Everything to Fear and Fear Itself

Back in fall 2014, I spent a bunch of time with an elderly relative. This was just before the midterm elections, at the peak of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. This elderly relative didn't generally watch Fox News and wasn't part of what has become the "Trump Train."

But he was obsessed with the Ebola story, positively gripped by fear. He wanted to quarantine everyone coming into the U.S., like the Maine nurse who returned after helping people. Declare martial law.

I didn't realize then, but the utter manipulation of the Ebola story, which started from Fox and Rush Limbaugh and the rest of right-wing media but then rippled out into mainstream coverage, was intentionally timed to create a climate of fear for the mid-term election.

Because humans whose brains are drugged with fear are much more likely to vote for authoritarianism.

And now here we are, within a few weeks of another midterm election, and what has started dominating the news? A completely imaginary story about an "army" of people coming from Central America, supposedly with criminals and vaguely threatening "Middle Easterners" among its members. When what is actually happening is a bunch of women and children are enduring tremendous hardship to flee violence in their home countries, and probably not really in greater numbers than has happened at some times in the past without much notice.

If anything, it's a humanitarian crisis, as shown in this story from Latino USA. They write, "The caravans reflect the ongoing nature of the structural problems compelling emigration from Central America, the failures of U.S. migration and foreign policy, and the dwindling options for these refugees to seek safety in the region."

But the thing I just realized is that it doesn't matter that it's this particular story: if this wasn't happening, Fox and its friends (and their propaganda bosses) would have found some other thing to make scary and shout about until everyone hears it.

Matt Yglesias at Vox recently wrote about how the asymmetry of our current media landscape allows this (or causes it). Stephen Colbert (in the Colbert Show days) satirized this manipulation of fear...remember the Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear?)




I guess the thing I keep coming back to is... aren't people angry that they are being manipulated this way?


I hope we (people in this country) are better than this. There's plenty to go around if we sitck together instead of sending everything to 1% or the .1 of the 1%.

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Late addition: Dara Lind at Vox has a complete and clear explainer on the group of asylum seekers.

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Some of the best tweets on the asylum seekers:

Helping refugees seeking asylum is a good thing to do and rich countries should do much more of it.
Ryan Avent

DEAR REPORTERS:
Hungry desperate human beings including children and infants are not:
Waves
Tides
Surges
Armies
Invasion
You all are suckers to this administration’s goals. These humans aren’t a natural disaster or enemy combatants. They are hungry, tired, and in need.
Alida Garcia

Super encouraging to see American evangelicals taking the “welcome the stranger” “heal the sick” “feed the poor” “help the refugee” message of Christ so seriously.
Jon Reinish

My favorite part about Republicans criticizing the people walking thousands of miles to become American citizens is when they get all dewy-eyed talking about their Polish or Irish or Italian immigrant ancestors who came to America “with nothing.” Pick a lane.
Mikel Jollett

Because if I was an "unknown Middle Easterner" trying to sneak into the United States, the way I would do it is I would fly to Guatemala and then walk north for 800 hours alongside men, women, and children who don't speak my language.
@eyeglassesofky

Calling a procession of desperate parents and starving babies "an army" is far from the only thing the media is getting wrong. We need to call them what they are: climate refugees.
@thedesirina

White people who traveled great distances to find prosperity were “pioneers.” Brown people who do the same thing now are part of a “migrant caravan.”
Hari Kondabolu

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It's slightly off-topic of the use of fear specifically, so here's an after-note with a quote from the Matt Yglesias piece that I found particularly disturbing:

Research from Emory University political scientists Gregory Martin and Josh McCrain found that when Sinclair buys a local [TV] station, its local news program begin to cover more national and less local politics, the coverage becomes more conservative, and viewership actually falls — suggesting that the rightward tilt isn’t enacted as a strategy to win more viewers but as part of a persuasion effort. A separate study by Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu estimates that watching Fox News translates into a significantly greater willingness to vote for Republican candidates.

Specifically, by exploiting semi-random variation in Fox viewership driven by changes in the assignment of channel numbers, they find that if Fox News hadn’t existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008. Without Fox, in other words, the GOP’s only popular vote win since the 1980s would have been reversed and the 2008 election would have been an extinction-level landslide. And that’s only measuring the direct impact of the Fox cable network. If you consider the supplemental effect of Sinclair’s local news broadcast, the AM radio shows of Fox personalities like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, and the broader constellation of right-wing punditry, the effect would surely be larger. 

(emphasis added; links to the research are given in Yglesias's original post)