What is Culture of Fear

This chapter looks at the news media articles relating to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting incident. It is shown that this incident is categorized by death toll in media coverage. Mass shootings generally are portrayed as an “ongoing trend” and are “normalized” to the extent that it appears they will occur again in the future. The news media also debates whether the incident should be defined as terrorism, deliberating about the criteria needed for an attack to be viewed as a terrorist act. Moreover, a sense of fear is conveyed and then amplified in news media coverage through accounts from eyewitnesses, descriptions of the shooting, and visualizations of the attack. This ultimately creates a culture of fear, whereby the risk of becoming victimized by a mass shooting is disproportionate to the actual threat faced.