Fear is a powerful psychological concept that politicians, activists and the media have used to their advantage since time immemorial. Although we might like to blame the modern media on a worsening condition of fearful press, it may not be wholly accurate.

The graph above, from the Google News Archive, shows the volume of New York Times articles mentioning ‘fear’ since 1900. Perhaps we have become so oversaturated with fear that it is no-longer newsworthy.

Matching articles from each decade were passed into Wordle to extract the most fearful topics of each decade. A war-torn century was briefly broken by fears of politicians during the 20’s prohibition, communism and civil rights in the 60s, and AIDS in the 80s.