Medias do invoke fear.....with no doubt

Are News medias revolutionary to the 21st century or are they having negative effects on us? I think the answer to this question is favored more to the later than the former. In The Culture of Fear by Barry Glassner, I learned about how the media can make one more fearful of the world than it actually is. Medias control the way we perceive things in general and sometimes give us false informations. One section of The Culture of Fear featuring George Gerbner, a professor at Annenberg School of Communications, appealed to me, "In his research over three decades Gerbner found that people who watch a lot of TV are more likely than others to believe their neighborhood are unsafe, to assume that crime rates are rising, and to overestimate their own odds of becoming a victim."I agree with Gerbner because people are sometimes blinded by the false stories shown on TV and thus becomes more fearful.

Occasionally, I will see some very exaggerated news about someone getting robbed and killed a few hundred miles away. This eventually provoked my parents to be fearful of our community. This idea of unsafeness has gotten to their head because they apparently watched more news than I did. Certainly, people who watches a lot of TV news about violence and robbery will start to feel uneasy about their surroundings. In return, those people's happiness is affected by the media. They take more unnecessary precautions and appears less in public because of their fear outside their houses.

The media can also influence the criminal justice system because those who feels unsafe will want stricter laws. Thus, laws become punitive rather than preventative. Due to many TV watcher's superstitious fear, they might feel safer if harsher laws are issued. issuing harsher laws may ultimately damage both the state and other innocent people.

Recently, I read a short story titled "Once Upon A Time," by Nadine Gordimer. It is about a family who took precautions beyond the necessary, which ultimately resulted in their child's injury(or possibly death). The family hears of reports of robbery, so they installed an alarm system, but a higher wall, and put razor blades around the walls. Their fear of outside intrusion made them insecure and caused them to be fearful. Ironically, their child is hurt by their own 'system of defense.' This connects to the idea presented by Glassner-Overuse of media will lead to unnecessary fear and that fear will eventually blind many people from seeing the real problem.