Photography by Joe Pugliese

Issue: Spring 2003

Fear Buster

Welcome to the life of America’s premier fear-buster, Barry Glassner, a multifaceted USC sociologist who is, paradoxically, a strident media critic and a media darling at one and the same time.

by Diane Krieger

As hard sells go, it doesn’t get much harder than this: A month after the September 11 tragedies, Barry Glassner, appearing on CBS, rallies shell-shocked Americans to stop cowering: “We have to present to our children the sense that they live in a safe environment. That’s our job as adults, as parents. And we don’t do that by filling the house with gas masks and going out and buying a bunch of guns.”

Safe? After seeing the Twin Towers being impaled by commercial airliners, then collapsing before our very eyes (over and over, dozens of times), we should feel safe? It’s a lot to ask, and Glassner knows it. So once again, watched by millions of nail-biting Americans, the mild-mannered USC sociologist girds for battle with his arch-nemesis, the evil temptress Paranoia.

His opening salvo came just 11 days after the 9/11 attacks. “I think it’s certainly a real possibility that there will be additional terrorist attacks,” he conceded on CNN, “but” – and then he let loose, fists rhetorically flying. “The many, many rumors that are spreading on e-mail, on the Internet, among friends, networks.… The number of them, and the silliness of them, when we take a step back, is pretty extreme.”

Rumors swirled of Al Qaeda fighters invading Catalina, of sleeper cells plotting to blow up bridges and power plants, of men in crop-dusters dumping chemical or biological agents on cities.

Glassner repeatedly appealed for calm: “The immediate dangers to an individual of stress and social isolation and fear are probably greater than the danger of terrorism,” he warned in John Tierney’s Oct. 9, 2001, New York Times column, advising folks to “avoid worrying about dangers over which you have no control.”

There was little chance of that really happening, Glassner knew.

For years he’d been blowing the whistle on a parade of outlandish panics: shark attacks, flesh-eating bacteria, Satanic cults that practice child sacrifice, killer bees, Congressional lotharios. A few short months before the terrorist attacks forever changed America, concerned parents had been fretting over roller-coaster safety. That halcyon summer, a woman died mysteriously after descending from Magic Mountain’s formidable Goliath. A single fatality in 1.5 million safe rides, noted a nonetheless-jittery David Brancaccio in a segment for Marketplace Radio’s “Savvy Traveler.”

“If you pay attention to these alarming stories in the media,” Glassner chided, “you’re going to have to keep your kids home from almost everything, because virtually anything you do with them will be at least this dangerous.”

On the second anniversary of the Columbine massacre, reporters revisited the wrong-headed myth that American schools teem with teen time bombs. Glassner patiently reminded CNN viewers that a student is more likely to be struck by lightning than to be killed in school. (Only 19 deaths out of 54 million children in 1996-97, Glassner’s research had documented.)

Fed a steady diet of the horrid and bizarre, is it any wonder that people should see their world askew? Paranoia’s hysterical chorus all but drowns out his faint voice. Or worse. Glassner recalls one surreal TV appearance on NBC’s “Today Show.” Invited to critique the media’s overzealous Columbine coverage, he complained of the endless replays of students fleeing the building. As he spoke, the tape was once again rolling.

So why doesn’t he just save his breath?

Glassner smiles. “I’m willing to be on their shows because it interrupts what their shows are otherwise doing. While I’m on, the fear-mongering stops, and there’s a countervailing message for people who are listening to it, that I hope will help calm them down.”


Glassner and Michael Moore, strolling in South Central, and looking for danger at Florence and Normandie, from Bowling for Columbine.
photos courtesy of Bowling for Columbine

Welcome to the life of America’s premier fear-buster, a USC sociologist who is, paradoxically, a strident media critic and a media darling at one and the same time. Author of the critically praised 1999 bestseller The Culture of Fear, in the last five years Glassner has appeared on scores of national TV and radio broadcasts, and has been quoted frequently in major newspapers and magazines. His op-eds – like last August’s stinging critique of the much-lauded Amber alerts in the Wall Street Journal – have occasionally drawn fire. (“America’s Most Wanted” creator John Walsh took issue with that one, bristling at Glassner’s claim that our obsession with freak instances of stranger abductions distracts from the far graver problem of child-snatchings by relatives and acquaintances, not to mention other widespread social ills affecting children, such as poverty and physical abuse.)

The Culture of Fear, an academic-popular crossover, was a huge hit when it was first published. Knight-Ridder and the Los Angeles Times named it a “Best Book of 1999,” and culture critic Neil Postman called it “a sound intellectual alternative to Prozac.” The book, to be re-issued with a new introduction next fall, is enjoying a fresh bounce after Glassner appeared in last fall’s hilariously provocative documentary, Bowling for Columbine.

Halfway through the movie, Glassner and filmmaker Michael Moore stand on the corner of Florence and Normandie, infamous cradle of the L.A. riots. It’s a sunny-hazy Southern California day. Bullets aren’t flying. Police sirens aren’t screaming. Where’s the danger? Moore wants to know. Glassner points north, toward the invisible Hollywood sign. Poor air-quality, he explains, is probably a deadlier threat than urban violence.

Glassner has the privilege of being the only “expert” that Moore has ever featured in one of his films. He’s also one of only a handful of people in the film (along with shock-rocker Marilyn Manson and “South Park” creator Matt Stone) whom Moore doesn’t wickedly lampoon.

But then Moore is a longtime admirer of Glassner’s work. And while the two aren’t exactly kindred spirits, the sociologist and the muckraking filmmaker share views on the importance of gun control, society’s unfair demonizing of black men and the irresponsible behavior of the media.

In a joint appearance with Moore on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Glassner found he had acquired yet another fan: “I went out and got [The Culture of Fear] immediately after seeing the movie,” the daytime diva and sometime book-critic confided. “If you were to go to my house, you wouldn’t see a gun under my bed, but you would see The Culture of Fear by my nightside table.”

Unlike Moore, Glassner defies political cubbyholes. His ideas tilt neither left nor right, but chart their own idiosyncratic course. In The Culture of Fear he defends rap musicians, TV violence and airline safety, while attacking the war on drugs and “metaphorical illnesses,” like Gulf War Syndrome.

“People who have strong commitments to a left- or right-wing agenda can all find chapters in my book that will really upset them,” he says. “My approach is to show what the evidence indicates, and if that upsets someone’s political belief, so be it.”

It’s not unusual for Glassner himself to be surprised by his research findings, which often contradict his hypotheses. “Were that not the case, I wouldn’t enjoy the work very much,” he says. “If I just kept finding what I suspected, it wouldn’t interest me very long.”

Even at 50, Glassner looks boyish – his close-cropped, dark curls innocent of gray, his eyes dancing with curiosity behind Harry Potter-ish wire-rim glasses, a smile never far from the surface.

When he joined the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences in 1991, he was a leading exponent of qualitative sociology (a methodology he advanced considerably when, as a graduate student, he had the audacity to co-found a new scholarly periodical. Qualitative Sociology filled a vacuum then; today it’s one of sociology’s flagship journals.) Glassner served as editor through 1982; he edited a special 20th-anniversary issue in 1997.

Something of a prodigy, he completed his master’s and Ph.D. at Washington University in just three years. Four years later, as a junior professor at Syracuse University, he helped pioneer a computer program capable of crunching qualitative data. Artificial intelligence programmers at Syracuse developed Qualog – the first computer-assisted qualitative data analysis tool – to assist Glassner’s study of adolescent drug use and crime, research relying on tens of thousands of pages of field notes, narratives and interview transcripts. Basically a highly sensitive word-search program for mainframe computers, Qualog paved the way for commercial PC software such as Ethnograph, now the sine qua nonof qualitative social science research.

That early study led to two books on adolescent crime and several articles. (Among his major findings: teens turn to drugs and crime out of boredom. Give them other options for excitement, and the risk of misbehavior sharply drops.)

At the same time, Glassner was making a name for himself in a completely different sphere of sociology – as a theorist. His books, Essential Interactionism: On the Intelligibility of Prejudice (1980) and A Rationalist Methodology for the Social Sciences (1985), co-authored with political scientist David Sylvan, were hailed as important contributions by leading scholars.

Glassner’s early theoretical work had focused on symbolic interactionism, a branch of sociological theory exploring how symbols play out in human interactions (for example, how the label “criminal,” as opposed to “mentally ill,” influences one’s treatment in the justice system). This led naturally to postmodernism, a philosophy whose applications to social science he teaches and writes about with élan.

It’s only in the last dozen years that Glassner’s research began to focus on how Americans come to believe things that aren’t quite true – and on how those misconceptions affect communities and the larger society.

In a series of journal articles leading up to his book, Bodies (1988), Glassner took on the fitness revolution of the 1980s. He began with the classic sociologist’s question: Who benefits?

At first blush, you might think everyone does. Glassner came to a different conclusion. The big winners, he says, are “insurance companies that can reduce payouts and increase their premiums for people who don’t exercise and eat right. Health clubs. Running shoe manufacturers and all fitness-apparel makers.” And don’t forget peddlers of diet foods and supplements, cereal aisles as far as the eye can see.

But aren’t strong, lean bodies obviously the best kind to have? “I think not,” Glassner writes in Bodies. The fat-free, muscle-toned ideal “is not an objective representation of beauty and durability,” he contends. “Its assumed superiority is based on myths that have trickled down from cosmetics, exercise and fashion moguls. We think it looks great because we’ve been taught that by so many authorities, from Mom to the American Heart Association.”

“It was a wonderful book,” says Lilian Rubin, an internationally distinguished sociologist/psychologist at UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Social Change. The galley proofs for Bodies had landed on the “requesting comments” pile on her desk. “I get so many,” Rubin says with a sigh, “but this one caught me quickly. I just kept coming back to it.” She returned a few lines of praise, which made it onto the book’s dust jacket – and a lifelong friendship was born.

A couple of years into a phone-buddy relationship that had somehow never yet brought them face to face, Rubin one day nonchalantly asked Glassner how he old was. He demurred, fearing she wouldn’t take him seriously. “He was right,” Rubin recalls, laughing. When she finally caught up with him at a conference, Glassner, then full professor and chairman of Syracuse’s sociology department, was a fresh-faced lad in his mid-30s.

Glassner’s next crossover book was Career Crash (1994). Hard on the heels of the 1991 recession, it explored what happens to Americans before, while and after their careers fall apart. And then he began narrowing in on the topic that was to make him a celebrity: the relationship between mistaken beliefs and societal fears. The idea grew out of a controversy during the 1992 presidential campaign, after Vice President Quayle’s criticism of the out-of-wedlock pregnancy of TV character Murphy Brown escalated into a full-scale attack on unwed mothers, particularly young ones. Intrigued, Glassner reviewed the social science literature: at the height of the scare over “babies raising babies,” he found fewer than 22,000 teen moms lived alone. In President Clinton’s first term, teen motherhood actually dipped nearly 12 percent.

Ironically, the qualitative sociologist found himself knee-deep in statistics. Glassner is quick to point out that none of the original research cited in The Culture of Fear is his own. His task was harder: collect all the scholarship, government reports and independent data on a given topic; gather every major media account of the same; and working back and forth between the various accounts, compare scientific facts with journalistic claims.

Like his earlier crossover books, The Culture of Fear is an accessible read. And like the others, it concludes with dozens of pages of endnotes. Celebrity and bestselling-author status aside, Glassner remains a stickler for rock-solid social science.

“He’s sort of known for that among graduate students – for holding you to a high standard and not letting you go beyond your data, not generalizing beyond what you actually have,” says doctoral candidate Wendy DeBoer MS ’97.

DeBoer, who was his research assistant, marvels at Glassner’s “amazing work ethic.” For The Culture of Fear, he would set her to hunt down every article on a given topic – road rage, welfare moms, unsafe houses, toxic issues. She e-mailed them by the hundreds to Glassner. “Within two or three days, I could see he had synthesized everything,” she recalls. “The timeframe was incredible!”

This knack for devouring and digesting reams of information in little time comes in very handy, as Glassner (who freely admits he’s a workaholic) keeps tabs on every topic he has ever studied. His nightly bedtime routine involves slogging through the entire Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and USA Today in search of articles on food and nutrition, health and fitness, body impressions, irrational fears and media hype, teen drug abuse, alcoholism, manic depression, career burnout, urban crime, race relations, prejudice and anti-Semitism, guns and so on. “Our recycling container is always overflowing,” he chuckles.

Just because he works constantly and goes to bed covered in newsprint doesn’t mean Glassner isn’t a fun guy. He and his wife, Betsy Amster, an independent literary agent, are both die-hard foodies, dining out on average five nights a week (mostly Korean, Mexican and Chinese restaurants where the bill never tops $15). With a self-mocking smile, the debunker of one-in-a-million odds ruefully admits he met his wife of 15 years in the ultimate crap-shoot, a blind date. And then there’s his overriding passion, the epitome of fun: Barry Glassner is a magician.

It’s Monday night at the Magic Castle, and Glassner is in his element, strolling through the niches where magician members gather for impromptu demonstrations, putting Invisible Irma through her paces (“How’s the weather?” he calls to the ghostly pianist; Irma rattles off a sunny show tune). Passing into the club’s Houdini Room, where séances are still held, he gazes lovingly at the memorabilia on display there: handcuffs, chains, a giant milk can the fabled escape artist used in his act.

This was his first love. A magician since age 6, Glassner says he was “really good” as a teenager, making the rounds at birthday parties and civic clubs.

Though he no longer performs, magic remains central in his life. “It was a lot easier for USC to recruit me,” he says, completely straight-faced, “because the Magic Castle was here.” When he and Amster began house-hunting, Glassner made just one stipulation: it had to be near the Magic Castle. From his Silver Lake home to the club’s valet lot takes 15 minutes.

There are many reasons Glassner finds magic so, well, magical, but the most compelling is this: “Magicians are the world’s greatest skeptics,” he says. “I’ve never met one who doesn’t look at anyone and anything that purports to be true, and ask: ‘Is there a trick here?’ It’s deep in our bones.”

He sees no contradiction in natural-born debunkers waving wands and muttering abracadabra. “Magicians show that all magic is a trick, and that the appropriate response to a trick is enjoyment and applause” – not credulity or terror.

Which leads right back to Glassner, the sociologist. “The principles of magic – the techniques to fool you – often are used elsewhere in the social world,” he says. “In The Culture of Fear, I talk about misdirection: if I want to make a coin disappear from this hand, I’ve got to get you to look over here for a second while I get rid of it. Politicians are doing this all the time.”


“Barry knows how to go on news programs and say serious things in a short time. It’s rare, and something [sociologists] should do more of.”

Almost as old as his fascination with magic is Glassner’s preoccupation with Jewishness. Growing up in rural southwest Virginia, the son of a jeweler, he experienced his share of hazing, name-calling and even beatings. Roanoke (“not to be confused with the lost colony ,” he says with a smile) was three hours from the nearest city, but right next door to a major Ku Klux Klan center.

Being Jewish guided his choice of college (“I wanted to go north to get away from the anti-Semitism in my hometown”). It shaped his dissertation topic – comparing competing theories of how “social distance” influences prejudice.

His first major study as a freshly minted Washington University Ph.D. delved into the curiously low rate of alcoholism found among Jews (under 1 percent, compared to more than 7 percent among Americans in general). His 1980 article, “How Jews Avoid Alcohol Problems” – published in the field’s top journal, American Sociological Review – remains a much-cited authoritative explanation of the gap, which, Glassner found, has to do with predictability of when drinking and drunkenness will occur in Jewish families.

His interest in Jewish issues continues. At USC, he is founding director of the three-year-old Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life. Glassner has collaborated with various faculty members to produce everything from a Jewish autobiographical film festival and a symposium on Jewish comedy to a two-day conference on a cultural and religious renaissance in Jewish life. He has organized lectures featuring Sen. Joe Lieberman and Rep. Barney Frank, as well as top scholars of the Dead Sea scrolls and the Oslo peace process. He recently co-authored The Jewish Role in American Life, the first volume in an annual series published by the Casden Institute. And he just announced the institute’s first research grants: to USC Law School’s Nomi Stolzenberg, for her study of “spiritual custody”; and graduate student Shirli Brautbar, for her history of Zionist women’s organizations in Los Angeles.

Though he’s quick to reject any claim to being a Jewish studies scholar, major Jewish themes thread through much of Glassner’s work – including his current book project. Tentatively titled The Gospel of Food, it focuses on how particular foods, flavors, restaurants and cooking practices come to be regarded favorably or unfavorably (there’s a section on Jewish food, of course), and on political contests over societal problems related to food and hunger.

If that book is anything like his others, it will be chock full of characters and dialogue, written in vivid, idiomatic prose that clearly demarcates Glassner’s road-not-taken. Back in college, he had double-majored in sociology and journalism (in Northwestern’s top-rated Medill School.) He had worked for ABC news radio, written syndicated newspaper columns and freelanced magazine features. Before hunkering down for his Ph.D. in sociology, he had briefly tried living by the pen, but was disappointed both by how poorly it paid and by the shallowness of having to distill important ideas down to 500 words.

He recalls voicing these frustrations to his favorite Northwestern professor, sociologist Howard Becker. “Become a sociologist,” Becker quipped. “Then you can write entire books that should have been 500 words.”

Glassner took half the advice – the part about becoming a sociologist. And he’s done a lot to combat the other half.

“Barry has succeeded in writing this serious scholarship that’s accessible,” says USC graduate student Stephanie Nawyn, admiringly. “He knows how to go on news programs and say serious things in a short time. It’s rare and something we should do more of.

“If sociologists want to be relevant, we need to be public intellectuals – people reporters and documentarians come to because we can talk in a language that’s understandable. We can’t continue to write things that no one reads, say things that no one hears.”

In fairness to the brotherhood he once belonged to and now slams for pandering to paranoia, Glassner tempers his criticism of media fear-mongers with praise of its stalwart fear-debunkers. For every reporter who turns a freak event into a “frightening trend,” there are others to keep them honest. It was a whistle-blowing Wall Street Journal reporter who sucked the hot air out of the myth that workplace violence was on the rise, he notes in The Culture of Fear.

To reporters who argue the bizarre makes good copy, he retorts: “The real big problems in American society have lots of drama. We’ve got roughly 40 million people without health insurance. Instead of showing a freeway car chase, why not show us what goes on in emergency rooms? It’s not like it doesn’t have suspense, blood and gore. There are lots of ways to report real problems in ways that are compelling for viewers and readers.”

In October, Barry Glassner is insanely busy again. Critics are singling out his scenes in Bowling for Columbine for special praise, and requests for interviews are pouring in. Meanwhile the nation (blitzed by wall-to-wall coverage of the Beltway snipers’ terror rampage) is once again gripped by fear. By the third week, people within a 100-mile radius of the capital have adopted a bunker mentality: schools closed, malls abandoned, football and soccer games cancelled, people pumping gas in a recumbent position. Paranoia triumphs, and talk-show booking agents once more queue up for a slice of Glassner’s get-a-grip common sense. There’s a greater possibility of being the victim of an automobile accident than a sniper bullet, he tells the Los Angeles Times.

A week later, the sniper crisis has blown over. Back in his office, Glassner confronts his own worst fear: that with The Gospel of Food he has bitten off more than he can cognitively chew. He’s been boning up lately on epidemiology. A file cabinet full of news clips and trade magazines, not to mention the hundreds of scholarly articles and government reports crowding his hard-drive, he worries, won’t all fit in his bulging brain.

From past experience, he knows the book will somehow come together. He has already arrived at some shockers, but he’s saving his thunder. Suffice it to say that people won’t be looking at bran muffins and Big Macs in quite the same way.

Life is good. Another book, a collection of essays he edited for Oxford University Press, is coming out later this year. That one explores the lives and research of two dozen prominent sociologists. Last spring, he received the USC Associates Award for Creativity in Research and Scholarship.

He revels in the little-known fact that Phillips Barbeque in Leimert Park serves the best barbecue west of Kansas City, and that later this week, he’ll take in a show at the Magic Castle. Now if only people could stop worrying about killer bees and West Nile virus …