The Fear Merchants

Clickbait is always an annoyance. Misleading and sensationalist headlines that sucker you into providing websites, social media accounts and YouTube platforms with those juicy and profitable clicks are a continual irritation at the best of times, even if they are doing so on very trivial levels, hyping up very ordinary and short showbiz news reports as if they have some startling, mind-blowing exclusive, or inventing scandal from mere whisps of a rumour. I get why those platforms that depend on the advertising money that comes from high web ranking and continual clicks – or even those people so driven by ego that they will seek attention any way they can – do this. It’s dishonest but in the grand scheme of things, it’s probably not all that important. If only it stopped there. I fear it is much worse.

In these uncertain times, it feels as though the last thing that anyone needs is for the news media to ramp up the levels of paranoia and fear even further. But that’s exactly what we have from news sites that are so obsessed with clicks that they are willing to scare their readers to death with hysterical claims of everything from imminent apocalypse and global chaos to newly-discovered health threats and sinister, underground organisations. They do this knowing that many people will be so alarmed at the suggestion of the headline that they won’t be able to avoid clicking, as much as they might not want to, only to find that it is often nothing more than political cock-waving, military power-hunger and passing comments that have been cranked up to seem like direct, immediate threats.

I’m not saying that we’re not living through worrying times or that it could not all suddenly spiral out of control – but equally, I think that a little level-headedness is called for. Many of these stories are essentially non-events, as you find when looking elsewhere online – if the terrifying headline from one source doesn’t even get a mention elsewhere, we can perhaps believe that it is less of an immediate threat than is being implied. But cynical news outlets that live on fear don’t care because they’ve got you to click on the story.

News sites thrive on fear – back when print was king, nothing sold papers more than a carefully coordinated hysteria and the same is true of clickbait now. The 24-hour news cycle needs awfulness to justify its existence; everything has to be ‘breaking‘, everything has to be a crisis. I’m not suggesting that we should be wrapped in cotton wool and protected from the potential threats facing us – but equally, it seems downright insane to be actively encouraging them. There is a point when hyping the unthinkable makes a lot more people think about it that bit more – be they politicians or fanatics. At the least, it makes people frightened and suspicious, fearful about things that they have no control over – fearful because they have no control over them. There is a word for this – terrorism. And while I imagine that the editors and cynical hacks working for our news outlets would be aghast to be accused of being terrorists, what else are they, really? Terrorism isn’t just about indiscriminate bombing, the gunning down of enemies, the random attacks on passersby and the execution of kidnap victims – it’s about instilling the fear of those things into a population, filling them with dread and paranoia, making them compliant and scared.

This cynical manipulation is immensely damaging to mental health, reason enough to stop it you might think. It’s also dangerous because politicians have a bad habit of believing what they see in the news and feeling the need to act on it. This is bad enough when it’s moral panic about computer porn. It’s a lot more dubious when the press are actively whipping up the belief that global war is inevitable and imminent or that the threat of terrorism is all around us or that the wrong person might be elected leader and so lead us all into anarchy and destruction. The media is expert at manipulating these beliefs and encouraging wild conspiracy theories. It’s all a game to them – a way to make money and feel important and self-righteous. But here’s the thing. People have died as a direct result of media fear-mongering – those attacked by fanatics who believe themselves under threat and those who become so terrified of an overly-hyped danger that they take their own lives. What sort of awful person would choose to be responsible for that? The press likes to take the moral high ground but let’s not fool ourselves – they are the worst sort of war profiteers and emotional terrorists, and at a time when everyone is feeling that things are spiralling out of control, the last thing that we need is excessive hype from money-hungry attention-seekers. Let’s all take a deep breath and ignore the people who want us to be more scared than we need to be.

DAVID FLINT

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