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We have nothing to fear but hype itself

By Malcolm King - posted Monday, 9 February 2009


One million people out of work by June! The lifestyles of the newly unemployed! Here comes the Great Recession! What’s next? The Great Depression! Read all about it ...

To paraphrase Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we have nothing to fear but hype itself.

The media have hit the superlative button and kept their finger on it for a generation now. Is it possible for the fourth estate to ramp up fear campaigns and moral panics beyond the descriptive powers of language?

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The use of gross exaggeration - labelling every car crash a tragedy, every flood, a natural disaster, every stock market fall a looming depression - is beyond fatuous. It’s mad.

It’s paradoxical that the media, which sells itself on its ability to report with a reasonable verisimilitude of “what happened and to who”, has abandoned this core function in favour of producing opinion stories - not unlike this one - but without the interview and research.

I am not talking about the downmarket tabloids or whacko “Martians attack Kansas” shock-horror backyard presses. I’m talking about Australian metropolitan newspapers and TV news.

Once upon a time it was the duty of every reporter to report as many sides of the story as possible. Even a “no comment” was a comment. Today, balanced reporting is an endangered species. Many news stories are diatribes and are full of errors of fact.

Here’s an example. Recently Queensland radio commentator Michael Smith flagged that the hijab, a type of head dress worn by Islamic women, should be removed before entering a shop because it disguised the wearer’s face. This was quickly followed by support from the National Retail Traders Association.

I’m not the sharpest chisel in the toolbox but I know that the hijab shows the face and it’s the burka (and various other styles) that cover the head. This story went national before the Minister for Multicultural Affairs in South Australia pointed this out on ABC radio.

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It was the producer’s job in Queensland to ensure the announcer didn’t make a fool of himself. Did he know? Did he care? Or did Smith say “burka” and by the time it reaches South Australia, it had turned in to a hijab? That story ran hot for 24 hours. It must have made the hordes of Islamic female armed robbers nervous.

“Newspapers are finding a similar business model as record companies did in the late 1990s. The cost to replicate their core function is rapidly dropping to zero with the ubiquity of video, bloggers and cell phones. And that can’t be stopped,” said the Executive Director of Carnegie Mellon Australia, Mr Tim Zak and innovation expert.

“And for many of the citizen journalists (bloggers), their need for revenues are not nearly as great as the major papers. Since the general public has so many more sources for news of all kinds and the ability to search for news is so much easier than before, it’s faster and easier to dispute a story that has been published.

“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.

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About the Author

Malcolm King is a journalist and professional writer. He was an associate director at DEEWR Labour Market Strategy in Canberra and the senior communications strategist at Carnegie Mellon University in Adelaide. He runs a writing business called Republic.

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