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Why I Don’t Follow the Mainstream Media - I Wish to Avoid this Fear-Mongering Machine (4 of 5)
By Life-Musings.com | February 15, 2009
Table of contents for Why I Don't Follow The Mainstream Media
- Why I Don’t Follow the Mainstream Media - Summary (1 of 5)
- Why I Don’t Follow the Mainstream Media - It Presents Only a Small and Biased View of Reality (2 of 5)
- Why I Don’t Follow the Mainstream Media - I Wish to Avoid Being Brainwashed (3 of 5)
- Why I Don’t Follow the Mainstream Media - I Wish to Avoid this Fear-Mongering Machine (4 of 5)
- Why I Don’t Follow the Mainstream Media - I Do Not Wish to Fill My Life With Bad News (5 of 5)
The media is writing stories to sell. And one thing which sells extremely well is fear. The news, and the media in general, is a lot about fear mongering.
If you don’t take precautions and vaccinate yourself (vaccinations come with a whole host of poisonous chemicals and health risk, by the way. They are one major reason why our children are becoming sicker, with weirder stuffs), a virus is going to eat you alive in the summer.
If you don’t eat the Happy Meal, you won’t be happy. If you don’t use pimple cream to get rid of your pimples, no girl is ever going to want to sleep with you. If you don’t lose weight, you are going to remain a pathetic, obese laughing stock of the world. If you don’t get the latest handbag, you will look out of style and old fashioned.
If you don’t take our latest course and upgrade your education, you will lose your job and be left behind by society. If we don’t invade country X, they are going to destroy us. The SARS virus is going to come back in full force at the end of year. Computer systems are going to crash come the turn of the century.
This list could go on and on almost forever.
Yikes, it’s the end of the world!!! But yet we are still around to discuss and debate the day after the end of the world.
The news, the mainstream media, is a whole load of fear-mongering propaganda. It’s frightening.
What’s more frightening is that people are allowing themselves to be instilled with fear, and to be governed by fear.
There are some who believe in conspiracies – governments and the media sow fear in the hearts and souls of the masses, because peoples who are afraid are peoples who cannot think straight, and are hence easy to control and lead by the nose.
It actually does make some sense. If you were a leader, do you really want 100 million independent, free thinking, intelligent individuals who are able to analyze situations critically for themselves and come to well-thought out decisions?
Or would you prefer 100 million mindless sheep who just go “baaaahhhh” whenever you want them to?
Okay, we don’t necessarily have to subscribe to such an extreme theory. We just have to realize that stories which sow fear, anger, hatred, etc are best sellers.
If you don’t think the news and the media is a big fear-mongering machine, the next time you watch the news, note down every thing which the news reports is a potential disaster or tragedy to strike the world. It could be viruses, terrorist plots, the Y2K bug, stock market crashes, loss of life savings, the resurrection of the mummy, asteroids, aliens, whatever. Now, over the years, check off how many of those actually take place. I am quite sure there are not many.
Terrorism
Then there is terrorism, which is an inevitable topic when we speak about fear today, and a big concern in my mind. Why? Because, perhaps more so than in any other of the potential world dangers, it is a phenomenon which especially plays on fear. Terrorism wins when we succumb to fear.
Even if another bomb never goes off again in the history of humanity, as long as we are governed by fear and lose our civil liberties (which continues to unfold in the US) as well as fail to live our lives as we normally would, terrorism has, to some extent at least, won.
Giving publicity to terrorism (as most of us know it) is thus a double edged sword. On the one hand, we want the masses to know, to be prepared. We need the people’s help to nab the perpetrators.
On the other hand, this must be carefully done, to avoid propagating the seeds of fear. Because fear is terrorism’s ultimate feed. If no one feared death and gave a damn (which, of course, is never going to happen), terrorism becomes a blunted knife, which would surely slowly fade into oblivion.
In giving publicity to terrorism, it is a delicate juggling act for those in charge. God help them.
(By the way, there are many forms of terrorism, many of which are practiced by legal institutions using supposedly legal means. But we only seem to harp on one kind of terrorism. I would say that is because that is what the mainstream media teaches us. That, however, is another discussion for another time. Here, I am focusing on the media.)
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