Fear Mongering is the act of purposefully spreading frightening and exaggerated rumors of impending danger to arouse fear to manipulate the public. It also means to create fear or alarm about a particular public issue. Generally, this strategy is mainly used by, “ various governments and media houses in order to scare you into agreeing with their policies or their point of view that usually involves some kind of protection or banning something which thus enacts more and more useless laws.”[1] This strategy may be used by the governments to keep the population under control because if they are under control they will be scared and it will be easier for them to rule on scared population. “ Fear-mongering is one of the most effective attack strategies for killing good ideas.”[2] Thus, we can say that fear-mongering is one of the major tools used by political parties, media outlets, and big organizations to manipulate the thoughts of the general public and make them agree to their point of view and make them think in the same way they think by creating fear in their minds.
Talking about different examples of how fear-mongering is done by different people like political leaders or different advertising agencies while advertising their products. Advertisers also have started adapting to this practice in order to create fear in the minds of people and manipulate them in order to sell their products and believing that fear also helps in increasing the sale. We can take examples of various products like car commercials advertisements based on the requirement of airbags in cars or advertisements for medicines. Similarly, there are advertisements for political campaigns as well at the time of the elections of candidates asking for votes from the people by manipulating their minds. Fear-mongering can also be caused by simply reading an article about a particular product or event and you keep thinking about it again and again. I think if you keep thinking about a particular thing it may also affect your physical and mental health and may lead to serious health problems.
Talking about fear-mongering in the current scenario and how time and again the big media outlets, government agencies, and advertising agencies have exaggerated things and presented before the public in order to manipulate them and create fear in their minds. The current situation where the entire world is suffering from COVID-19 virus which can’t be seen and entire countries around the world are under lockdown to stop the spread of the deadly virus. Due to lockdown in the countries, economies are closed and people are not able to earn money and they are running out of money. This is creating fears in the minds of people and it is also affecting them mentally.
Apart from this the news of the spread of the virus and the number of increasing cases shown by the media outlets is sometimes exaggerated and is terrorizing the minds of people. This is increasing the fears in the minds of people and also affecting the thinking abilities of people. The news channels and some of the big organizations are also not showing the positive news like the increased recovery rate and the fewer number of casualties they are just showing the negative news and in turn, increasing fears in the minds of people. “ Fear-mongering seems to have been emerged as a booming industry in these depressing times. From experts to media everybody is terrorizing us.”[3] Thus, we can see that the tool of fear-mongering is used in this depressing time in order to manipulate people and create fear in minds of people apart from the adding stress of economic problems due to lockdown.
Conclusion
We can see that fear-mongering is an act of creating fears in the minds of people by exaggerating facts, in order to manipulate the minds of people and make them agree to particular things. This may end up changing the way people think and making them believe that what others are saying is only true. Sometimes this creates various risks for people and they end up believing in policies sometimes which may not be good for them. We can also see that this tool is used by various media outlets, etc to terrorize people sometimes by changing and exaggerating the facts.
References:
[1]Digital Preacher , Fear Mongering , Urban Dictionary, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fear%20mongering , 10th January,2015 ( 10/6/2020 12.13pm)
[2]John. P Kotter , Turning the Tables on Fear- Mongering Attack , Harvard Business Review , https://hbr.org/2011/03/turning-the-tables-on-a-fear-m.html , 7th March, 2011 ( 10/6/2020 12.46pm)
[3] Ravi Shanker Kapoor , Fear-Mongering is the only booming sector , Sunday Guardian Live, https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/news/fear-mongering-booming-sector , 31st March , 2020 , (11/6/2020 1.07 pm)
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