society

The Fear Agenda

For all you Media Studies students out there (good luck with working at Argos when you graduate by the way), the UK mass media at the moment is a perfect case study of a media agenda based on fear. The tipping point for me is all this Sharia Law debacle created by serial bodger, the Archbishop of Canterbury (I refrained from hijacking his title with profanity).

I feel that we have just wandered down a winding path with the media into a dark, scary Sleepy Hollow-esque woods since 9/11 via Iraq/Afghanistan, Madeline McCann, Global Warming and now the impending economic doom and Sharia Law implementation. Whilst I am not proposing that we stick our heads in the sand on important issues, the question I pose is that does the mass media have a disproportionate negative impact on the population through it’s methods of reporting events? The follow-on questions from that (if the answer is yes) are: a) how does this impact our political actions? and b) what are the short-term and long-term impacts on the British psyche?

First up, I implore you to watch this clip from the thought provoking film, Waking Life. This film which touches upon a number of fascinating discussions is shot in the innovative style of one of Linklater’s other films, A Scanner Darkly.

Also, before I go into it, here are some amazing quotes on the topic of fear from some of the greatest minds:

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd”. Bertrand Russell

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment”. Marcus Aurelius

“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood”.Marie Curie

The use of fear as a political tool to influence public opinion has attracted hoards of academic publications, however, one I’d recommend that isn’t too long is Noam Chomsky’s article on Fear in the context of the Iraq War and the War on Terrorism.

I think that the Sharia Law debate which has sprung up over the last week highlights perfectly the conditioning that the British public have been subjected to by the mass media. The UK press has used all the tools at it’s disposal to draw the average man on the street into a position where he believes that the country is going to be taken over from within tomorrow. The following are just a few of the ways in which the media can push a certain issue, and I challenge you to spot them in the press next week:

Emotive & charged language – see this example from The Sun, it’s hardly the pinnacle of journalism, but the headline “Williams: Victory for Terrorism” is immediately misleading, associating Sharia Law with terrorism (not to mention attributing the “victory for terrorism” sentiments to the Archbishop). This muddying of the waters by the media has been integral to creating a perceived “monolithic islamic threat” in the way that they use Islam, Muslims, Terrorism/Terrorists and Islamic Fundamentalists interchangeably. Esposito’s book on the topic suggests that since the end of the Cold War, an Orwellian vacancy was left unfilled and those sympathetic to the realist bi-polar perspective of International Relations will tell you that this situation simply isn’t cricket.

So in part, the events of 9/11 and the like have been jimmyed into this space, which is the equivalent of pushing a square peg into a round hole. I will cut short my quasi-conspiracy theory there…due to the fact that I believe that it’s a much less malignant forces that drives the UK media ‘fear culture’ – lazy and ignorant journalism and the success of sensationalism in shifting extra units.

Expert comments – The man on the street knows he’s a layman on complex issues and his knowledge of anything originating in Asia probably stops and being able to differentiate between a Garlic and Peshwari Naan. So what he looks to the media for is the ‘man/woman in the know’, to help him formulate his opinions. The key to building a political agenda is to selectively use “expert comments and quotes” to get across your point and to make your argument look credible. Compare this excellent selection of balanced quotes from the BBC (one of their better offerings!) to stories next week in the paper and see how experts are used to build consensus behind the agenda of the author as opposed to offering an objective view of events.

Unnamed/Inside sources – This tool is the Swiss Army Knife of gossip columnists and political correspondents alike. Need to add credence to a story? Add a quote from “a source close to the band” or a “high ranking military insider” and suddenly the pile of papers that look like they have been researched by a blind ferret and written by a giraffe on acid transform into insightful and exclusive news articles.

Polls: Our favourite ever prank as uni hacks was to do polls in the pub and use them in articles to piss the University/the Student’s Union/our friends off. Such genius polls include “80% of students think the Chancellor has a penchant for dogging”; “90% of students demand smoking in lectures” and “99% of students are against the university plan to “insert anything the university was planning to do”. If you think this is far-fetched, look at how the Telegraph frankly molests this “poll” (of which we’re given no details of sample size) to spew out it’s confused brand fear mongering.

Whilst I have no empirical evidence to support this view, I honestly believe that the UK would be a happier, more harmonious and productive (in every sense) place if we, in a bastardisation of Tim Leary and later Gil Scott-Heron, dared to tune into the World around us, turn off the TV and drop out of the bewildered herd.

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