Panic Attacks: Media Manipulation and Mass Delusions

Panic Attacks: Media Manipulation and Mass Delusions. Robert E. Bartholomew and Hilary Evans. Sutton Publishing, London, 2004. 222 pp., hardcover. This entertaining history of the effects of news stories, media hype, and urban myths on the popular imagination is presented as a series of lively case studies.

The examples range from the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 and the Halley's Comet scare of 1910 to the "Lost" Tasaday Tribe deception of the 1970s and 1980s and the modern American "witch hunt" that created a sex-abuse accusation epidemic from the late 1970s to early 1990s involving "repressed memories." Other examples include chemical and biological terrorism scares going back to 1630, the mad cow disease hysteria, media-driven social delusions involving real or imaginary creatures, and the Heaven's Gate mass suicides stimulated by a bizarre comet-spaceship theory.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group