Scare-line

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A scare-line, scare-head, or scare headline is a word or phrase that is presented (often as a quotation and as a headline or other emphasized text, such as a pull quote) to scare the reader, [1] as part of a smear campaign against an opposing political candidate, [2] or to cause an estrangement or cause something to seem unfamiliar in a supernatural way. [3] The term scare quote is sometimes also used to refer to scare-lines that are direct quotations, [3] but more often refers today to use of dismissive quotation marks around a term to imply doubt, irony, or scorn.

Contents

Origin of the terms

The terms scare-line and scare-head derive from scare + headline ; the longer name scare headline has sometimes been used. [4] The Oxford English Dictionary notes the use of the shorter expressions scare-line and scare-head, the latter as early as 1888. [5] The use of scare quote in the same sense dates back to at least 1946. [2] The term scare line also refers to "a means of directing fish towards the main, holding part of a net by frightening the fish into movement", [6] but the term is not well known outside of commercial fishing (and bird hunting, where a similar technique is used to flush birds into flight), so an influence on the journalism term is dubious despite a conceptual similarity.

In newspaper journalism

Scare-lining increases newspaper sales predictably, and this has been known for several generations. Upton Sinclair wrote in The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism (1928): "I knew for instance, sitting at my desk, just how many extra papers I could sell with a scare-line on a police scandal." [7] The practice has also been criticized as manipulative and of questionable journalistic integrity since the same era. [4]

In modern women's magazines

Women's magazines, especially from the early 1990s onward, have published an increasing number of "scare stories" [8] about health, most often using alarming headlines and "billboard" text that are not quotations. For example, Glamour magazine in the year 1990 had no health cover stories, but in 2002 had at least one scare-line in almost every issue, e.g. "It's Common, It Can Kill: Why Aren't Doctors Telling Us about This Women-only Disease?" (from the April 2002 issue). [8] : 124  Myrna Blyth, a feminist, media critic, and former editor-in-chief of Ladies' Home Journal , characterizes the trend as the selling of unhappiness and fear about health. Her 2007 book Spin Sisters observes the following, based on one-year, three-year, and ten-year studies of articles in women's magazines: [8] : 123–127 

Two thirds of the articles reviewed in the [one-year] study never mentioned that the actual risks from any of these threats were extremely small, and even more important, that the alarmist views in many of the articles actually disagreed with mainstream science. ...

What women's magazines really specialize in are stories that make you afraid to cross the threshold of a hospital, trust your doctor, or take your medicine. In looking at ten years of cover lines ... one can see a dramatic acceleration of bad-doctor stories during the 1990s. ...

Women's magazines also package fear ... by "exposing" frightening and imminent threats to women, especially when it comes to health. Our survey of women's magazines found that when it comes to scare stories, the least substantiated ones were about health. In fact, over the three years' worth of stories we reviewed, 258 health stories about everything from food contamination to mercury poisoning to rare diseases earned space in America's magazines for women—many overly dependent on anecdotal evidence and devoid of any valid risk assessment. Often, a hint of conspiracy was added ("10 Urgent Health Risks Doctors Don't Tell You About") to ratchet up the fear factor....

She concludes that women acting as the effective gatekeepers of family health is why they have been increasingly targeted by this sort of writing and marketing, [8] : 125  often based on "confusing, junk-science statistics" [8] : 122  and the replacement of rigorous reporting with personal opinion and vague, exaggeratory implications with a lot of "wiggle room". [8] : 126  Such articles also appear to be the leading source of unreasonable fears about vaccines [8] : 121–123  (e.g., the debunked but persistent idea that childhood vaccination causes autism). Blyth concedes that her own former publication also ran such scare-lines, such as "Dangerous Medicine: When Cures Harm Instead of Heal", and "Foods that Can Kill". [8] : 127 

Related Research Articles

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Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story using a first-person narrative. The word "gonzo" is believed to have been first used in 1970 to describe an article about the Kentucky Derby by Hunter S. Thompson, who popularized the style. It is an energetic first-person participatory writing style in which the author is a protagonist, and it draws its power from a combination of social critique and self-satire. It has since been applied to other subjective artistic endeavors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Horror fiction</span> Genre of fiction

Horror is a genre of fiction that is intended to disturb, frighten or scare. Horror is often divided into the sub-genres of psychological horror and supernatural horror, which are in the realm of speculative fiction. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon, in 1984, defined the horror story as "a piece of fiction in prose of variable length... which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing". Horror intends to create an eerie and frightening atmosphere for the reader. Often the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for larger fears of a society.

Yellow journalism and yellow press are American terms for journalism and associated newspapers that present little or no legitimate, well-researched news while instead using eye-catching headlines for increased sales. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism. By extension, the term yellow journalism is used today as a pejorative to decry any journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion.

In English writing, quotation marks or inverted commas, also known informally as quotes, talking marks, speech marks, quote marks, quotemarks or speechmarks, are punctuation marks placed on either side of a word or phrase in order to identify it as a quotation, direct speech or a literal title or name. Quotation marks may be used to indicate that the meaning of the word or phrase they surround should be taken to be different from that typically associated with it, and are often used in this way to express irony. They are also sometimes used to emphasise a word or phrase, although this is usually considered incorrect.

A sound bite or soundbite is a short clip of speech or music extracted from a longer piece of audio, often used to promote or exemplify the full length piece. In the context of journalism, a sound bite is characterized by a short phrase or sentence that captures the essence of what the speaker was trying to say, and is used to summarize information and entice the reader or viewer. The term was coined by the U.S. media in the 1970s. Since then, politicians have increasingly employed sound bites to summarize their positions.

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References

  1. ↑ Kaplan, Alice Yeager (1986). Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life. Theory and History of Literature. Vol. 36. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN   9781452901497 . Retrieved 25 January 2017.
  2. 1 2 McWilliams, Carey (1946), Southern California: An Island on the Land, p. 298, ISBN   9780879050078 , retrieved 25 January 2017
  3. 1 2 Harries, Martin (2000). Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment. Stanford University Press. p. 6. ISBN   9780804736213 . Retrieved 25 January 2017.
  4. 1 2 Sinclair, Upton (1928). The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism. University of Illinois Press. pp. 91, 214, 285. ISBN   9780252071102.
  5. ↑ Craigie, W. A.; Onions, C. T., eds. (1933). The Oxford English Dictionary: A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  6. ↑ Pauly, Daniel; Froese, Rainer, eds. (2017). "scare line". FishBase . Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences. Retrieved 25 January 2017.
  7. ↑ Sinclair, Upton (1928). The Brass Check. p. 419. ISBN   9780252071102.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Blyth, Myrna (2007). Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America. Macmillan. pp. 116, 120, 122–127, 136–137, 140, 299. ISBN   9781429970952 . Retrieved 25 January 2017. The block quotations are from pp. 123–124, 125, and 127, respectively.
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