But the society wide impact of that has been a much more fearful people, obviously making parents more protective too.
Also more subtle changes in how media reports things in general. I haven’t seen a study on this, but it would be an interesting subject.
If you look for security reasons, you'll find security reasons, for everything. It's like like applying a caricature of scientific method to gaslight someone.
To be fair, the media landscape changed pretty drastically since the 80s or so. First, cable (and talk radio?) let us start forming bubbles. Then ubiquitous Internet made more bubbles and pushed people apart more.
And what's great for forming bubbles and, coincidentally, marketing demographics? Nothing new: fear.
The thing is . . . the media landscape hadn't been so mainstream, pine-scented, and vanilla-flavored until really recently: probably traceable to the rise of radio in the early 20th century. Before that, every big city had many newspapers, most of whom claiming some of the others were lying. "Yellow journalism" dates to the last century.
Radio and broadcast television were highly regulated. The idea was that use of those things should be for the public good. And people who voted D and people who voted R both had reasons to want that enforced. And their politicians found something to agree about beyond scrabbling for donor money.
In these days of corporate capture of politics, regulating anything for the public good is only going to happen if it profits the biggest gorilla in the room.
Well before then. I got one of the last chemistry sets around 1970, when they were all emasculated.
> The entire capitalist machine realised just how profitable fear can be
Oh come on. A huge driver of this problem is the legal system which encourages jackpot lawsuits, along with our culture of it's always someone else's fault (usually the party with money that becomes worthwhile to sue).
1. Profiteering media based on a 24/7/365 fixation on fear and violence: "if it bleeds it leads", and encouraging our worst tendencies toward moral panic (e.g. the 80s satanic ritual abuse panic, which recapitulated in some ways the Salem witch trials)
2. A people who easily go along with the media-driven culture of fear, and learn e.g. that their kids can't go anywhere without falling into pedophile clutches
3. The hyper-punitive systems of US law and child protective services
I agree with your premise that it certainly was recognized and capitalized upon at that time again that fear, hysteria, crises, etc were good ways to get what you want out of people.