

Although some sections are stronger than others, The Culture of Fear's examination of many nonproblems--such as "road rage," "Internet addiction," and airline safety--is very good. Glassner also has a sharp eye for what causes unnecessary goose bumps: "The use of poignant anecdotes in place of scientific evidence, the christening of isolated incidents as trends, depictions of entire categories of people as innately dangerous," and unknown scholars who masquerade as "experts." Although Glassner rejects the notion that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, he certainly shows we have much less to fear than we think. And isn't that sort of scary? --John J. Miller --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In this oddly comforting audiobook, Glassner (Derailing Democracy) deconstructs many commonly held beliefs about the threats of the modern world and aims to expose the media's role in keeping citizens fearful. Frightened citizens, he posits, make better consumers and more easily swayed voters. In a methodical fashion, he raises a series of public safety threats—the prevalence of road rage, middle-class heroin addiction and husband abuse, to name just a few—and then systematically tries to strike them down with statistics. More provocative are later chapters when he attempts to debunk such modern phenomena as Gulf War Syndrome and illnesses caused by breast implants. Glassner's delivery is serious but not emotionless; he keeps an even keel most of the time, but emotion does seep into his voice, most notably when talking about gun control. His reading style stands in sharp contrast to filmmaker Michael Moore, whose apparently improvised introduction is passionate and compelling; in fact, Glassner, who was featured in Moore's film Bowling for Columbine, sounds a bit dull coming right after Moore. But he is clearly a man on a mission, and even though many listeners might disregard some of his explanations as oversimplifications, virtually everyone will leave this book with a more realistic, guardedly optimistic world view.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; Later Printing edition (March 16, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465014909
• ISBN-13: 978-0465014903
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (180 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #420,130 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

The author of seven books on contemporary social issues, sociologist Barry Glassner is President of Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Described by The New York Times as "a master at the art of dissecting research," Glassner has published research studies in The American Sociological Review, American Journal of Psychiatry, and other leading journals in the social sciences. His articles and commentaries have appeared in newspapers including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and he is the recipient of several honors, including an "outstanding book of the year" award from Choice magazine.

Glassner's book, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things (Basic Books, 2010), is a national bestseller that was named a "Best Book of the Year" by Knight-Ridder newspapers and by the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

In his other recent book, The Gospel of Food (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2007), Glassner argues that by abandoning food fads and mythical beliefs about diet, Americans will eat better and lead happier lives. "Glassner exposes the strained interpretations, 'prejudices dressed up as science,' and pure fabrications behind much received wisdom," The New York Times wrote of The Gospel of Food, a book that The Los Angeles Times described as "pure fun to read."

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

75 of 80 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars look askance at major media June 26, 2001

By MLS

Format:Paperback

Glassner took 5 years off from teaching sociology at USC to write "Culture of Fear." It certainly shows. This book is a meticulously-footnoted indictment of mass media's distortion of reality. Among the things that Glassner skewers is the media's portrayal of teen moms & young black men as destroyers of American society, road rage, plane crashes, & health woes related to breast implants. The basic premises that Glassner covers are these:

1) Mass media creates panics & hysterias from a few isolated incidents. 2) Anecdotal evidence takes the place of hard scientific proof. 3) The experts that the media trots out to make comments really don't have the credentials to be considered an expert. 4) Entire categories of people are christened as "innately dangerous" (like the aforementioned teen moms and young black men)

Sometimes Glassner's tone towards media is very snide, which may turn the reader off. Nonetheless, I came away with a new distrust of nightly news magazines, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and others. Glassner goes for breadth rather than depth; many of the topics that he covered could be books in their own right. If you lean towards the Christian Conservative side, you won't like this book. Same goes for 2nd Amendment proponents, some Republicans and Libertarians.

165 of 183 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Well researched and even more relevent now November 25, 2002

By D. Prorok

Format:Hardcover

In the course of reading Barry Glassner's "The Culture of Fear," I was surprised that Glassner took a more balanced view than I had at first expected. After being featured in left-wing muckracker, Michael Moore's latest film, "Bowling for Columbine," I had assumed Glassner, too, had produced a one-sided liberal rant about the corporate-controlled media interests. I was wrong.

While some of Glassner's conclusions may be questionable, like his statements without clear evidence that the availability of guns are almost entirely to blame for the nation's violence, much of his book is filled with example-after-example of familiar media-propagated scares of the 1990s along with well-researched statistics to debunk the myths. After reading the book, the pattern became clear of how the media spins its stories to make them deliberately misleading in order to sell fear and keep viewers and readers plugged in. I believe this educational experience has made me a more savvy and skeptical consumer of the news.

While Glassner's primary target in "The Culture of Fear" is the media, other groups are also shamed along the way (and they aren't all conservatives, either!) For instance, he spends a fair amount of time accusing feminists of propagating the silicone breast implant scares for symbolic gains even as study-after-study, some very large, involving tens of thousands of women showed no increased evidence of medical problems due to the implants.

One trend that I found amusing in many of the scares is that genuine experts are often ignored in the propagation of the fears. When genuine experts are consulted and disagree with the media's spin, their rational hard-facts explanations are often dismissed with a brush of the hand from the interviewer and followed by a, "but what about all the children?" or "but you can't deny people are suffering?" when there may be no connection between the suffering and the purported cause or the chances of the threat occurring being several times less likely than being struck by lightning. Instead, for airline safety stories, we rely on "seasoned traveler" Joe Blow, as if by riding an airplane a couple times a month Joe is an expert or we rely on college student and self-proclaimed researcher, Marty Rimm, for all that is known about Cyberporn and our children's exposure to it. (Rimm achieved earlier fame by manipulating the media in high school with a trumped-up scare of teenagers spending time in New Jersey casinos. Later debunked, you'd think the media would be more skeptical of him when he applied his manipulation tactics again.) The pattern is similar: when reporters are trying to propagate a scare, they find whomever they can to agree with their pre-decided point-of-view, not matter their dubious qualifications, and ignore anyone who casts doubt on the sensationalized arguments, regardless of their authority.

Yes, I am sure there are conclusions within the book that will make conservatives irate, like the observation that it is poverty that causes crime, not race or crack, but it is interesting to find out that in an era when crime rates were dropping, coverage of crime increased 600%, thus creating an impression on the public that crime is out of control. And, no, things aren't any worse now than they were before...a lot of bad things happened in the past, too, like kids killing kids, but it is the media coverage, not the trend that is growing.

Overall, it is a good read and well-documented. Most of the spin is transparent enough to separate it from the interesting factual data contained within it. If you are living in fear of terrorism or any of the other scare-du-jour, this book is definitely worth a read.

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A timely call to courage for a nation of Chicken Littles and the politicians/media who encourage them October 16, 2006

By Jason Mierek

Format:Paperback

"We have the resources to feed, house, educate, insure, and disarm our communities if we resolve to do so....We can choose to redirect some...funds to combate serious dangers that threaten large numbers of people. At election time, we can choose candidates that proffer programs rather than scares." (p. 210)

With these concluding words, sociologist Barry Glassner underscores the basic premise of his book---Americans live in a culture in which extreme irrational fears are stoked while more serious (but less sexy) concerns are downplayed or ignored. Over the course of nine chapters, each focusing on a different "genre" of fear-mongering, Glassner dissects the most widely discussed terrors du jour (e.g., moral panics, violent crime, terrorism, infectious diseases like SARS, airplane crashes, etc.) and asks why it is that we tend to ignore serious, chronic, systemic problems like homelessness and malnutrition among American children in favor of flashy "threats" like West Nile Virus and school shootings.

His answer, such as it is, is that this culture of fear results from the intersection of political ideology, mass media pandering, and monomaniacal advocacy. So, for example, the obvious denominator common to all gun crimes, the relative ease with which guns can be acquired, is ignored or written-off in favor of moral or psychological explanations. That most child abuse, kidnapping, and murder occurs within the family unit gets less press than "don't talk to strangers," perhaps because we collectively fear what the examination of the "family" recommended by this data would reveal. SARS and West Nile Disease eclipse coverage of and response to a real killer, malaria; the spectacle of airplane crashes fills disproporationately more headlines than the far more risky rush hour commute; politicians pander to racist fears to win election. Glassner does an admirable job of debunking some very popular fears while also indicating more substantial concerns that require our attention.

The book is not perfect. His focus on systemic issues and his insistence that we use our national wealth for the benefit of all will rankle many who brace at this "liberalism" or "socialism." (To that, my response is that educating, feeding, housing, and immunizing children takes precendence over any ideological commitments, right or left, but I digress.) The book would definitely benefit from an update that takes into account the new-and-improved culture of fear we call "post-911 America." As well, perhaps Glassner or his editors felt that the book needed to be bigger, because the author spreads himself too thinly at times with the result that some chapters are less essential than others. My final criticism is that the book provides very little in terms of resources to respond to our culture of fear-mongering. How do we become more media savvy? How do we face up to "conservative" rhetoric that avoids systemic solutions to systemic problems? How do we become more "fear-proof" as individuals? A chapter on resources would be great in future editions.

In sum, this is a good antidote to much of the chicken-little behaviour that characterizes our national discourse and water cooler conversation. It is well-written and easily readable.