Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women

By Caryl Rivers

University Press of New England

We’ve known for some time that advertisers sell insecurity, but did we know that the news media sell anxiety? Caryl Rivers, media critic and professor of journalism at Boston University, details just how they do it in Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women. In an easily-digestible eleven-chapter discourse, she outlines how the news media are becoming “infected with the values, attitudes, and requirements of Infotainment.”

The bad news is we get a distorted view of women; we see more images of celebrities than of women in high-level positions, and more images of beautiful women (Laci Peterson) than less affluent women and women of color (e.g., hundreds of women killed in Juarez, Mexico.) Even as women have advanced, she persuasively claims, media images have become more retrograde. Apparently, images of successful women aren’t sexy or sellable. Independent working women (like Mary Tyler Moore) who once brought in the ratings, have turned into conniving, desperate housewives.

It’s not that the media don’t want us to achieve our goals, Rivers argues, but they do want to tell us the price we’ll pay: having less time with our children, dealing with “dangerous” daycare centers, making our husbands suffer, being unhappy, and, gasp, being unloved. In these stories, the media prefer the use of simple arguments, sensational findings, and poorly designed but “interesting” studies. Rivers debunks many of the studies that have garnered attention: how girls lose self-esteem in adolescence, how boys are now the ones suffering in schools, and how male and female brains differ.

Not only do the media fuel these kinds of gender wars, they give longevity to the "mommy wars," pitting stay-at-home mothers against working moms. They create a falsehood by claiming women are “opting out” of the workforce in pursuit of domestic bliss, and, of course, we all know how the media treat the likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Indeed, the media is overwhelmingly shaped by men. The author suggests war and terrorism are topics that interest men and, therefore, get the most space in newspapers; whereas for women, "our issues" get less space. Stories of war and terrorism trump news about poverty, education, racism, sexism, health, and reproductive rights. Women's issues are often ignored or trivialized. Certainly, while the conservatives waged “war” on birth control, promoting abstinence-only education, for example, news media outlets sat idly by, practically ignoring the battle wounds the family planning movement suffered. Wasn’t this war important?

According to Rivers, the media distorts the reality of women’s lives and harms the image of feminism. She’s made some persuasive arguments against some studies that even I still held as true. While I had some awareness on how advertisers can make women neurotic, I learned new information on how the news media do the same. If you have studied the media, this book may be old news for you, but if you have minimal or intermediate knowledge of the media’s bias, this book will break the news in a clear and convincing fashion.

Review by Joan Dawson