It is also clear from his account who is responsible for misrepresenting this threat: the media and politicians. Throughout this work, he scolds both. Politicians, we are told, “amplify the threat for their own political gains and mislead the public into misunderstanding terrorism and prefer appearing tough on terrorism to effectively combating it at home”. He argues that media reporting is significantly flawed and hysterical and suggests that the media and politicians seldom pass up any opportunity to manipulate and sensationalize news events. The combination of these two factors is a great inflation of the terrorist threat in the United States, resulting in popular hysteria. The focus on the threat to the West is understandable in some ways—it is the threat to one’s own state that the media and politicians are concerned with and attempt to mitigate.
