Fear of crime is a vastly overeported dilemma that has been going on since at least the end of WW2. It factors in with all of their oter
fear/terrormongering, such as that they used in the Cold War. Today Terrorism & Global Warming are the replacement for Cold War fear, although the
Bush admin is doing a great job of kickstarting a new Cold War with Russia & friends.
In fact, after 9/11 Bush even went as far as to liken "Terrorists" to the mafia, directly. He taught us to fear terrorists like the shadow mafia,
and then he taught us to fear Hussein as much as Osama. Now, they're teaching us to fear "Global Warming" like we do Terrorism, and its working.
It's about keeping us in a perpetual state of fear, and when theres no "good" fear monger stories like recent terrorism then they switch over to
other subjects to fill the void. For instance, there are typically over 100 BIG NEWS grade kidnapping events each year, but they usually only
'report' a handful. Report meaning WOAH EVERYBODY FREAK OUT, because we're going to report on this like OJ. 'Look how sick humans are', 'the
enemy is your spouse, your neighbor', etc. So is that undereporting? Not quite, its actually them fillng in the blanks until some new captivating and
freakish grand scale thing occurs. The Media is, by definiton, a classic example of "Distater Capitalists".
The fear of crime dimension is a
very well studied and understood issue, in academic circles anyways. Here goes some scholarly papers for you
(I honestly dont have time to yank citations today):
www.jc2m.co.uk...
www.blackwell-synergy.com...
www.cleen.org...
Follow up on their citations and keywords, and add "PDF" to your google searches to target scholarly papers.
I could carry on and on about this, but for a short perspective on-topic they report things far more than than statistics actually apply to the real
world. Its about making it look like more of a problem than it is, to say the least. I highly recomend you all take the time to at least read my first
link there. Enter my profile and click my threads tab and you can find some of my writings about modern fearmongering involving terrorism and global
warming.
[edit on 14-10-2007 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]