David L. Altheide is a sociologist and was born in the United States in 1950. He teaches at Arizona State University's School of Justice and Social Inquiry where he is Regents' Professor, a prestigious recognition given to those who make pioneering contributions in their field of study. His received the Charles Horton Cooley Award thanks to his studies in the field of methodological perspectives of symbolic interaction, the only person to have ever received this prestigious award three times. It is given for excellence in publications in the field, by the SSSI (Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction), in recognition of his of qualitative and interactive research. He also received the SSSI's George Herbert Mead Award in 2005 in recognition of his lifetime achievements.

In his recent publications he analyses the way in which social actors construct the meanings that give sense to social organization and action, especially with regard to the media's role in spreading news about the phenomenon of terrorism and to promote a policy of fear that increases the need for social control. His best-known books are Qualitative Media Analysis (1996), Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis (2002) and Terrorism and the Politics of Fear (2006). The last book was selected as one of the Outstanding Academic Titles of 2006 by Choice (American Library Association) because of the high quality original analysis it contains.

David Altheide's work on mass media's role in the processes that "construct" the daily fears that afflict the members of global society, is the reason for his participation in the WSS.

Central to Altheide's work is an analysis of mass communication methods and tools the world over. He concludes that this is the main way by which the global dimension of our world enters the daily lives of individuals. Mass media have revolutionized traditional notions of space and time, making it possible to build social relationships independent of local interaction. Far-away events can become just as familiar or perhaps even more so, than the "local universe" of people whom the individual has daily contact with. They can thus become an integral part of the personal experience picture. Individuals thus become members of a global community, something that no one can avoid. The result is a process of cultural homogenisation, caused also as a consequence of individual participation, through the media, in planetary events. It means becoming aware of potential global risks (terrorism, natural catastrophes, etc.), with effects that impact individual lives. And this also means that the perception of risks, both the real ones and those we think are real, are repeated on a global scale. In this way, the process of experience mediatization can amplify fears that people may or may not already have or even generate new ones. The mass media, as agents of widespread socialization, are the source of many a symbol, meaning, programme and basic definition. The public thus identifies and interprets the different situations using these factors. In the past, many fears that people had were related to direct, and most often, first hand experience. But today most fears derive from indirect experiences, ones that people have no direct personal link with, ones they have come into contact with through the mass media. Their cunning lies in the ability to provoke fear, presenting themselves as the means of protection and reassurance, allowing people to find social order through the imaginary scene that they mastermind.

The way that communication is organized and information is selected and presented is fundamental to capturing (and manipulating) the public. A relevant issue is the growth of the entertainment format in the last three decades. It sets out completely new norms, presenting unpredictability and "out of the ordinary" adventures as normal behaviour, encouraging viewers not to doubt what they see on the screen. This type of format is usually brief, action packed and dramatic. It uses deliberately forceful and emotionally charged language, resulting in a pace that is exciting and by now familiar to the public. Thus, especially because people spend more and more time watching them, the language and logic of advertising, entertainment and popular culture are now taken for granted and considered a natural and normal means of communication.

Journalistic language, too, is dominated by the spectacularization and dramatization of events. In keeping with this logic, there is an attempt is to attract public attention by referring continuously to facts, images and words in ways which excite fear. In his book Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis (2002), Altheide documents the increasing use in recent times of the word "fear" in news bulletins, especially in text titles that are often accompanied by a jingle, purpose-made to create suspense. In general, there is a trend towards creating a variety of services based on the assumption that danger and risk are features that we need to accept in our physical and symbolic environment, the way people live and define it in their daily lives.

The influence of media is such that even the language of politics, economy, sport, and religion end up by fitting into the logic which govern and change them, knowing that information which is excessively simplified and spectacularized is very attractive to the public. In his last book, Terrorism and the Politics of Fear (2006), Altheide shows how, especially, politicians stoke the fears of citizens, and how in more recent times they resort to the threat of terrorism to promote their politics and achieve their objectives, including personal ones. In an inward-looking, consumer-oriented society that lacks shared values and lives mainly in the present, the fear of terrorism becomes the perfect diversion. It shifts attention away from more serious problems, or from issues such as creating legitimacy and improving consensus, and wherever authentic support for this idea does not already exist, it uses the threat of a "real enemy" to bring this danger to the fore. In conclusion, therefore, it is a useful tool for increased social control over citizens.

Ably manipulated risks thus replace shared values, and the fear of loss of identity overrides political choice and collective action. The hoped for results seem to promise cultural stability, but in truth turn out to be just the opposite. Thanks to the passivity produced by fear, the lives of individuals in the post-modern society are marked, by an unlimited and arbitrary use of political power. But by the same token, they are ruled by policies founded on superficial consensus that is incapable of controlling the aggressiveness of individuals and social groups at their origin. All told, they are policies without clout.