ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to set forth the relevance of mass communication formats and content for analysis of the intersection between culture and cognition and for suggesting a few bridges across some conceptual and methodological divides in mass communication research. It offers a conceptual and methodological approach-tracking discourse-to the study of mass media. The mass media provide the bulk of cultural experiences for citizens about crime and fear. And while some researchers have examined the place of fear in some cultural venues of American life most accounts do not significantly expand our understandings beyond those set forth by Hadley Cantril and his colleagues nearly sixty years ago. The focus on media forms and logic of communication underlies an expanding agenda for understanding how the mass media can influence culture in terms of content, messages, and agenda, as well as the prevailing media logic that pervade the popular culture shared by many segments of society, albeit unevenly.
