ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the social implications of Oklahoma City. There is the control agenda, which seems to appeal to people's insecurity—incidents such as the Oklahoma City bombing are beyond the control of people and the only way to deal with them is to increase the power of the police and other law enforcement agents. The ethnocentrism of the news media was clear in two ways, namely: in the stereotyping of Arabs and other Middle Easterners and in the denial that ordinary Americans could be engaged in terrorist activities. The news media had by now perfected the art of mass coverage of spectacles, and sociological research had demonstrated that heavy TV viewers were more ignorant of the facts of these major events than were light viewers and newspaper readers. For some people the social context may be the strongest factor in violence, while for others the social identity of the target may be the critical dimension.
