On his book On the Trail of the D.C. Sniper: Fear and the Media
Cover Interview of April 11, 2010
In a nutshell
On the Trail of the D.C. Sniper tells the story of the press coverage of the deeds of John Muhammad and Lee Malvo as they traversed the Washington D.C. area in October 2002.
Honing in on twenty-three days permits a tightly focused analysis of the kaleidoscope of information and opinions provided by the media.
To understand this coverage, the book also compares it to the sniper as imagined by major school systems responding to the threat.
In a nutshell, the press embraced fear while the schools turned toward coping. This contrast does not prove who was right but instead reveals the underlying structures of press and schools which then led and still leads toward a particular viewpoint. The impact of a media inclined to propagate fearful reporting can be problematic in a nation in which fear is so casually used to political and commercial advantage.
The narrative story of the reporting perhaps provides even more unexpected results than the book’s main conclusion. Following journalists who surveyed this carnage reveals more vulnerable professionals than appear in either movies or the writings of critics. The image of the schools wrestling with that crisis, on the other hand, shows decisions that are rarely in the spotlight.
Despite the general orientation of the press, differences—some surprising—turn up in this book. Some of them relate to the variety of the media I include—regional, national, and international; radio; local and cable television; and opinion and news shows.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
On the Trail of the D.C. Sniper tells the story of the press coverage of the deeds of John Muhammad and Lee Malvo as they traversed the Washington D.C. area in October 2002.
Honing in on twenty-three days permits a tightly focused analysis of the kaleidoscope of information and opinions provided by the media.
To understand this coverage, the book also compares it to the sniper as imagined by major school systems responding to the threat.
In a nutshell, the press embraced fear while the schools turned toward coping. This contrast does not prove who was right but instead reveals the underlying structures of press and schools which then led and still leads toward a particular viewpoint. The impact of a media inclined to propagate fearful reporting can be problematic in a nation in which fear is so casually used to political and commercial advantage.
The narrative story of the reporting perhaps provides even more unexpected results than the book’s main conclusion. Following journalists who surveyed this carnage reveals more vulnerable professionals than appear in either movies or the writings of critics. The image of the schools wrestling with that crisis, on the other hand, shows decisions that are rarely in the spotlight.
Despite the general orientation of the press, differences—some surprising—turn up in this book. Some of them relate to the variety of the media I include—regional, national, and international; radio; local and cable television; and opinion and news shows.