The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [139]
14 Louis Uchitelle and N. R. Kleinfield, “On the Battlefields of Business, Millions of Casualties,” New York Times, 3 March 1996, pp. A1, 14—17. On limitations in the Times series see Janine Jackson, “We Feel Your Pain,” Extra, May 1996, pp. 11-12. Crime sta tistics derived from Bureau of Justice Statistics reports. Specific victimization estimates based on Uchitelle and Kleinfield, “Battlefields of Business,” and Ray Surette, “Predator Criminals as Media Icons,” in Gregg Barak, ed., Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime (New York: Garland, 1994), pp. 131-58.
15 Downsizing effects: Barry Glassner, Career Crash (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Uchitelle and Kleinfield, “Battlefields of Business”; David Gordon, Fat and Mean (New York: Free Press, 1996); Paul Krugman, “Superiority Complex,” New Republic, 1 November 1997, pp. 20-21. Continuation of the trend: Robert Reich, “Broken Faith,” Nation, 16 February 1998, pp. 11-17; Aaron Bernstein, “Who Says Job Anxiety Is Easing?” Business Week, 7 April 1997, p. 38. Amount of coverage: Barbara Bliss Osborn, “If It Bleeds, It Leads,” Extra, September 1994, p. 15; Larry Platt, “Prime Suspects,” Philadelphia Magazine, November 1994, pp. 90-93, 119; Roy Edward Lotz, Crime and the American Press (New York: Praeger, 1991), pp. 2-3; Mark Fitzgerald, “Newspapers and Violence Coverage,” Editor and Publisher, 18 June 1994, pp. 14, 40; Max Frankel, “The Murder Broadcasting System,” New York Times Magazine, 17 December 1995, pp. 46—47; Franklin Gilliam, Shanto Iyengar et al., “Crime in Black and White,” working paper, Center for American Politics and Public Policy, UCLA, September 1995; Stephen Budiansky et al., “Local TV: Mayhem Central,” U.S. News & World Report, 4 March 1996, p. 63; Steven Stark, “Local News: The Biggest Scandal on TV,” Washington Monthly (June 1997): 38-41. Some evidence suggests that the amount of coverage declined in the late 1990s: Alan Finder, “Something New in News: Drop in Crime Reporting Follows the Drop in the Crime Rate,” New York Times, 6 September 1998, p. A23.
16 Judy Klemesrud, “Those Treats May Be Tricks,” New York Times, 28 October 1970, p. 56.
17 “The Goblins Will Getcha,” Newsweek, 3 November 1975, p. 28.
18 Abby, quoted in Jan Harold Brunvand, “The Halloween Saboteurs,” column syndicated by United Feature Syndicate, October 1991. Polls cited in Joel Best, Threatened Children (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 132.
19 Brunvand, “Halloween Saboteurs.”
20 Best, Threatened Children; Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi, “The Blade in the Apple,” SocialProblems32 (June 1985): 488-99; and private correspondence with Best.
21 Bill Ellis, “New Halloween Traditions in Response to Sadism Legends,” in Jack Santino, ed., Halloween and Other Festivals ofDeathand Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), pp. 24-44 (quote on p. 27). Ellis and Best interpret the Halloween sadism stories as an “urban legend.” While I do not disagree with that categorization, my concern here is with the specific fears that the news stories promoted and dodged.
22 Klemesrud, “Those Treats May Be Tricks.”
23 See, e.g., Ted Thackrey, “Trick or Treat Subdued Amid Poisoning Scares,” Los Angeles Times, 1 November 1982, pp. 1, 28; James Barron, “Poison Worries Lead to Precautions for Halloween,” New York Times, 28 October 1982, pp. B1, 4.
24 Best, Threatened Children (NBC quote on p. 98); Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, Satan’s Silence (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 39-44 (Goodman quote on p. 42); Lawrence Stanley, “The Child Porn Myth,” Cardozo LawJournal 7 (1989): 313-15. For historical accounts of panics over child molesters see Joel Best, Images of Issues