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David Altheide (Arizona State University, USA)
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Creating, framing, and amplifying fear
Summary of the speech We speak of the rhetoric of fear because one of the consequences of what we call "fear speak" is that language itself changes, bestowing new meanings and symbols on our world vision. And as a result the world changes.
With regard to the role of the media in creating fear, fear was used by the American press very often even before September 11th. What we have produced over time is the conversation about fear, which features risks and danger in a central position in everyday life. The mechanism is that of associating a fear with a problem, for example fear of crime, later separating it from the phenomenon and putting it with another, for example, drugs. The result is that the word "fear" disappears, but the phenomena remain mechanically associated in citizens' psychology.
From the Iraq war on, discussions regarding fear have continued to increase. The Iraq war would never have happened the way it did without preparing citizens over many years. The politics of fear are part of this background. What a government can do is to spread the conviction that everyone can be protected and this allows them to increase social control. The consequence is that the "life architecture" of people changes. Many of them go to live in gated communities, buy arms and accept that they will have a limited public life; mutual suspicion increases.
The Iraq war was not a glorious period for journalists who understood that made many mistakes were made, by their not having covered some aspects of how the war was fought.
T he information flow changes as a result of this process. The public wants messages with a beat and speed because they are used to the logic of entertainment. We need alternatives to all this.
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