Opinion: UTC course explores the origins of our fears

Times Free Press staff photo by Mark Kennedy. Jared Rosenberger, Ph.D., taught a course at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga last year called "Mean and Scary World."
Times Free Press staff photo by Mark Kennedy. Jared Rosenberger, Ph.D., taught a course at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga last year called "Mean and Scary World."

Is it really a mean and scary world? Or, do our media-saturated brains make us nervous Nellies?

Those are questions researchers in a small corner of academia have been trying to answer for decades.

Jared Rosenberger, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, has done research in the area of "cultivation theory," which holds that people's attitudes are heavily shaped by their media consumption habits. To give an example: People who watch a lot of violent TV and movies are more likely to fear for their personal safety, studies show.

George Gerbner (1919-2005), a Word War II vet turned University of Pennsylvania professor, is considered the father of "cultivation theory." He began studying the effects of violence in movies and TV programming in the 1960s. In recent years, "cultivation theory" principles have been applied more broadly to news media and, to some extent, social media.

Rosenberger found the topic so compelling that he designed a "special topics" course at UTC called "Mean and Scary World." Students in the class last year studied Gerbner's work, which claims violence is a news and entertainment commodity that is easy to understand, can be packaged for short attention spans and cuts across cultures. In Gerbner's words, violence "travels well."

"[Gerbner] found that both TV and movies are riddled with violent depictions," Rosenberger said in an interview at UTC. "In some of his early research, he found that consuming those types of depictions left you afraid and with higher levels of fear of victimization."

Specifically, "cultivation theory" notes that many people who are heavy consumers of violent programming placed their risk of being a victim of violent crime at 1 in 10 in any given week, when the true risk is closer to 1 in 10,000, Rosenberger said.

"The takeaway is, 'I need to be prepared at all times. There's a high likelihood that I will be victimized,'" Rosenberger said. "Statistically, that's not always the case. Gerbner found that people were overestimating [their risk] greatly - which he attributes to this fear, this 'big, mean world' idea."

That kind of personal risk assessment can lead to public policy decisions that may or may not be rooted in reliable data, Rosenberger said. For example, many believe that so-called "war on drugs" and resulting mass incarceration were rooted in media-driven fear of crime prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s.

Rosenberger's course takes a close look at how media shapes the news. He says the "fake news" label is largely a political invention, but that doesn't mean news consumers should blindly trust everything they see on TV or read in the newspaper. Digging deeper is often required.

"The media isn't fake," he said. "It's simply that there is context to all information and stories. I hope for my students that when they are confronted with something [in the media] their response should be: 'OK, let's not take this at face value or reject wholeheartedly. Let's try to find some additional information from good quality sources.'"

A good example of how the news media cherry-picks data for effect is in the realm of health news, Rosenberger says. For instance, one day a headline says coffee is making us healthy, then another day a headline says coffee is hurting us, he said.

"They [the media] take very complicated, very narrow studies, and if they find one correlation, they run with it," he said.

To be more media literate, students (and, more generally, all media consumers) have to be vigilant, Rosenberger said.

"I hope students leave the class optimistic about their own ability to seek out reliable information," Rosenberger said. "I never want the takeaway to be that we reject news. The stories are always rooted in reality."

Still, he said, the way news stories are framed, often with a lack of context, can result in misleading reports.

The bottom line: Some things in life are truly scary. But inventing dread helps no one, and causes many to live in their fears.

Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com.

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