To gain a sense of the immediacy of coverage, turn to page 53 to begin a sample of the panicky reporting when the sniper was on the loose.These pages detail the first hour of television coverage of a shooting on October 7, 2002. After the initial six murders on October 2 and 3, an eerie calm had settled over the metropolitan area that was later somewhat disrupted on October 5 when a woman was wounded south of the city in Virginia. Already on October 4, Charles Moose, chief of police for Montgomery County and head of the task force, had assured the public that children were safe in school. In this context the October 7 shooting of eighth-grader Iran Brown at Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Maryland, would, of course, prove quite unsettling.Nothing about the press coverage mitigated the anxiety that would have normally occurred over this shooting. In fact, following the attack at 8:09 A.M., the press scrambled exceptionally hard to get reporters into place. As news teams consolidated, the broadcasts, including anchors and reporters, developed a style in which coverage moved from source to source in a staccato rhythm that created anticipation and fed worry. The frenetic style of the production overwhelmed the customary calm of the anchors. In the most extreme case, one anchor added to the unease. Insightful and highly experienced Mike Buchanan fidgeted, adjusting his tie and holding his head, as in pain. He showed his exasperation with the investigation. In yet another case, the on-site reporter, with a crack in his voice, described the chaos as parents showed up to pick up their kids.All this was exacerbated by an announcement on the local FOX station that six or seven police cars were heading off to another shooting. Seen from the camera on a helicopter, a speeding police convoy proceeded to a Wal-Mart only a couple of minutes away. FOX threw doubt on the story right away, but only ten minutes later could watchers on the NBC affiliate breathe a sigh of relief. Still those watching the ABC station could find a new cause for fear. Even as FOX changed its story, ABC reported not one but two shootings. Then ABC put up a map labeled “New Shootings.” Finally, twelve minutes after the initial retraction, ABC abandoned this tack. Of course, the reports returned to Tasker which was still awash with nervous parents extracting their children from the school. After continuing several more hours, finally the defeated channels had to give up on any progress in the case.I hope this work will contribute to three contextual areas: understanding the economic/career motivations of journalists, evaluating the media by standards derived from its period, and discovering a chronological history of fear. Such evaluation of the media from several angles can lead to a number of other observations. For example, the book scrutinizes separately the television opinion shows which one might hypothesize would be most likely to spread fear. I found, however, that this was generally not the case. In fact, hosts like Chris Matthews on Hardball evinced virtually no interest in the sniper story.The opinion press also followed the lead of the rest of the media in asserting that the snipers were not political terrorists. Sean Hannity, the one journalist who suspected terrorism, dropped that tack after several of his own guests demurred. It remains unclear why the opinion press rather unexpectedly remained relatively loath to raise the decibel level. Perhaps, that so many broadcasts originated from outside the Washington reduced anxiety on the subject.In describing the printed press, I sampled the regional, national, and international printed press in an effort to understand not only the coverage by the press but also to contribute to the debate and discussion over nationalism and globalism.While I expected that different areas of the country would appropriate the story to meet their own concerns, the sample I used (from New York, Houston, Chicago, and San Francisco) did little more than occasionally point out matters consistent with the concerns of the paper.One theme somewhat developed was the way that this incident showed the need for greater gun control. But most reporting followed the line laid down by the local papers in the Washington region.This same lack of independence was even more evident in the international press from France, England, South Africa, and India that I surveyed. Likely, the explanation here is the reverse of that of the opinion shows: most journalists who covered this story, regardless of their home paper, did so through correspondents based in Washington. These results might underline the unconscious way that the temper of a region affects reporting.