Fear Mongering in the Media

At last, we have finally touched on the subject of media influence in society. Thank you, Block, I was wondering when you'd throw this little screwball in the mix. Except, the media should not be considered just a little side note for the sake of inclusion. News, internet, facebook- all of these aspects of society play an enormous role in our lives, in our ways of thinking, in the patterns that our community follows.

Turn on the news at any given time, on any given channel. The first stories we hear are of are of what type? We are instantly bombarded with messages of fear; shootings, stabbings, rapes, car crashes, the recession, the war, the foods we eat are no longer safe for us and your children could be kidnapped at any moment, and most often, kidnappings and rapes are executed by people that our family seems to know and trust. One story after another of gruesome imagery plague our ways of living. We immediately are conditioned to be afraid, to ignore the positive aspects of our society, because they easily outweighed by the horrible things going on in our backyard.

But what better way to sway people over to your side than to make them think that they are a walking target at all time, that their lives are in constant peril, and that you are the one that can offer protection and guidance? Life during wartime is a prime breeding ground for new feelings of panic and uncertainty. There is a term I have come to love in the past days, and I took it from our article research this week. It is a term that has been around for almost 40 years, and that term is "moral panic." I lovingly took the phrase from a journal in the British Journal of Sociology by Arnold Hunt entitled"'Moral Panic' and Moral Language in the Media (1997)." Hunt explores the topics of fear and society by questioning whether it is the media that creates our sense of fear, or is the media simply broadcasting what its citizens want to hear? It's a bit of the proverbial chicken or the egg syndrome, which problem came first in our society, but I and Hunt believe that without the media, we couldn't have the far-reaching spread of fear and worry that communications cause. Hunt argues that "the media is among the most powerful forces in shaping public opinion about topical and controversial issues." But just how much of our news are the newscasters broadcasting to us? How often have we heard snippets from a speech that lead us to think one way, only to do further research on the nature of the speech and find that the words were taken completely out of context? I read a short article from Iran's news dated September 17th, 2008. The article dealt with Iran's continued cooperation into the study of its "nuclear weaponery." We have been programmed in the U.s. to believe that Iran is a sort of rogue state, and along with N. Korea, are storing up arms and are waiting for the signal to unleash holy hell on our citizens. But as the article from the Iran news blogger states, "The agency 'is under extreme US pressure to create a psychological basis for pressuring Iran.'" Without a real cause for fear to be in the Middle East, how would the Bush administration find its support?

The short answer is that fear sells. Fear is what gets us moving, either to a new location or on to a new president. We look for the leader that is going to fix all of our society's problems, instead of society rather acknowledging the issues we face and trying to better each other from a sort of grassroots initiative, an upbringing of morals and positive issues from the citizens themselves. We are living in a world of quick answers and instant gratification. We take the news at face value, rarely pausing to think about the stories we just heard. It is has come time so slow our lives down a bit, put the brakes on, and really stop to think about what message our communities are sending to us.