Chunk 4

In the fourth and final chunk of "The Culture of Fear", Glassner discusses the use of metaphoric illnesses, which people use to attribute the causes of the disease according to their personal beliefs or gain. Such metaphornic illnesses that are found in soceity are Gulf War Syndrome, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and breast implants. As to produce fear among the pulblics, reporters dismiss, if not, pay little attention to the reasearch, statistics, and analysis conducted by scientists that prove otherwise such as breat implants which studies found no evidence that implants had caused diseases in women who used them, and chose to go in favor of anecdotes of the victims.Glassner also discusses the fear produced by the media on plane crashes which statistics say are 1 in 4 million and reporters choose to connect scattered, random events to give false and misleading information which leads to the decrease in business. So what makes an airplane crash so interesting? According to Gareth Cook,"When a plane falls from the sky, the story is compelling, albeit morbidly so: the pictures of twisted metal, luggage hanging from trees, the screaming mother at the airport where the flight never arrives."

Questions
1. What are some types of metaphoric illnesses we see nowadays portrayed in the media?
2.How much of the media can we trust and believe to be truthful when after reading Barry Glassner's "The Culture of Fear", all it seems to do is promote fear?

Chunk 3... I am an inivisible man.

In "Black Men" of The Culture of Fear by Barry Glassner, the author discusses the amount of media coverage given to the crimes committed by black males than rather being the casualties of crime because "victimization does not attract the media spotlight the way their crimes do." The media also heightens the public's fear of being a victim of a homicide when in reality, a black men is eighteen times more likely to be murdered than is a white woman. "When a dog bites a man that is not news, when a man bites a dog, that is news." Another aspect is their gangsta rap from which people blamed rappers for almost any violent or misogynistic act anywhere when songs sung by white men can be just as violent. In "Smack is Back", how the government spends a lot of time and money exploiting drug abuse when that money can be used "to address other social and personal problems effectively." Due to this amount of the media portrayal on drug abuse increases our perception of how important the issue is, which is what psychologists refer to as availability heuristic. As well as how the media portrays victims of drug abuse as innocent people to gain the sympathy and increase the credibility that drugs are ruining our nation.

Questions:
1. How is a nation supposed to progress forward when racism and prejudice are embedded in our society?
2. Can unity of minority cultures actually be realized when the media teaches us to fear one another?