9781422283073

radio, and then the advent of television. The business is now more about television ratings, circulation , listenership, and ad- vertising dollars than taking time to thor- oughly research and report the facts. Psychology Today examined the

Should the NFL revise its policies about the media?

news in an article titled, “If It Bleeds, It Leads: Un- derstanding Fear-Based Media.” The article stated, “Fear-based news stories prey on the anxieties we all have and then hold us hostage…The success of fear-based news relies on presenting dramatic anec- dotes in place of scientific evidence, promoting iso- lated events as trends, depicting categories of people as dangerous, and replacing optimism with fatalistic thinking.” With this in mind, the feature concluded that ex- posure to fear-based news causes people to feel that their neighborhoods and communities are unsafe, to believe that crime rates are rising, to overestimate their odds of becoming a victim, and to consider the world a dangerous place. Those things may or may not be completely true, but people come to believe

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