Fear in the Media

Be afraid; be very afraid. After all, isn't fear the strongest emotion we have? If you were a reporter who wanted to get the best ratings, wouldn't you use the most powerful tool in the human experience? It works, is why they do it. If we didn't react to negative and scary news so powerfully and predictably, they wouldn't use it; but we do because we are human.

Do you remember the pandemic? Bird flu was coming to get us. Why? Because it was the scariest thing they could report in that boring news cycle. As soon as there was something else to scare us, the media forgot about bird flu. The potential for avian flu to transform into a pandemic hasn't changed, but we got tired of being afraid of bird flu, so we went onto other fears, the war, the terrorist threat, the collapsing bridge. We all drive across bridges, so now we are all focused on making our bridges safer, not developing a vaccination to prevent the spread of avian flu.


Imagine, we re-elected a president we all knew was incompetent, simply out of fear. We were afraid to vote in another leader in a time of war. The known fear is always preferable to the unknown fear. We voted, saying, "This fear, this president, and this war we can live with," because we knew that fear. Had we voted, "I don't know what the other will be but I don't fear it as much as this one," we would have had a change in direction. Here, I won't make any predictions if that would have been good or bad, but it would have been different.

Fear can be highly motivating, or paralyzing, depending on how we react to our fears. The media is great at helping us decide what to fear, but not so good at helping us know how we should respond to it. There are too many "experts," who disagree about what to do, but they all agree we should be very afraid.

How can we, the people, the readers and watchers of our world, deal with the media and the fears they provoke? Similar to how we manage our fears in life, I would think. We know that life is scary, and we manage to ignore, or deal with those fears, usually, not well for some and better for others. Humankind needs to be scared; that's why we have scary movies and Stephen King. But, that's not enough; we also have Fox News and Rush Limbaugh to further scare us.

Why does the media scare us? Because it works. How we can react to it positively, is to not let them manipulate us, through our fears, but from our own experiences and thought processes, much like we do the real things to fear in our lives. We know that we can be seriously injured or killed in a car, but we drive. We know the news is scary, but we watch it and react to it, some positively and others negatively; it's our choice.

The other choice is to deny that there are things to know and some to fear, which requires some response, or to be ignorant of what is occurring in the world, and not care. I choose to sort and filter the news, not ignore it. You can choose for yourself.