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<header class="h15ky94r"> <br>
(fear and terror, the cornerstones of any political organisation)<br>
<h1 class="agrq4zn">The manufacturing of fear</h1>
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spiked-online.com
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<p>Be afraid. Be very afraid.</p>
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<p>That is how the media approached Covid. Be afraid
of everything, from <a
href="https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-ice-cream-tests-positive-for-coronavirus-in-china-12188761"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-2">ice cream</a> to <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/07/covid-19-found-in-semen-of-infected-men-say-chinese-doctors"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-3">semen</a>. Be
afraid of being <a
href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/28/people-6ft-have-double-risk-coronavirus-study-suggests/"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-4">tall</a>. Be
afraid of being <a
href="https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/bad-news-baldies-new-study-22402917"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-5">bald</a>. Be
afraid of going to the <a
href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55667624"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-6">shops</a> <em>and</em>
accepting <a
href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8954431/Do-dogs-spread-coronavirus-Spanish-study-finds-owners-78-higher-risk-catching-it.html"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-7">home deliveries</a>.
And if you’re a man, it’s not just semen you should
worry about, but also your <a
href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8930159/How-mans-testicle-pain-turned-sign-Covid-19.html"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-8">testicles</a>,
your <a
href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9022827/COVID-19-cause-erectile-dysfunction-doctor-says.html"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-9">erectile function</a>
and your <a
href="https://metro.co.uk/2020/11/12/covid-could-damage-fertility-of-up-to-20-of-male-survivors-study-finds-13581623/"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-10">fertility</a>.
Even your <a
href="https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-people-who-contract-covid-may-develop-red-and-swollen-toes-which-turn-purple-say-scientists-12117502"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-11">toes</a> are in
danger.</p>
<p>The fearmongering is relentless. Be afraid of your
<a
href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8936987/Experts-warn-dogs-kept-two-metres-away-cats-indoors-protect-owners.html"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-12">pets</a>. Be
afraid <em>for</em> your <a
href="https://metro.co.uk/2021/04/23/cat-dies-after-catching-covid-19-from-its-owner-14459027/"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-13">pets</a>. Just be
afraid.</p>
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<p>The media have served us a cornucopia of
frightening articles and news items about <a
href="https://www.spiked-online.com/tag/coronavirus/"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-14">Covid-19</a> in
2020 and 2021. While writing my new book, <em><a
href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/State-Fear-government-weaponised-Covid-19/dp/1780667205"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-15">A State of
Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear
During the Covid-19 Pandemic</a></em>, I
encountered a panoply of doom-mongering headlines.
These were an indication of the significant role the
media have played in creating our state of fear.</p>
<p>Of course, news <a
href="https://www.spiked-online.com/tag/media/"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-16">media</a> should
not shy away from reporting frightening news during
a pandemic. They should make us aware of the numbers
of deaths, the policies being implemented to tackle
the pandemic and the latest scientific developments.
But during Covid, the media went beyond reporting on
the pandemic. Instead, they appeared beholden to the
old commercial imperatives, ‘If it scares, it airs’,
and ‘If it bleeds, it leads’. It seems fear does
sell.</p>
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<p>The anxious, frightened climate this has helped to
create has been suffocating. Death tolls were
constantly brandished without the context of how
many people die every day in the UK, and hospital
admissions were reported while recoveries were not.
As a result, Covid often appeared as a death
sentence, an illness you did not recover from – even
though it was known from the outset that Covid was a
<a
href="https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-millions-of-britons-will-need-to-contract-covid-19-for-herd-immunity-11956793"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-18">mild illness</a>
for the majority of people.</p>
<p>Given the wall-to-wall doom, it is therefore no
surprise that the British were one of the most
frightened populations in the world. Various studies
showed that we were more concerned than other
countries about the spread of Covid and less
confident in the ability of our government to deal
with it. One <a
href="https://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-19_opinion_tracker_wave-4.pdf"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-19">survey</a> in
July 2020 showed that the British public thought
between six and seven per cent of the population had
died from Covid – which was around 100 times the
actual death rate at the time. Indeed, if six or
seven per cent of Brits had died from Covid, that
would have amounted to about 4,500,000 bodies – we’d
have noticed, don’t you think?</p>
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<p>While researching <em>A State of Fear</em>, I
interviewed members of the general public about how
they were impacted by the ‘campaign of fear’ during
the epidemic. Many talked of how the media had
elevated their alarm.</p>
<p>‘There wasn’t much to do’, Darren told me, ‘so we’d
watch TV and we saw programmes about disinfecting your
shopping when it arrives, and having a safezone in the
kitchen. The nightly bulletins on the TV about death
tolls, the big graphs with huge spikes on them, came
at us “boom, boom, boom!”. It was a constant barrage
of doom and gloom. My fear of the virus went through
the roof.’</p>
<p>Sarah told me she had to stop watching the <a
href="https://www.spiked-online.com/tag/bbc/"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-20">BBC</a>. As her
daughter put it, ‘If you just watched or listened to
the BBC every day, what hope would you have had?’.
Jane, meanwhile, described the ‘gruesome headlines’
that came at her ‘thick and fast’.</p>
<p>The fearmongering about Covid began even before the
pandemic hit the UK. We were primed by videos from
Wuhan in China, which were then widely circulated by
UK-based media outlets. These painted an apocalyptic
picture, featuring collapsed citizens, medics in
Hazmat suits, concerned bystanders and a city grinding
to a halt. In one memorable video, which went viral,
so to speak, a woman fell, stiff as a board, flat on
her face, on a pavement. The split second where she
falters is a giveaway – this was a set-up. If the rest
of the world had Covid, China had ‘Stunt Covid’.</p>
<p>These videos were carried by and reported on by major
UK newspapers online without their authenticity being
verified. Headlines referred to ‘zombies’, a ‘killer
bug’ and the ‘apocalypse’. Over and over again,
reports and commentaries described these Chinese Covid
videos as ‘disturbing’. The coverage was saturated by
horror-film and ‘end of days’ references. A <em>Sun</em>
headline ‘Zombieland’ travelled with the speed of a
virulent sneeze through the copycat global media.</p>
<p>The media have a responsibility to inform us. But
they also have a responsibility to be balanced. That
didn’t happen when Covid first emerged in China. And
it didn’t happen when it hit the UK. Instead, we were
treated to contextless coverage of daily death tolls.
Add this to the ghoulish headlines and the scary
graphs, and the media had left us adrift in a
monoculture of fear. Some of the people I interviewed
told me about the considerable negative effect this
coverage had on their perception of the world, not to
mention their mental wellbeing. The media should serve
the public. But over the past year, they have been
terrorising us.</p>
<p>Newspapers, news shows and so on owe their readers
and viewers the best available version of the truth.
Something that can be ascertained by careful
questioning. So what has gone wrong?</p>
<p>Journalists are human, of course, and subject to the
same worries as the rest of us. We are all made of the
same psychological stuff. Perhaps their own fears
clouded their judgement and reporting. Maybe they did
not have time, in the teeth of the crisis, to
investigate every image and video supplied by the
picture desk with the requisite thoroughness, or to
provide the Covid data with the necessary context.</p>
<p>But alongside journalists’ own fears and their lack
of time, there are other factors that might explain
the widespread media fearmongering. One of which is
the financial incentive to be as sensationalist as
possible. As one broadsheet comment writer put it to
me, when I asked him why newspapers used so many
doom-laden headlines: ‘Narcissism and greed drive
this.’ He went on: ‘Pay rises are linked to the
top-performing articles. The journalists who get the
highest views for articles and the most subscriptions
generated for the paper get the biggest pay rises. So
you want your stories to get the most views.’
Compensating writers for clicks might not lead to the
most balanced news reporting.</p>
<h3>A pro-lockdown media</h3>
<p>The No10 press briefings were often characterised by
bland and unchallenging questions from journalists,
such as ‘When will the epidemic be over?’. Little
wonder that when the <em>Press Gazette</em> ran <a
href="https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/poll-journalists-have-not-donea-good-job-at-covid-19-briefings-majority-of-respondents-say/"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-21">a poll</a> asking,
‘Do you think journalists have done a good job of
holding the government to account during the daily UK
Covid-19 press briefings?’, 70 per cent answered ‘No’.</p>
<p>In general, mainstream journalists approached the
epidemic as if the lockdown was the only correct
response. They didn’t investigate and interrogate the
idea of lockdown in general. When journalists did
challenge the government, almost performing the role
of the unelected opposition, they didn’t challenge the
lockdown orthodoxy, or the safetyism that underpins
it. They merely urged the government to go further,
and lock down sooner and harder. Close businesses?
What about closing schools? Tier Three? Why not Tier
Four? It was as if journalists had come to see
themselves as political activists whose job it was to
hold prime minister Boris Johnson to account for not
being sufficiently pro-lockdown. Some have even
attempted to turn the pandemic into a simplistic
morality play, with Covid deaths held up as proof of
the evil Tories’ failure to lock down soon enough.</p>
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<p>By and large, journalists have shied away from asking
more challenging questions of the response to the
pandemic. This may be because of the proximity of mass
media to political and economic power, as Noam Chomsky
has it in <em>Manufacturing Consent</em>. As well as
editor and proprietor bias, journalists might feel
pressured to maintain good relationships with press
officers who, in return, will release privileged
information to them, often late in the day. And then
there’s the fact that the government and Public Health
England became two of the <a
href="https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/govt-spent-184m-covid-comms-2020/1708695"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-22">biggest advertisers</a>
in the UK. Did the media dare to bite the hand that
fed them?</p>
<p>In addition to proprietor bias, the influence of
advertising revenue, the lure of the clickbait
headline and the journalist’s own tendency to feel the
fear and allow that to influence reporting, another
worrying factor affected media coverage of the
epidemic — state pressure.</p>
<p>On 23 March 2020, Ofcom, the UK’s communication
regulator, issued strict guidance about Covid
coverage. It asked broadcasters to be alert to ‘health
claims related to the virus which may be harmful;
medical advice which may be harmful; accuracy or
material misleadingness in programmes in relation to
the virus or public policy regarding it’. This will
have inhibited any media outlets thinking of pursuing
any stories that ran counter to government advice.</p>
<p>It was hardly a surprise to find that a Dutch <a
href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340378068_Fear_of_the_coronavirus_COVID-19_Predictors_in_an_online_study_conducted_in_March_2020"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-23">study</a> on our
fear of Covid had concluded that our exposure to media
increased our fear. ‘Stronger messages in the media
may induce more fear and therefore more compliance
with the social distancing and lockdown policies
imposed’, it stated. ‘However, we caution against
using media messages to induce more fear in the
general public… as this may only increase distress.
Furthermore, a substantial proportion of respondents
in our sample were concerned about the role of
(social) media, mass panic and hysteria. Hence,
fear-appeals in the media should be used carefully.’</p>
<p>This is not advice the UK government and its advisers
have heeded. The media have actively induced fear, and
therefore prompted more compliance with lockdown
measures. But not only did the Fourth Estate help to
shape citizens’ behaviour during lockdown, it is also
now impeding our exit from lockdown.</p>
<h3>Dangerous times ahead</h3>
<p>Even though the vaccine rollout is proving a success,
the media are still fearmongering about Covid. The
language in headlines and articles continues to play
up the risks and threats on the horizon. As Bloomberg
<a
href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-24/when-will-covid-end-we-must-start-planning-for-a-permanent-pandemic"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-24">had it</a>
recently, ‘We must start planning for a permanent
pandemic – with coronavirus mutations pitted against
vaccinations in a global arms race, we may never go
back to normal’.</p>
<p>And those who do not conform to the safety-first
orthodoxy continue to be demonised. It feels as if
dangerous times are ahead.</p>
<p>In Israel, for instance, <em>Haaretz</em> <a
href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-deradicalize-israel-s-covid-insurgents-before-they-incite-a-civil-war-1.9529626"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-25">described</a>
ultra-Orthodox Jews who do not follow the state’s
rules as ‘Covid insurgents’ and ‘terrorists’. In a
particularly hyperbolic description, ‘maskless
individuals’ were accused of setting off
‘epidemiological time bombs’. Once we feared bombs
that might be dropped on us following the pressing of
a red button in a faraway country. Then we feared
bombs strapped to terrorists. Now human beings <em>are</em>
bombs.</p>
<p>Back in the UK, media coverage of Covid has taken a
similarly bio-political turn. People are being
conjured up as threats, indeed biohazards. A recent <em>Times</em>
headline – ‘Hunt for mystery person who tested
positive for Brazilian Covid-19 variant, then
vanished’ – evoked an image of a hunt for a person
carrying a new Covid variant as if it was a weapon. As
Nick Cohen <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/27/it-is-only-a-matter-of-time-before-we-turn-on-the-unvaccinated"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-26">wrote</a> in the <em>Guardian</em>,
‘It is only a matter of time before we turn on the
unvaccinated’. History reverberates with examples of
deliberate attempts to dehumanise and divide people
and it has never ended well. It is a worrying
development. Let us observe how we report on events in
our time and consciously choose to write a better
story.</p>
<p>There is much talk right now of the forthcoming
inquiry into the handling of Covid. While there should
be a great deal of focus on the government and the
state, it might be wise to consider the role of the
media, too. Something seems to have gone seriously
awry. Bad news has had too many wings. The media have
not been dispassionately reporting on the pandemic –
they have been making fear fly. Perhaps in the future,
the media need new imperatives: if it leads, let it be
vigorously fact-checked; and if it airs, let the
sources be verified. And please, don’t try to make us
afraid.</p>
<p><strong>Laura Dodsworth</strong> is a writer,
photographer and filmmaker. Visit her website <a
rel="noopener noreferrer"
href="https://www.lauradodsworth.com/"
target="_blank" id="reader.external-link.num-27">here</a>.
Her latest book, <em>A State of Fear: how the UK
government weaponised fear during the Covid-19
pandemic’</em> is published by Pinter & Martin,
(Buy this book from <a
href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1780667205/spiked"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
id="reader.external-link.num-28">Amazon(UK)</a>.)</p>
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