[UCP Books]: Selling Fear
“Selling Fear is an important and sobering book, documenting a press that was ‘more lap dog than watchdog’ and that only ‘rediscovered its bite’ after the nation was deeply mired in the Iraq War, civil liberties and human rights had been violated at home and abroad, and opportunities to improve our ability to deter terrorism and increase our disaster preparedness bad been lost.”—Michael X. Delli Carpini, University of Pennsylvania
Selling Fear
Counterterrorism, the Media, and Public Opinion
Brigitte L. Nacos, Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, and Robert Y. Shapiro
| Publication Date: June 15, 2011 | $24.00 • £15.50 |
| International publication date: July 11, 2011 | 978-0-226-567198 |
While we’ve long known that the strategies of terrorism rely heavily on media coverage of attacks, Selling Fear is the first detailed look at the role played by media in counterterrorism—and the ways that, in the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration manipulated coverage to maintain a climate of fear.
Drawing on in-depth analysis of counterterrorism in the years after 9/11—including the issuance of terror alerts and the decision to invade Iraq—the authors present a compelling case that the Bush administration hyped fear, while obscuring civil liberties abuses and concrete issues of preparedness. The media, meanwhile, largely abdicated its watchdog role, choosing to amplify the administration’s message while downplaying issues that might have called the administration’s statements and strategies into question. The book extends through Hurricane Katrina, and the more skeptical coverage that followed, as well as through the first year of the Obama administration, when an increasingly partisan political environment presented the media, and the public, with new problems of reporting and interpretation.
Drawing on in-depth analysis of counterterrorism in the years after 9/11—including the issuance of terror alerts and the decision to invade Iraq—the authors present a compelling case that the Bush administration hyped fear, while obscuring civil liberties abuses and concrete issues of preparedness. The media, meanwhile, largely abdicated its watchdog role, choosing to amplify the administration’s message while downplaying issues that might have called the administration’s statements and strategies into question. The book extends through Hurricane Katrina, and the more skeptical coverage that followed, as well as through the first year of the Obama administration, when an increasingly partisan political environment presented the media, and the public, with new problems of reporting and interpretation.
Brigitte L. Nacos is a journalist and adjunct professor of political science at Columbia University. Yaeli Bloch-Elkon is assistant professor of political science and communications at Bar Ilan University, Israel. Robert Y. Shapiro is professor of political science at Columbia University.
Please contact Micah Fehrenbacher at (773) 702-7717 or micahf@uchicago.edu for more information.