Unpredictability and Oversimplification. Two deadly arrows in media’s quiver to induce mass panic

in time of a pandemic

This article is inspired by the terror the mass media are erupting day by day regarding the corona virus. What follows is not an attempt to belittle the new pandemic in any way, but to take a closer look on why journalism uses fear to cloud people’s judgment from the true magnitude of serious events exactly like corona virus.

In the first pages of the book the 50th Laws, Robert Greene explains a reality that may sound familiar to you:

As human beings, we have developed a world in which being attacked by a fearsome animal or a more powerful tribe dropped down to approximately zero. Human beings have constructed complex systems that help us thrive on a daily basis and maintain the security we have been striving from the beginning of our existence.

Somewhere along this fight for stability and reduction of surprises, journalism has exploited a side of fear that is being continuously used to control the audience.

But why base a considerable part of the media system on fear and not on another emotion?

What makes fear so different?

What separates fear from other reflexes is its flexibility. Fear can begin prior to the stimuli, compared to other reflexes. That kind of flexibility makes it unique, and as you can understand very easy to trigger. Once a catastrophic idea has been presented by the media, then it’s up to the audience to enhance it in their minds with vivid pictures and plausible scenarios, so fear can easily kick in before the actual event takes place.

Contrary to the rest of the animals, human beings won’t wait for a stimulus to appear; they might as well manifest it in their imagination so that the fear takes place.

Our brain constructs scenarios that end up being overwhelming for oneself. But fear lies only on the surface.

If we take a step further there lies something more specific than fear.

Unpredictability

Research called “The Biology of Fear” breaks down unpredictability to 3 types:

• Temporal uncertainty in the occurrence of a stimulus
• Novelty of the stimulus itself
• The context of knowing that one does not know much about the given stimulus

The study proposes two ways a stimulus can be categorized as uncertain:

• Risk
• Ambiguity

Two factors that approximately every news article and report you see encapsulates in a brilliant and smart way. In-depth knowledge of fear equals more readers, panic and rush decisions leading to manipulation of the crowd. The possibility to do something stupid, like emptying all the supermarket shelves of toilet paper and then visit the church to receive the Holy Communion, is to be considered normal with the chaos that the media produce.

Oversimplification

In the book “1984”, our protagonist Winston meets a colleague whose job is to update the language, called “Newspeak”. He looks down to Winston, who translates some documents but still uses the “Old Speak” and he tells him:

“In your heart, you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.”

When I used to watch the news here in Greece, I was puzzled every time the host asked from another journalist, politician or expert in a specific topic to “make it simpler”. To be more exact all the hosts were using the same expression “Can you please make it simpler, so people can understand it?”.

Controlling in that way the conversation to produce a catchphrase that would be placed below them. A slogan that is “easy for people to understand” and it’s filled with simple words like “good”, “bad.”

For example, data regarding the coronavirus requires detailed information and not just numbers of dead and infected people about it. My friend Ioannis Georgiadis poses a great point in his article:

Below I “stole” two of my favorite passages of his article:

“The CoViD-19 pandemic is the perfect fertile ground for rampant misinformation, generated partly by people prioritizing clicks over logic and truth and partly by people wanting to exploit our panic and confusion to make money.”

“A title like “30 more deaths from coronavirus in the US this week!” will draw many more readers than “Coronavirus continues to spread in the US.” The second title hints to a more complex situation that requires further reading to get the details, while the first focuses only on the number with the highest shock-value.”

I bring some disappointing news for the journalists that insist on believing their audience is stupid and requesting to “make things clearer”:

Your audience is capable of understanding the complexity of reality. What they require from you is to be able to deconstruct to the best of your abilities each point and idea. I am not suggesting complicating things just for the sake of it, but appreciate the gravity of some events and take the most accessible exit of simplification.

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