Altheide & Michalowski (1999). Fear in the News

[杉森 典子]

Hi, 

 

I read Linnea’s response before reading the actual article. She wrote that this article examined newspaper headlines and text over a 7-10 year period. She also suspected that the shift (of the use of ‘fear’) to children and school is partly due to an increase of school violence. . . . I agreed with Linnea and I imagined that this article discussed the impact of the Columbine High School massacre. But I was wrong. The authors examined newspapers from 1987 to 1996, much before the Columbine insident in 1999. If these authors examined the use of ‘fear’ in more recent newspapers in the 21st century, what kind of findings would emerge? I am very curious. 

 

The authors also write:

A discourse of fear is promoted by audience familiarity with an duse of the word fear in everyday life. . . Fear is increasingly substituted for such words with much different connotations from fear, as “concern,” “relevance,” “trouble,” “query,” “issue,” “item,” and many others (p.497). I wondered if it is really true and examined today’s Boston Globe (8/31/05). The Globe ran Barbara Demick’s article titled “Fear of excessive game-playing on Net rise in S. Korea.” (The Globe bought this article from Los Angeles Times, which is one of the newspapers the authors in question examined). This article was about a 28-year-old Korean man who died of heart failure after a 50-hour binge playing an online game in a Internet café. No violence was involved in the cases reported in this article. My intuition says that “concern,” rather than “fear” is more suitable for the headline of this article. Although this isolated example may not tell anything, I wonder if the
 authors’ above observation is on the right track. Reading the above quote, I also remembered our discussions about the word choice in newspapers. Several months ago, one of our members, who is a real journalist, wrote that newspapers have to pay attention to the length of words (the shorter words may be better to squeeze in the limited space, in particular, in headlines). Most of all words listed above are longer than “fear.”  

 

Best, 

Noriko Sugimori
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