We have nothing to fear but hype itself

“So if a reporter has their facts wrong, then the same technologies that are threatening the newspaper model, will be turned against them. At the end of the day credibility matters,” he said.

Exaggeration is a gyp. When reporters over-egg a story, they are spending hard earned credibility; credibility which in many cases hasn’t been earned.

For example, they have co-opted the more reasoned aspects of the environmental movement to create apocalyptic visions of the earth burning, tidal waves, coastal devastation and the land wracked by famine and pestilence. This is silly and does the environmental movement a major disservice.

The language of environmental catastrophes is then appropriated and recycled to dramatise our predicament. We have toxic people, toxic debt, stock market meltdowns and fiscal tsunamis. What we have here is an over supply of rhetoric and an under-supply of facts.

Frank Furedi, a British academic said recently that the rhetoric of panic is used to promote the idea that we are all scared and if we are not, we should be.

“Scaremongering has become a normal dimension of our lives,” Professor Furedi said.

Fans of George Orwell’s 1984 will remember that the rulers of Oceania used propaganda techniques such as scare mongering in their eternal war against Eurasia and Eastasia. One minute the giant TV screens would exhort the proles to celebrate an alleged famous victory, the next there would be panic in the streets, as the aggressors’ armies marched on to new territories which were always just next door to Oceania.

Scare mongering has become a part of our lives. Hasn’t it always been so? No.

Read almost any metropolitan newspaper from Australia 40 years ago and there’s no hint of gross exaggeration or any attempt to scare the bejesus out of us. Terrible things happened: massive storms, earthquakes and wars, but there was no ramped up sense that the “end was nigh”.

A report released by the World Social Summit in Rome last October, called Fear in the Mega-Cities (PDF 192KB), attempts to show how fear is created in 10 major cities across the world.

The study showed that while a large majority (90 per cent) acknowledged that they have day-to-day worries or serious anxieties about an important dimension of their lives, only 12 per cent feel overwhelmed by a sense of fear. Most said they have a positive orientation towards life (55 per cent) and 24 per cent defined themselves as optimistic.

As Ferudi says, fear has become a cultural idiom through which we signal a growing unease with the workings of the world. To acknowledge fear is to demonstrate awareness. This self conscious affectation does not mean that people are more scared than before. It merely signals that they ought to be.

The good news is that people only panic in rare and exceptional circumstances. The vast majority of humankind refuses to play the role assigned to actors in a Hollywood disaster movie.