Böcker av David L. Altheide

The creative use of fear by news media and social control organizations has produced a "discurse of fear" - the awareness and expection that danger and risk are lurking everywhere. Case studies illustrates how certain organizations and social institutions benefit from the explotation of such fear construction. One social impact is a manipulated public empathy: We now have more "victims" than at any time in our prior history. Another, more troubling resutl is the role we have ceded to law enforcement and punishment: we turn ever more readily to the state and formal control to protect us from what we fear. This book attempts through the marshalling of significant data to interrupt that vicious cycle of fear discourse. David Altheide employs a method, which he calls "tracking discourse", to map how the nature and the extent of the use of the word "fear" has changed since the 1980s; how the topics associated with fear, the topics of media discourse, have also changed over the same period (for example, the emphasis "moves" over time across AIDS, crime, immigrants, race, sexuality, schools, and children); and how certain news sources prevail over others, thus protectively insulating themselves from criticism of the premises of their discourse frames.

Altheide's new book advances the argument set in motion some years ago with 'Media Logic' and continued in 'Media Worlds in the Postjournalism Era:' that in our age, information technology and the communication environments it posits have affected the private and the social spheres of all our power relationships, redefining the ground rules for social life and concepts such as freedom and justice.

This text explains how the social construction of fear is used to steer public and foreign policy, arguing that security policies to protect the citizenry have become control systems that curtail privacy and civil liberties. It has been updated with analysis of recent events, ranging from Israeli-Hamas wars to the growing impact of social media.

This book challenges social science to address the most important social change since the industrial revolution: the mediated communication order. From the internet to the NSA, he shows how media logic has transformed audiences into personal networks guided by social media.

The author shows the reader how to obtain, categorize, and analyze different media documents in this entry in the Qualitative Research Methods series

David Altheide maps how the nature of the use of the word "fear" has changed since the 1980s; how the topics associated with fear, the topics of media discourse, have also changed over the same period; and how certain news sources prevail over others.