I recently gave a Zoom talk titled ‘America the Fearful: Navigating the Media’s Phantom Fears,’ based on my new book: “News and social media provide a steady diet of things to fear: COVID. Vaccinations. Immigrants. Kidnapping rings. Satanists. QAnon. Mass shootings. Suicidal airplane pilots. Baby formula. Killer cops. Violent video games. Mysterious sonic weapons. Critical Race Theory. Stranger danger. And on and on. Some threats are real, some are exaggerated, and some are entirely manufactured. How do we tell the difference? In a world of limited resources—and limited political attention spans—Radford believes it is vital that we adopt a scientific approach to addressing these problems, parsing out the real dangers from the red herrings, the threats from the Boogeymen.”

You can watch it here!