Media are pushing stories of shootings, floods, Ebola, kidnappings and beheadings.

Americans are fed a non-stop diet of fear-invoking images every night of the week, the more lurid, the more sensational, the more threatening, the better.

It doesn't matter what network or local TV station you watch, fear sells and keeping the viewers hand off the TV remote is the name of the game.

In the golden age of television news, anchors and reporters just presented the news, bad or good. Watch Walter Cronkite announcing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 to see what I mean. It’s on YouTube. I saw it 50 years ago when I was just 10 and it's still etched indelibly in my memory.

No “rapid response” panel. No reporters offering their vapid personal opinions. No grizzled former Secret Service agent nattering endlessly on about what may or may not have happened in Dallas. Just Walter Cronkite telling Americans their beloved young president was dead and then fighting to check his personal emotions in what seemed like an eternity of silence.

That was real broadcast journalism.

In the years since, network and local television news operations have come under increasing pressure by the advertising departments who ultimately answer to Wall Street investors.

Cronkite never saw one of these "Mad Men" in his office. His news division was insulated from hitting revenue and profit goals by television visionary, CBS Network CEO Bill Paley. It was all about getting the story right for Cronkite and his peers.

Today, advertising suits invade newsrooms all the time trying to influence what airs. They want more viewers because more viewers equal more dollars.

If you watch a lot of TV news as I do, it's no accident you're in a perpetual state of apprehension if not outright fear. You make sure the doors are locked. You check the kids are tucked in their beds one extra time. You look over your shoulder as you walk up Peachtree Street to the Fox Theater.

Fear sells. But there's a price we must pay for all that terror.

We’re suspicious of strangers and we mistrust our neighbors. We buy lots of guns and dead bolts. We over-medicate. We live in a constant state of paranoia.

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria or ISIS has figured this out. And as Bill Maher recently pointed out using a vulgar but nonetheless amusing expression, Americans are doing exactly what ISIS wants.

Using social media and delivering the images right into our homes, ISIS executes its prisoners in a particularly intimate and gruesome way, knowing the effect it will have on us.

The world is full of people who hate America. And some want to bleed us. At the minimum they’ll try to terrorize Americans -- but they will only be successful if we let them.

In 1941, we faced two monstrously formidable enemies that make ISIS look like the Mickey Mouse Club. Americans were worried back then, but not terrorized. On the home front, they rolled up their sleeves and got about the business of crushing our enemies as one nation, indivisible.

When GIs in the Pacific listened to Tokyo Rose, they enjoyed the popular tunes she played but laughed at her dire predictions of an American defeat as they gazed out over the endless armadas of warships heading to Japan. These were men of courage who stormed the beaches of Tarawa and Iwo Jima. Some lady on the radio wasn't going to scare them.

In England, American soldiers and their allies listened to William Joyce's broadcasts from Berlin. “Lord Haw Haw” told them their defeat at the hands of Hitler's Aryan super race was inevitable. Early on it appeared he might be right, but the Greatest Generation blasted the Germans out of Normandy and pushed them back to Berlin in less than a year. Some traitor wasn't going to stop them with talk.

So I wonder where the home of the brave went. When did we Americans, proud citizens of the greatest, richest, most militarily powerful nation mankind has ever known, start quaking in our boots over a bunch of psychopaths dressed in black who butcher their helpless victims in the back of beyond?

We're better than this.

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Kevin Foley owns KEF Media Associates, Inc., an Atlanta-based producer and distributor of electronic publicity. He can be reached at [email protected].