The News Spreads Fear of Violence

The news is an influential medium that plays a huge role in conditioning Americans. With 35 million nightly viewers, it is considered a trusted informant on the worlds events (Radford, 66). A problem with Americans using the news as their source of current events is that the reported stories are decontextualized and filtered through a journalist, which adds a bias to the stories. Not everything newsworthy makes it onto the news. What often does make it onto the news are crimes, sometimes bumping more important news off the air. A study done by Professor Joe Angotti from the University of Miami concluded that 30% of news air time is spent on crime, 15% is on the government and politics, 7% is on medicine and health care, and 2% is on education (Radford, 69). The disproportionate coverage of crime conditions people to fear crime more than they should. The more violence people watch on TV, the more conditioned they will be to perceive the world as violent. 

By emphasizing crimes and violence, the news spreads a false image of the world to viewers. For example, in 1994, a Time magazine article ran a headline across the top of two pages that read, “Not a month goes by without an outburst of violence in the workplace--now even in flower nurseries, pizza parlors and law offices” (Glassner, 26). Following this story, more than five hundred stories came out about violence in the workplace in 1994 and 1995 alone (Glassner, 27). Fear of random attacks by coworkers spread across the country. It was not until a journalist from The Wall Street Journal, Erik Larson, discovered the actual statistics that the myth of a workplace crisis was dispelled (Glassner, 27). He found that included in the scary statistics that newspapers were proliferating was the deaths of the most vulnerable workers: police, security guards, and taxi drivers, to name a few. Taxi drivers alone have a “homicidal rate twenty-one times the national average” (Glassner, 27). The news can spread false or exaggerated information to the public using misleading data. 

The Victims and How They Tell Americans Who to Fear

          As mentioned before, the news has the power to choose what information the public sees. This means that the newscasters decide which stories and victims get air time. One of the most common groups of victims on television is children, considered by Professor David Altheide as “a critical symbol in the entertainment-oriented fear perspective” (Altheide, 156). Between the years 1994 and 1996, 28% of Los Angeles Times headlines that contained the word “fear” had the word “children” in the article (Altheide, 158). One reason for the media’s emphasis on child victims is that nearly everyone supports the protection of children and opposes crimes to children such as pedophilia, abduction, abuse, etc, so the news stories appeal to a wide crowd. However, an effect of widespread coverage of crimes against children is that it conditions Americans to expect an unreasonably high amount of child victims.

       White people are another group that are over-represented as victims on the news.  Black people are most often reported as the perpetrators and not the victims, even though black people are much more commonly the victim (Glassner, 109). A classic example of the inadequate coverage of crimes with black victims is the Kent State shootings versus the Jackson State shootings. At Kent State, police shot at a crowd of anti-war protesters, killing four and wounding nine. At Jackson State, a historically black college, police shot at anti-racism protesters and killed two and injured twelve. Even though the Jackson State shootings were only ten days after the Kent State shootings, and they were very similar in nature, Kent State got much more media coverage than Jackson State. Without adequate coverage of crimes against all races, Americans will be conditioned to believe that whites are the most victimized race. In addition, the underrepresentation of black victims perpetuates the stereotype that blacks are dangerous. If black victims were actually portrayed as victims on the news, they would be humanized to viewers, receive more viewer sympathy, and possibly dispel some of the fear surrounding minorities. 

Just as repetition of news stories with white or child victims has conditioned Americans to fear minorities as perpetrators of crimes, the repetition that only citizens of the “brave new world” are civilized has conditioned Lenina to fear the “Savages.” The first word Lenina said when she arrived at the Reservation was “queer,” identified by Bernard as her “ordinary word of condemnation” (Huxley, Ch. 7). As they made their way through the pueblo, Lenina regurgitated conditioned lines, such as “cleanliness is next to fordliness,” and scorned the Savages for not adhering to her conditioned beliefs about what a society should be like.