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Fearmongering, or scaremongering, is the act of intentionally fomenting feelings of fear by using exaggerated rumors of impending danger. [1] [2]
| Part of the Politics series |
| Political campaigning |
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| Politicsportal |
Fearmongering, or scaremongering, is the act of intentionally fomenting feelings of fear by using exaggerated rumors of impending danger. [1] [2]
According to evolutionary anthropology and evolutionary biology, humans have a strong impulse to pay attention to danger because awareness of dangers has been important for survival throughout their evolutionary history. The effect is amplified by cultural evolution when the news media cater to people's appetite for news about dangers. [3]
The attention of citizens is a fiercely contested resource that news media, political campaigners, social reformers, advertisers, civil society organizations, missionaries, and cultural event makers compete over, according to attention economy. [4]
Social agents of all kinds are often using fearmongering as a tactic in the competition for attention, as illustrated by the examples below. [3] [5]
Fearmongering can have strong psychological effects, which may be intended or unintended. One hypothesized effect is mean world syndrome in which people perceive the world as more dangerous than it really is. [6] [7] Fearmongering can make people fear the wrong things, and use too many resources to avoid rare and unlikely dangers while more probable dangers are ignored. For example, some parents have kept their children at home to prevent abduction while they paid less attention to more common dangers such as lifestyle diseases or traffic accidents. [8] Fearmongering can produce a rally around the flag effect by increasing support for the incumbent political leaders. For example, official warnings about the risk of terrorist attacks have led to increased support for the proposed policies of US Presidents. [9] [10]
Collective fear is likely to produce an authoritarian mentality, desire for a strong leader, strict discipline, punitiveness, intolerance, xenophobia, and less democracy, according to regality theory. Historically, the effect has been exploited by political entrepreneurs in many countries for purposes such as increasing support for an authoritarian government, avoiding democratization, or preparing the population for war. [11]
Daisy is a famous television commercial that aired in 1964 and was run by Lyndon B. Johnson's presidential campaign. It begins with a little girl standing in a meadow, birds chirping in the background; she picks and clumsily counts the petals off of a daisy. When she reaches 'nine', an ominous male voice begins a launch countdown. The girl's gaze turns toward the sky and the camera zooms into her eye until her pupil blackens the screen. As the countdown reaches zero, a nuclear explosion flashes on and morphs into a mushroom cloud. While the firestorm rages, Johnson's declares, "These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die." Another voice then says, "Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home." [12]
Fierce economic competition is driving commercial mass media to rely extensively on scary stories and bad news in a competition that has been characterized as an emotional arms race. [13] Stories about crime, and especially violent crimes and crimes against children, figure prominently among newspaper headlines. An analysis of US newspapers has found that between 10 and 30% of headlines involve crime and fear, with a tendency to a shift of focus from isolated crime events to more thematic articles about fear. [14] In the United Kingdom, the news media have routinely used a focus on gory sex crimes as a parameter of competition. The continued focus on emotionally touching sex crimes has had a strong influence on politics and legislation in the country. [15]
Advertisers have also entered the arena with their discovery that "fear sells". Ad campaigns based on fear, sometimes referred to as shockvertising, have become increasingly popular in recent years. Fear is a strong emotion and it can be manipulated to persuade people into making emotional rather than reasoned choices. From car commercials that imply that having fewer airbags will cause the audience's family harm, to disinfectant commercials that show pathogenic bacteria lurking on every surface, fear-based advertising works. [16] While using fear in ads has generated some negative reactions by the public, there is evidence to show that "shockvertising" is a highly effective persuasion technique, and over the last several years, advertisers have continued to increase their usage of fear in ads in what has been called a "never-ending arms race in the advertising business". [17]
Author Ken Ring was accused of scaremongering by New Zealand politician Nick Smith. The Auckland seller of almanacs made predictions about earthquakes and weather patterns based on lunar cycles, and some of his predictions were taken seriously by some members of the public in connection with the 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand. [18]
Fearmongering is routinely used in psychological warfare for the purpose of influencing a target population. The tactics often involves defamation of an enemy by means of smear campaigns. False flag attacks have been used as a pretext for starting a war in many cases, including the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Shelling of Mainila, and Operation Himmler.
Terrorism is also a kind of psychological warfare. It is creating violence and terror in order to get media attention or to scare an enemy. [19] [20]
A remarkable tactic is the so-called strategy of tension, which is based on making violence and chaos in order to create political instability, to defame an opponent, to pave the way for a more authoritarianism or fascist government, or to prevent the decolonization of colonies. The strategy of tension is associated in particular with the widespread political violence in the so-called Years of Lead in the 1960s to 1980s in Italy. There were many terrorist attacks in the country in these years, some committed by right-wing and neo-fascist groups, and others by left-wing groups. Some attacks initially attributed to left-wing groups to were suspected or confirmed false flag attacks. The main purpose of the strategy of tension in Italy was to prevent the communists from gaining power and to pave the way for a neofascist government. Historians disagree about who were controlling the strategy of tension, but there is evidence that both national neofascist groups and foreign powers were involved. [21] [22] [23] [11]
Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants. There are various different definitions of terrorism, with no universal agreement about it. Different definitions of terrorism emphasize its randomness, its aim to instill fear, and its broader impact beyond its immediate victims.
Counterterrorism, also known as anti-terrorism, relates to the practices, military tactics, techniques, and strategies that governments, law enforcement, businesses, and intelligence agencies use to combat or eliminate terrorism and violent extremism.
A moral panic is a widespread feeling of fear that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society. It is "the process of arousing social concern over an issue", usually perpetuated by moral entrepreneurs and mass media coverage, and exacerbated by politicians and lawmakers. Moral panic can give rise to new laws aimed at controlling the community.
Cultivation theory is a sociological and communications framework designed to unravel the enduring impacts of media consumption, with a primary focus on television. At its core, the theory posits a compelling hypothesis: individuals who invest more time in watching television are prone to perceive the real world through a lens aligning with the prevalent depictions in television messages, in contrast to their counterparts with lower television viewership but comparable demographic profiles.
A lone wolf attack, or lone actor attack, is a particular kind of mass murder, committed in a public setting by an individual who plans and commits the act on their own. In the United States, such attacks are usually committed with firearms. In other countries, knives are sometimes used to commit mass stabbings. Although definitions vary, most databases require a minimum of four victims for the event to be considered a mass murder.
Culture of fear is the concept which describes the pervasive feeling of fear in a given group, often due to actions taken by leaders. The term was popularized by Frank Furedi and has been more recently popularized by the American sociologist Barry Glassner.
Robert Anthony Pape is an American political scientist who studies national and international security affairs, with a focus on air power, American and international political violence, social media propaganda, and terrorism. He is currently a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and founder and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST).
A strategy of tension is a political policy wherein violent struggle is encouraged rather than suppressed. The purpose is to create a general feeling of insecurity in the population and make people seek security in a strong government.
Mediatization is a method whereby the mass media influence other sectors of society, including politics, business, culture, entertainment, sport, religion, or education. Mediatization is a process of change or a trend, similar to globalization and modernization, where the mass media integrates into other sectors of the society. Political actors, opinion makers, business organizations, civil society organizations, and others have to adapt their communication methods to a form that suits the needs and preferences of the mass media. Any person or organization wanting to spread messages to a larger audience have to adapt their messages and communication style to make it attractive for the mass media.
Terror is a policy of political repression and violence intended to subdue political opposition. The term first appears in the Reign of Terror, a revolutionary violence during the French Revolution, which also gave rise to the term terrorism.
Fujimorism is the policies and the political ideology of former President of Peru Alberto Fujimori as well as the personality cult built around him, his policies and his family, especially Keiko Fujimori. The ideology is defined by authoritarianism, its support for neoliberal economics, opposition to communism, and socially and culturally conservative stances such as opposition to LGBT rights and school curriculums including gender equality or sex education. Opponents of Fujimorism are known as anti-Fujimorists.
The 2011 Hotan attack was a bomb-and-knife attack that occurred in Hotan, Xinjiang, China on 18 July 2011. According to witnesses, the assailants were a group of 18 young Uyghur men who opposed the local government's campaign against the burqa, which had grown popular among older Hotan women in 2009 but were also used in a series of violent crimes. The men occupied a police station on Nuerbage Street at noon, killing two security guards with knives and bombs and taking eight hostages. The attackers then yelled religious slogans, including ones associated with Jihadism, as they replaced the Chinese flag on top of a police station with another flag, the identity of which is disputed.
Terrorism, fear, and media are interconnected. Terrorists use the media to advertise their attacks and or messages, and the media uses terrorism events to further aid their ratings. Both promote unwarranted propaganda that instills mass amounts of public fear. The leader of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, discussed weaponization of media in a letter written after his organization committed the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In that letter, Bin Laden stated that fear was the deadliest weapon. He noted that Western civilization has become obsessed with mass media, quickly consuming what will bring them fear. He further stated that societies are bringing this problem on their own people by giving media coverage an inherent power.
The dead cat strategy, also known as deadcatting, is the political strategy of deliberately making a shocking announcement to divert media attention away from problems or failures in other areas. The present name for the strategy has been associated with British former prime minister Boris Johnson's political strategist Lynton Crosby.
Terrorism in Turkey is defined in Turkey's criminal law as crimes against the constitutional order and internal and external security of the state by the use of violence as incitement or systematic to create a general climate of fear and intimidation of the population and thereby effect political, religious, or ideological goals. Since the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, both organized groups, lone wolf, and international spy agencies have committed many acts of domestic terrorism against Turkish people.
Crime in Côte d'Ivoire is prevalent and versatile across the West African country. The most common forms of crime include child labour, arms trafficking, terrorism and human rights abuse. Other less common, but still evident types of crime include cannabis and synthetic drug trade, sex trafficking, fauna and flora crimes, cybercrime.
Misogynist terrorism is terrorism that is motivated by the desire to punish women. It is an extreme form of misogyny—the policing of women's compliance to patriarchal gender expectations. Misogynist terrorism uses mass indiscriminate violence in an attempt to avenge nonconformity with those expectations or to reinforce the perceived superiority of men.
Far-right terrorism in Australia refers to far-right-ideologically influenced terrorism on Australian soil. Far-right extremist groups have existed in Australia since the early 20th century, however the intensity of terrorist activities have oscillated until the present time. A surge of neo-Nazism based terrorism occurred in Australia during the 1960s and the 1970s, carried out primarily by members of the Ustaše organisation. However in the 21st century, a rise in jihadism, the White genocide conspiracy theory, and after effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have fuelled far-right terrorism in Australia. Both the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) are responsible for responding to far-right terrorist threats in Australia.
The terruqueo is a negative campaigning and often racist method of fearmongering used in Peru that involves describing anti-Fujimorists, left-wing political opponents and those who are against the neoliberal status quo as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, with the tactic primarily being used by right-wing parties and Fujimorists to create a culture of fear. United Nations experts have condemned the use of the terruqueo, describing it as an intimidation tactic used by the government.
The rhetoric of Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States and current President-elect, is widely recognized for its unique populist, nationalistic, and confrontational style, which has been the subject of extensive analysis by linguists, political scientists, and communication experts. Known for its direct and unfiltered approach, Trump's rhetoric emphasizes themes of crisis, division, and loyalty, often casting himself as an outsider fighting against a corrupt political establishment. Central to his communication strategy are emotional appeals that resonate with voter insecurity, promises of restoring past national "greatness," and the use of simple, repetitive language that amplifies his message to broad audiences.