Thread: Panic Nation: Obama's rule by executive order

Obama's rule by executive order is an extension of the same media driven state of emergency

Panic Nation

- Daniel Greenfield
Tuesday, August 30, 2011

As I sit here in the sunken ruins of New York City, breathing oxygen through a two mile straw, and shopping by dispatching orders through a helpful school of fish—I can’t help but think that I should have listened to the media when they told me to panic, run to the stores and pay 40 dollars for batteries, and then listen to every weather update while waiting for the end to come.

But of course none of that actually happened. There are places where hurricanes are dangerous, but the city I live in is not one of them. Aside from a few downed trees, some power loss and a little flooding near the river, the same things that happen every few years, there was nothing to speak of. Nothing except a vast media driven overreaction.

Hurricane Irene is just another entry in the non-stop shriek of media driven panic. The news cycle is fed by three main types of stories, salacious gossip, horrible tragedies and panic stories. All three are culturally destructive, but the third is the most insidious because it contains a germ of truth that is inflated to spread panic. Hurricanes are dangerous, so are child molesters and the swine flu—but they are also elements in a news cycle that is intended to induce a state of permanent panic.

Permanent panic is another word for ‘helplessness’. Consume enough panic stories and you begin to feel like your life is out of control. And that is the intended or unintended consequence of the media. People who feel helpless are eager to listen to anyone who promises to help and willing to accept any solution.

Media driven panics agitate the public and encourage politicians to cluelessly leap on the bandwagon with bad policies
Media driven panics agitate the public and encourage politicians to cluelessly leap on the bandwagon with bad policies. Then when the policies fail, the media blasts the politicians, feeding a backlash to a mess that it created. And when the politicians go back to ignoring the problem, they run alarmist stories and the cycle repeats itself.

The common denominators in the media driven panics are reports that assume the worst case scenario with only shallow reporting on the nature of the problem leading to general overreactions, rather than intelligent problem solving.

That’s how we decided to strip search everyone getting on a plane, rather than profile likely terrorists, or treat any stranger as a potential child molester. Or why a city where weather kills less people than panhandlers, had to shut down over a hurricane. These overreactions create a siege mentality which shuts down critical thinking and leads people to accept otherwise unacceptable solutions without asking questions.

The media often likes to pretend that it is the voice of reason, investigating and asking the questions that the public doesn’t know enough to ask. In reality its chief function is to stop people from asking questions and accept its narrative. Panicked people are less likely to ask questions and more likely to do what they’re told.

Questions narrow down a problem and its solution—which is the opposite of the media’s presentation that maximizes the possible danger to everyone by keeping the details as vague as possible. Whether it’s bird flu or terrorism—the two questions that most need to be asked,where is the problem coming from and what is the actual risk go unanswered.

Panic is created when people are told that their survival and the welfare of their families is on the line, but are given little information about the real risk to them or how to deal with the threat. Media driven panic saturates the airwaves, the print media and the internet with empty reporting that emphasizes the scale of the threat, but provides little useful risk assessment information. These gaps are filled in with the usual gimmicks, on the spot reporting, man on the street interviews, which are usually pitched to make the state of panic seem universal.

“It’s happening in Denver, it’s happening in Atlanta, everybody is worried and doesn’t know what to do.â€

A thousand mini-crises are used as weapons of mass distraction to prevent people from seeing how prices have gone up, morals have gone down and the very idea of what the nation used to be is being destroyed all around them.

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