Hmm... kinda finished Fear, however i ended up just skimming the end. I agreed with a bunch of Glassner's general ideas (media over hypes things and misses core issues) however at times he seemed to go over the deep end. Potraying a mass conspiracy against large groups of people. He makes a case for a consipiracy (in effect) between the White House and media companies to hype illegal drugs as an evil thing. I agree that the illegal drug use is probably a smaller issue that abuse of legal drugs, but I don't buy that there is a consipracy. Glassner fell short of actually saying it was a blatant conspiracy...

Anyway, it was still a good read and had lots of good contrary facts against illegal drug abuse, crime rates, teen pregnancy, airplane crashes, and road rage as the biggest fears we should have. Glassner is obviously strongly against guns, which were probably the single most consistently blamed evil in the book.

I have always felt the evening news over dramatizes everything (Windstorm 2002, etc.), and I guess the nice thing is that this book validates my bullshit detector. Net result - don't trust mainstream news.

Interestingly enough, it looks like weblogs might be a good source of information... at least according to the Microcontent News site.