The Culture of Fear Quotes

“Samuel Taylor Coleridge was right when he claimed, 'In politics, what begins in fear usually ends up in folly.' Political activists are more inclined, though, to heed an observation from Richard Nixon: 'People react to fear, not love. They don't teach that in Sunday school, but it's true.' That principle, which guided the late president's political strategy throughout his career, is the sine qua non of contemporary political campaigning. Marketers of products and services ranging from car alarms to TV news programs have taken it to heart as well.

The short answer to why Americans harbor so many misbegotten fears is that immense power and money await those who tap into our moral insecurities and supply us with symbolic substitutes.”
― Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things

“In addition, when a neighborhood's crime victims are portrayed as victims-sympathetically and without blame, as humans rather than as statistics-people living in other parts of the city are more inclined to support social services for the area, which in turn can reduce the crime rate.”
― Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things

“In TV newsrooms, if it bleeds it leads remains the watchword. A study of 559 newscasts in twenty television markets across the United States compared the crimes covered by local news to the number and types of crimes actually committed. Although crime had fallen for eight years prior to the 2004 study, in all twenty markets “audiences were told essentially the same story—that random, violent crime was a persistent and structural feature of American society,” the researchers found. All the more misleading, the newscasts consistently gave the impression that murder and other serious crimes are rampant in places where they are rare.”
― Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Muta

“Television news programs survive on scares. On local newscasts, where producers live by the dictum “if it bleeds, it leads,” drug, crime, and disaster stories make up most of the news portion of the broadcasts.”
― Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Muta

“Producers of TV newsmagazines routinely let emotional accounts trump objective information.”
― Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Muta

“Criminologists have documented that the amount of coverage a crime victim receives affects how much attention police devote to the case and the willingness of prosecutors to accept plea bargains.”
― Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things

“Michelle Obama, spoke to supporters in rural Iowa about why she agreed to let her husband run. “Barack and I talked long and hard about this decision. This wasn’t an easy decision for us,” she explained, “because we’ve got two beautiful little girls and we have a wonderful life and everything was going fine, and there would have been nothing that would have been more disruptive than a decision to run for president of the United States. “And as more people talked to us about it, the question came up again and again, what people were most concerned about. They were afraid. It was fear. Fear again, raising its ugly head in one of the most important decisions that we would make. Fear of everything. Fear that we might lose. Fear that he might get hurt. Fear that this might get ugly. Fear that it would hurt our family. Fear. “You know the reason why I said ‘Yes’? Because I am tired of being afraid. I am tired of living in a country where every decision that we have made over the last ten years wasn’t for something, but it was because people told us we had to fear something. We had to fear people who looked different from us, fear people who believed in things that were different from us, fear one another right here in our own backyards. I am so tired of fear, and I don’t want my girls to live in a country, in a world, based on fear.” May her words reverberate well into the future.”
― Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Muta

“Flash forward to the 1980s and 1990s and it is not foreign fascists we have to put out of our minds in order to fall asleep at night, even if we do fantasize about hostile forces doing us great harm. (Witness the immediate presumption after the Oklahoma City bombing and the crash of TWA Flight 800 that Middle Eastern terrorists were to blame.) Mostly our fears are domestic, and so are the eerie invaders who populate them—killer kids, men of color, monster moms. The stories told about them are, like “War of the Worlds,” oblique expressions of concern about problems that Americans know to be pernicious but have not taken decisive action to quash—problems such as hunger, dilapidated schools, gun proliferation, and deficient health care for much of the U.S. population.”
― Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Muta

“Disproportionate coverage in the news media plainly has effects on readers and viewers. When Esther Madriz, a professor at Hunter College, interviewed women in New York City about their fears of crime they frequently responded with the phrase “I saw it in the news.” The interviewees identified the news media as both the source of their fears and the reason they believed those fears were valid. Asked in a national poll why they believe the country has a serious crime problem, 76 percent of people cited stories they had seen in the media. Only 22 percent cited personal experience.29”
― Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Muta

“By the time George Bush’s re-election campaign got under way in 2004, there was little doubt he’d make terrorism the focal point of all of his speeches and press conferences. His surrogates went farther still, overtly portraying a vote for his Democratic rival, Senator John Kerry, as an invitation to annihilation. “If we make the wrong choice,” Vice President Dick Cheney warned a Des Moines audience, “the danger is that we’ll get hit again—that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.” In May, just prior to the Democratic Convention, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that al Qaeda’s preparations for an attack were 90 percent complete; immediately after the convention, the Department of Homeland Security issued yet another terrorist alert, which diverted America’s attention away from Kerry and back to the “wartime” president, George Bush. The strategy worked.”
― Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Muta

“Fear mongers make their scares all the more credible by backing up would-be experts’ assertions with testimonials from people the audience will find sympathetic.”
― Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Muta

“In nearly every episode of fear mongering I discussed in the previous chapters as well, people with fancy titles appeared. Hardly ever were they among the leading figures in their field. Often they were more akin to the authorities in “War of the Worlds”: gifted orators with elevated titles. Arnold Nerenberg and Marty Rimm come immediately to mind. Nerenberg (a.k.a. “America’s road-rage therapist”) is a psychologist quoted uncritically in scores of stories even though his alarming statistics and clinical descriptions have little scientific evidence behind them. Rimm, the college student whom Time glorified in its notorious “cyberporn” issue as the “Principal Investigator” of “a research team,” is almost totally devoid of legitimate credentials.”
― Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Muta

“The more things improve the more pessimistic we become. Violence-related deaths at the nation’s schools dropped to a record low during the 1996—97 academic year (19 deaths out of 54 million children), and only one in ten public schools reported any serious crime. Yet Time and U.S. News & World Report both ran headlines in 1996 referring to “Teenage Time Bombs.” In a nation of “Children Without Souls” (another Time headline that year), “America’s beleaguered cities are about to be victimized by a paradigm shattering wave of ultraviolent, morally vacuous young people some call ‘the superpredators,’” William Bennett, the former Secretary of Education, and John Dilulio, a criminologist, forecast in a book published in 1996.11”
― Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Muta

“While a major focus of this book is fear mongering by journalists and others, throughout the chapters that follow I take note as well of reporters who bring to light serious dangers about which the public hears little from politicians, corporations, and most of the media. Indeed, again and again I find that it is reporters, rather than government oversight organizations, academics, or other professional truth seekers, who debunk silly or exaggerated scares that other journalists irresponsibly promulgate.”
― Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Muta

“Dennis Rome, “Stereotyping by the Media,” in C. R. Mann and M. Zatz, eds., Images of Color, Images of Crime (Los Angeles: Roxbury,”
― Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Muta