ESSAY 2 Does the Media promote a culture of fear?

Does the media promote a culture of fear? The first answer one would come up with is yes, it appears so. All one has to do is turn on the television to make that belief seem true, yet this may be an incorrect assumption. In order to answer this question we must know who the characters are and what roles they play. In this case the characters would be the media and the population.

In his article “Heads Above the Hype,” Peter Phillips wrote, the media is a corporation (Phillips). More realistically it is a conglomerate of a limited number that can be considered a corporation and thus a business. The business of the media is to inform us, the population, whether or not they do that in an unbiased way remains to be seen. For example the media is quoted as saying they are” just giving the people what they want.” For starters how do they know what we want and what happened to unbiased news reporting? One way to realize how they “give us what we want” is to think of privacy issues. As stated by David Plotz in his essay published in GQ magazine, that companies know what you want by monitoring your activities, such as credit card purchases and stores visited, allows the big business to cater to your needs specifically (Plotz 57). This in turn allows them to advertise to you only the things you may buy. If this is applied to the media then news outlets will be able, as time goes by, to cater their news to suit the tastes of the viewer. If people continue to watch violence then we will continue to get more violence. In this light it seems easy to see where the media outlets are coming from.

The other character in this game is the population. If you as an individual had only two choices on television: reports of violence or reports of theft which would you watch and why? Most people would probable watch the violence. The answer could be that it is more entertaining or perhaps it makes us feel better knowing it’s them not us. For all the excuses about violence on television a simple omitted fact is that more child violence occurs in violent homes, from violent parents. Or that most children start smoking or drinking by watching addict parents, as summarized from an article written by Mike Males (Males 270). It should also be noted that Jane Ellen Stevens mentioned a new form of epidemic called violence epidemiology that began taking shape beginning in 1977. Stevens wrote about her involvement with this disease in her book entitled “The Violence Reporting Project: A New Approach to Covering Crime.” This idea explains how violence in society is a sickness just like any other ailment that people suffer. This ailment has quantifiable causes and consequences…that manifest into long term fear and mistrust of members of a community (Stevens 112).

Could it be possible that we are stuck in a vicious circle? Are we a victim of mass media or are we a victim of ourselves? It could be stated with an abundance of research and finger pointing that the media promotes fear in our culture. Unfortunately it is not that simple. Yes, it can be proven that the media is biased and pushes the idea of danger into our thoughts but it isn’t simply to promote fear but to keep ratings and make money. The media would push whichever idea would make the most money even if it was pink unicorns, they don’t care; money is money. Likewise the society we live in would have violence and fear from it regardless of whether or not a reporter was there to record such things. The issue of media hype and a fear culture may best be described as opposite sides of the coin not seeing the forest for the trees. Regardless of what the media may or may not do it is still the people that commit the violence and watch it on television. This would imply that the fault lies with the people and not the business that is dependent upon them for survival.

Males, Mike. "Stop Blaming Kids and TV." Goshgarian, Gary. What Matters in America. New York: Pearson Education Inc., 2007. 267-271.

Plotz, David. “Privacy is overrated.” Goshgarian, Gary. What Matters in America. New York: Pearson Education Inc., 2007. 56-62.

Phillips, Peter. “Heads Above the Hype.” Goshgarian, Gary. What Matters in America. New York: Pearson Education Inc., 2007. 104-107.

Stevens, Jane Ellen. “The Violence Reporting Project: A New Approach to Covering Crime.” Goshgarian, Gary. What Matters in America. New York: Pearson Education Inc., 2007. 110-114.