This is an eclectic list of various books and articles that have influenced my thinking about the rhetorical uses of anxiety in the formation of social issues and how, generally, media and audiences engage in creating and sustaining anxiety. I've included a few basic collections that introduce concepts in communication and cultural studies as well.

Altheide, David L. Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis. NewYor: Walter de Gruyter, 2001.
Uses a "tracking discourse" method to trace the changing nature of fear as reflected in the news media through discourse of fear surrounding various social issues. Analyzes how some organizations and causes benefit from the exploitation of fear.

Barker, Martin, and Julian Petley, eds. Ill Effects : The Media/Violence Debate. 2nd ed. London ; New York: Routledge, 2001.
Analyses from several perspectives the debate about effects of mass media violence, arguing that the studies that find violence in the media cause violent behavior are flawed and tend to oversimplify the complex relationship of audience and text.

Best, Joel. Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists. Berkeley: U. of California, 2001.
A short, very accessible critique of the rhetorical uses of statistics and how to approach social claims made with statistics with a critical eye. Gives examples of mistakes, misconceptions, and misleading uses of numbers.

---. Random Violence. Berkeley: U. of California, 1999.
Random violence stories imply that anyone could be a victim of crime, that it is patternless and on the rise, that it is an epidemic or a sign that society is heading toward apocalypse. In fact, crime in general is far from patternless. We identify with victims (something news promotes by often leading with a victim’s story) but believe that criminals are utterly different from us – remorseless, feral, pre-social. Crime waves are really attention waves (which Best also calls “cycles of concern”). Four players engage in using crime for claims (because it offers means of commenting on and explaining social issues, as well as the emotional appeal of anxiety): media, activists, governments, and experts (academics and professionals who are least visible of the four) He provides an interesting matrix of how these draw on one another.

---. Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child Victims. Chicago: U. of Chicago, 1990.
Analyzes the ways children are used in the creation and expansion of a variety of social issues, providing similar analysis of how social problems are rhetorically shaped and reformulated by various interest groups.

de Young, Mary. "Another Look at Moral Panics: The Case of the Satanic Day Care Centers." Deviant Behavior 19 (1998): 257-78.
Expands the concept of “moral panic” to include audience participation in the formation of concern. “The intricate web of relations, between various interest groups, the kinds of claims they make, and the media that present and contest them, must be part and parcel of future analysis. And so must be the many audiences that receive them. Either overlooked completely or treated as little more than passive dupes in classic analysis, these audiences must be seen and appreciated for their imaginative and active roles in moral panics. Whether as actors, observers, readers, or listeners, audiences actively appropriate and decode the ‘facts’ of the claims of moral panics and act in relation to them. They do so as well with the ideological underpinnings of those claims. Future analysis, therefore, must include a critical examination of the ideology of moral panics, how it resonates with the lived experiences of those audiences, how it acts to recruit them, and how it retains them long after the ‘facts’ of the claims have been disputed and debunked” (275).

Dickinson, Roger, Ramaswami Harindranath, and Olga Linne, eds. Approaches to Audiences: A Reader. London: Arnold, 1998.
A collection of classic essays on the topic, many previously published in communication studies journals. Makes for a useful introduction to different conceptual approaches.

Douglas, Mary. Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge, 1992.
An anthropologist specializing in religion argues our concepts of risk management tend to rely on limited empirical data rooted in individualism; they neglect the cultural perceptions of risk. Though we tend to think of societies laying blame on specific factors as a primitive tribal notion, and modern societies as having knowledge to guide their assessment of risk, she points out "[t]he old link from danger to morals was not made by lack of knowledge. Knowledge always lacks. Ambiguity always lurks. If you want to cast blame, there are always loopholes for reading the evidence right" (9). She then talks about the "political uses of danger" (10). "Anthropologists would generally agree that dangers to the body, dangers to children, dangers to nature are available as so many weapons to use in the struggle for ideological domination" (13) ... "It would be strangely innocent nowadays to imagine a society in which the discourse on risk is not politicized" (13).

Ellis, Bill. Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2000.
A folklorist looks at how Satanism, with its folkloric roots, is represented and amplified by the media. Cattle mutilation, grave robberies, conspiracy theories are covered both in US and UK. Argues that folkloric beliefs have value but when they are institutionalized and used to build a "truth" that misappropriates myth and becomes damaging. The media has an abilitiy to spread and validate social issues in ways that take them out of the realm of the folkloric and make them less interpretive - and more dangerous.

Ericson, Richard V., Patricia M. Baranek, and Janet B. L. Chan. Representing Order: Crime, Law, and Justice in the News Media. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1991.
A thorough investigation of the place of crime stories in the news media. The authors' content analysis of six Canadian media outlets shows that stories on crime, the criminal justice sytem, and law constitute almost half of news coverage in newspapers and television news and an even higher percentage of radio news. They reason that "law has become the primary cultural device for defining acceptable ehaviour, identity, and reality. . . . News operatives use the law as a tool of cultural construction, as one of the preominant means by which the authority system instructions people on what to be as well as what to do" (341-2) Along with an interesting analysis of difference in sources among the media and how different markets respond to different kinds of news stories, the authors reject simplistic analyses that characterize news as determined by any one influence (technological, structural, or by demands of entertainment). "News is the most available, serious, and powerful means by which we represent our social organization and aspirations" (358). This is the third exhaustive study of social control and the media by these authors.

Felson, Richard B. "Mass Media Effects on Violent Behavior." Annual Review of Sociology 22.1 (1996): 103-28.
Reviews studies of media effects (including pornography) and concludes there may be some empirically valid effect, but it is minimal: "exposure to television violence probably does have a small effect on violent behavior for some viewers, possibly because the media directs viewer's attention to novel forms of violent behavior that they would not otherwise consider." (from the abstract)

Friedman, Sharon M., Sharon Dunwoody, and Carol L. Rogers, eds. Communicating Uncertainty: Media Coverage of New and Controversial Science. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999.
An exploration of three players in the construction of science and how its uncertainty is communicated - looking at scientists, journalists, and audiences. Includes essays on public responses to uncertainty, effective explanation of ambiguity in scientific findings, and some specific cases of how science stories play out in the public arena. Because essays grew out of a conference, some panel discussions transcripts are included. This is a followup to an earlier collection, Scientists and Journalists: Reporting Science as News (1986).

Glassner, Barry. The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things. New York: Basic, 1999.
A popular exploration of how anxiety is affected by the efforts of claims-makers, offering numerous detailed examples. Concludes with an examination of the hysteria generated by Orson Wells's War of the Worlds radio broadcast and what that gullibility signifies.

Goode, Erich and Nachman Ben-Yahuda. Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Unpacks the cultural roots of generalized anxiety about social issues. Gives sustained examination of the theory of moral panics, as well as several detailed examples. Concludes that moral panics can reaffirm traditional boundaries, can make change (such as generate new legislation or bureaucratic efforts to control deviance) and have long-lasting effects because even when they have faded from the public consciousness, they leave "informal traces that prepare us for future panics" (229) and so are an important factor in social processes.

Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992.
A collection of esays that describe this diverse field of study and show its critical method in practice. Essays deal with gender, national identity, postcolonialism, race and ethnicity, the politics of aesthetics, popular culture, and cultural studies interactions with disciplines, including ethnography, pedagogy, science, and history.

Grossberg, Lawrence, Ellen Wartell, and D. Charles Whitney. MediaMaking: Mass Media in a Popular Culture. Sage: Thousand Oaks, 1998.
Covers a lot of ground: basic theory, meaning, interpretation, ideology, audience construction, media effects, politics, economics, and globalization, all presented in a highly accessible form. A nice general introduction to communication studies approaches to mass media.

Hacking, Ian. "The Making and Molding of Child Abuse." Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 253-88.
A fascinating article recapping how "child abuse" has been defined and redefined over the years, depending on claims-makers' needs. Hacking is concerned not with construction of social issues but the construction of people – how the labels we apply affect their behavior. It’s an epistemological investigation into how those involved perceive knowledge and causation. Defining what is “abnormal” behavior is an important part of defining what is “normal.” “It is clear throughout that conceptions of what child abuse is, conceptions of its causes, and conceptions of what actions to take are intimately connected” (282). The actions to be taken as well as its attributed causes tend to carry much ideological and moral baggage.

Jenkins, Philip. Images of Terror: What We Can and Can't Know about Terrorism. New York: de Gruyter, 2003.
Discuses the problem of knowing what we mean by "terrorism" and "terrorist act," unpacking the rhetorical processes by which it has been defined by interest groups and officals and the audience acceptance - or rejection - of various images and stereotypes. After exploring motives, political and historical background, and media responses to terrorism, he offers a "critical consumer's guide" that uses a constructionist approach to challenge assumptions. He recommends we ask "how do we know what we think we know?", that we consider the ways that claims have consequences, and that we use our collective social memory (including gathering information) to resist politically-motivated reconstruction of the "facts".

--- Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the of the Child Molester in Modern America. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.
A fascinating historical survey from 1890 to present of how we interpret child abuse. It’s about “the creation of orthodoxies, of social facts so obvious it seems incredible they could ever have been ignored or doubted and yet which, in historical perspective, appear temporary and contingent. Prominent among what we accepted as self-evident facts in contemporary America is the belief that children face a grave danger in the form of sexual abuse and molestation” (1). He uses a constructionist approach to examine the cyclical nature of the problem of sexual abuse. “The process of constructing a social problem begins with an event or condition that represents a serious challenge to accepted values. Different activists try to link that issue with other conditions that they believe to be harmful or threatening, so that the original incident is used to support a moral or political lesson and the narrative is embroidered with appropriate cultural cross-references” (9). He then provides an historical overview of how these constructions developed over time in social science theory, public policy, and popular culture.

---. Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide. New York: De Gruyter, 1994.
A fascinating analysis of the emergence of serial murder as a category of crime and as a feature of the popular imagination in books, films, and the news. Reveals a lot about how social issues are framed and used by claims-makers.

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, and Jacqueline S. Palmer. "Millennial Ecology: The Apocalyptic Narrative from Silent Spring to Global Warming." Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America. Ed. Carl G. Herndl and Stuart C. Brown. Madison: U. of Wisconsin, 1996. 21-45.
An interesting essay that analyzes the narrative strategies used to dramatize ecological issues at the beginning of the environmental movement. Does a good job of linking science policy to effective rhetorical strategies borrowed from 19th century apocalyptic religious rhetoric in the US.

Kincaid, James R. Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child-Molesting. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.
A fascinating exploration of the tension between our construction of children as innocents and society's fetishization of youthful sexuality - and the kick we get out of it imagining threats to children. Making child abuse the "absolute evil" gives it enormous power for claims-makers. "Our wildest stories gain currency when tests of rational probability are suspended in favor of anecdote and tstimony, supported by the demand that we accept narratives as valid if we cannot positively prove they are not. . . . Legends are made to shield the legend makers, not the subjects of the stories. In particular, those stories known to folklorists as 'subversion myths' arise from great social tension and a perceived threat to individual security; when such anxieties are collective and accompanied by a general will to believe, then anxiety-fed legends appear. Interestingly, such legends, by focusing anxieties on a specific threat and provideing thereby a very simple explanation do not so much ease the fear as give it fuel . . . The idea is not to erase the anxiety but to excite it, since it's the anxiety that's doing so much for us" (167-8).

Marcum, James W. "Rethinking Information Literacy." Library Quarterly 72.1 (2002): 1-26.
Describes the IL paradigm as a progression from information to knowledge with that transformation happening somewhere in a "black box." Argues learners bring much context to learning and that the social context of learning is underplayed in IL practice. Concludes we need better focus, more attention to visual literacy, and ratcheting up the stakes from being capable of handling textual information to "sociotechnical fluency."

Meola, Marc. "Chucking the Checklist: A Contextual Approach to Teaching Undergraduates Web-site Evaluation." portal: Libraries and the Academy 4 (2004): 331-344.
A spirited and sensible critique of the checklist approach to evaluating sources (specifically Web pages, but applicable to all sources) based on examining a set of qualities--authority, accuracy, currency, etc. He argues that understanding sources in context is more valuable, and advocates for comparison of sources and corroboration of key evidence in more than one source.

McDermid, Val. "Fear and Loathing" The Guardian19 Oct. 2000: 8.
A journalist-turned-crime novelist muses on what is that makes us relish fear, and particularly why so many women voluntarily "collude in the fear industry" recognizing that women are more likely to worry about crime and have their lives effected by that fear than men are. She concludes there are a number of reasons, one being that it is reassuring because in fiction it's happening to someone else and things tend to turn out right. She also points out that "certain kinds of fear are actually pleasurable. Adrenaline, after all, is a fabulous drug. It produces a great high, it's legal and its free." She also acknowledges the appeal to social order presented in fictional depictions of crime. "Whether or not we admit it, bringing out the protective element in others is a strategy that appeals to many of us."

Pawley, Christine. "Information Literacy: A Contradictory Coupling." Library Quarterly 73.4 (2003): 422-52.
From the abstract: "This contradiction results in part from the genealogy of the terms ’information’ and ’literacy,’ terms that share a relationship traceable to an Enlightenment ideology, namely, that reading could transform society by informing its people. But reading's power to transform was also a contested issue for groups seeking political and cultural ascendancy, and reading genres that initially challenged conventional thought evolved into those that buttressed it. In the process, some groups came to be defined as information ’consumers’ and simultaneously excluded from the role of information ’producers.’ Strategies that can raise awareness of the assumptions underlying this legacy include critical analysis of language use and envisioning information use as a process that involves all users in both consumption and production." A thought-provoking analysis of the rhetorical positioning of information literacy as a social issue and its inherent contradictions.

Rind, Bruce, Robert Bauserman, and Philip Tromovich. "Science Versus Orthodoxy: Anatomy of the Congressional Condemnation of a Scientific Article and Reflections on Remedies for Future Ideological Attacks." Applied and Preventive Psychology 9 (2000): 211-25.
Describes how the author's meta-analysis published in the APA Bulletin (a study that concluded the harmfulness of child sexual abuse had been overstated by poorly designed case studies) came under attack. Defends their science at length, looks at the political and social agendas behind the attack (led by radio talk show host Dr. Laura), and argues there should be no “sacred cows,” that scientists must be free to study ideologically charged issues. Expresses a somewhat naïve faith in empirical methods, but does a good job of laying out the attack which, in short, was “the end-product of a system built on economic interdependency among various special interest groups fueled by deeply rooted ideology” (220). Ironic that the “good news” that children are less damaged than people thought is so unwelcome in some quarters because it defuses the crisis needed by claims-makers.

Simpson, Philip L. Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Fiction and Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000.
Looks at the genre's Gothic roots, at how the representation has changed over time (from Harris and the introduction of profiling to excessive individualism to a more post-modern reflection on serial killers as a symptom of our apocalyptic culture). "The serial killer of modern America is embarked upon a quest not of self-discovery but of self-recovery--recovery of a lost moral certitude" (16) and "The literature and legends hthat have coalesced around uber-criminals answer the human need to personify free-floating fears, aggravated by the perplexing indeterminancy of the postmodern world, into a specific, potentially confinable, yet still ultimately evil, threat. The marauding serial killers of the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s encode, deliberately or otherwise, many of our cultural phobias in their polysemous narrative representation in fiction and film" (2).

Surette, Ray. Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice: Images and Realities. 2nd ed. Belmont,Ca: West/Wadsworth, 1998.
A short textbook that looks various ways that two huge social institutions - the mass media and the criminal justice system - influence each other. Includes background on how crime becomes newsworthy, how crime news influences social concepts of acceptable behavior, and how popular culture picks up on the popularity of crime stories. Suggests "the single most significant effect of media conetnet is not its direct generation of crime but its effect on our criminal justice policies" (236).

Weart, Spencer R. Nuclear Fear: A History of Images. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.
A history of images that articulate our fears and dreams about matters atomic throughout the twentieth century, attempting to go beyond the chronology of events and ideas to see the symbolic representation and emotions connected with nuclear energy. A gracefully-written and rich examination of our recent past as a shared experience.

Wilson, Christopher P. Cop Knowledge: Police Power and Cultural Narrative in Twentieth-Century America. Chicago: U. of Chicago, 2000.
An exploration of “police power: those who exercise it, those who would reform it, and those in the popular arts who are drawn to its political dramas, its cultural contradictions, and its fraternal mysteries. More simply, it is a book about a series of literary, journalistic, and mass-cultural encounters with everyday police authority, as it has changed over the course of the twentieth century” (1). Argues we need to understand the cultural history of policing (and crime) to understand its place in culture, and that distinctions between image and reality - between newspaper reports and fictional narratives - neglect that “reality” is as manufactured as the image. Makes the interesting claim that audience participation in crime stories is a form of "coummunity policing."

last updated 1/04

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