Culture of Fear

The “Culture of fear” is an expression used by Barry Glassner in one of his books. He’s a professor for sociology at the University of Southern California. By using this term, he tries to explain the anxiety, constructed by the media and the government, of the citizens in the USA. Michael Moore also took that idea for his film “Bowling for Columbine”.

Michael Moore impressively criticizes the government of the USA and also the media. Since 9/11 it was very easy to construct a culture of fear. The whole citizenship was really afraid of the terrorists coming from Afghanistan to kill as much as possible. The politicians took advantage of these terror threats really well. Nearly everyone accepted when the government und George W. Bush enacted stupid and causeless laws, like the “USA PATRIOT Act”.

Michael Moore recognized: The US-American society increasingly gets afraid of terrorism, murderers or anything else, also killer bees. That’s in contrast to the real statistics. The crime rate decreases, but the network TV and the local news support the anxiety in America by broadcasting news of the bad black man. There were also many cases, in those murderers assigned blame to blacks for their murders and everybody believed them because in TV the blacks are extremely stigmatized to be bad and cruel.

But not only Michael Moore recognized this kind of society, Joyce Carol Oates, the writer of the novel "Big Mouth and Ugly Girl" also integrated it in her book.

Matt Donaghy is arrested because he made a joke about running amok in his school. But, as everyone should know, he didn’t want to put that into effect. He’s only a person who likes to make jokes, but he would never kill a human being.

But neither the children, who snitched on him, nor the principal, who has immediately called the police department, thought about Matt and whether he could do something like that. And even the people, who spread the heinous rumors, should have known that he couldn’t do anything comparable. Everyone was absolutely swayed by the media and didn’t think about the consequences for Matt.

Of course I know, the threat of a shooting spree would terrify everyone, but you have to consider what kind of person the suspect is. You cannot haply suspect someone of planning an amok.