Have you ever been afraid of something, even though you had no Idea why? Or you have been afraid of something, even there was no reason to be afraid of it? That’s somehow what political fear mongering is about! Political fear mongering is the process of spreading fears among the voter to create political support for something or someone. Often it is used in election when, of course, both side want to win but instead of showing why everybody should vote for them, they show ‘reasons’ not to vote for the other side. So is President Obama opposed off willing letting in Ebola into the Country just because he is not shutting all the air travels from and to West Africa. This prediction is wrong in many parts because it is not in the power of the president alone to do this and also would a stop in airtravel probably even worsen the situation in Africa.
The idea of fear mongering became really big in 1950 when senator McCarthy used the strategy of fear mongering to get back popularity after he was becoming really unpopular with his drinking and his vast lobbyism for Pepsi. He chose the biggest issue of his time to gain back support from his voters. He accused over 200 people working for the government of being communists! In the 1950’s the fear of communism was already extremely big, partly with good reason. The US was just involved in the Korean War, which was not going too well against the communists. China had just converted to communism and therefore changed to political weights between capitalism and communism, so that the odd where now standing for communists. In addition to that the Soviet Union had just tested an atomic bomb a year before and had created an actual threat for the US.
Having all those fears already, McCarthy made it even worse with pushing everyone's fear that the Evil communist where infiltrating the Government and working on destroying the country from the inside out. After the speech in which he told the world that he had a list with names of communist got the support to make his own sub-committee in 1952 where he could just call out people and then try to prove that they were communists. This process of investigating was most often enough to destroy a person's reputation and, or career because even though McCarthy hardly prove any cases to be right no one wanted to have anything to do with a communist. On the highpoint of popularity 69% percent in america would think that he was doing a good job with fighting communism. This lasted for a few years until the threat wasn’t that recent anymore and McCarthy would lose political support really fast. Afterwards people would call this way of gaining political support McCarthyism. McCarthyism was the first huge political use of fear mongering that was also depicted as even this.
On the most famous advertisements that include fear mongering is the electoral ad from Lyndon B. Johnson. Daisy, a little girl is counting the leaves on a flower, when she reaches ten, a voice starts a countdown that ends with a nuclear explosion. This was one of the biggest threats the US had to during the 1960’s where this advertisement helped Johnson to become president what perfectly shows how effective fear mongering works. In this case of political fear mongering it was actually a real threat that was used and overhyped to scare the people to vote. And even though it was a real threat one needs to ask in what ways it was actually necessary to use a little girl, the most innocent thing in the world, to gather political support for this candidate.
As briefly touched on, the Republicans are responsible for the Ebola crisis. This ad to vote against them is made around a long list of how the republicans cut many health fundings and due to that caused Ebola to spread faster and without real medical resistance. Just that this is the best example of how you can misread a statistic if you want. One example could be just to take a certain amount of years and leave out others. But there are many different ways of reading data wrong what apparently happened in this ad. As shown here, many of the numbers are just wrong. The article from the Washington Post gives the exact number published by the health organisations itself and even clears it from inflation to prove that numbers have not been cut by the republicans as dramatic as the ad is telling us.
But not just in the US fear mongering is a big topic. Many of the topics are spread across the world. So is Immigration also a really important topic in Great Britain, where now, just after the EU allowed every worker inside the EU to get job in another EU-country. This is used in Britain in a way that newspapers and politicians predict a new wave of immigrants, who will steal the jobs from normal people. The numbers that are presented to support the fact of an immigration wave are based on numbers from a decade ago. This Numbers are likely to have changed since then! Great Britain is not anymore so attractive for workers and now people can migrate to every EU country not just a few. So in this case too, it is just fear mongering to to build support against it, without having actual facts to prove anything.
In some of my research I was caught more than in others. With putting ‘political fear mongering’ as my search term in google I became less and less sure about whether it was giving articles about fear mongering or actual fear mongering articles. In one of them in the Huffington Post I found myself asking what the author meant. He was describing how the Republicans wouldn’t understand the terror war in the middle east but always use it for their ad campaigns. Or in another one that Republicans would scare voters so that they would vote for them. Both of the articles are nicely written and good to read but with thinking about them I came to wonder about where the factual support is. Both of them are quantitativ big but give few support for their claim what leaves me with the opinion that both of them are written about fear mongering but are nevertheless fear mongering articles themselves.
Political fear mongering is a tool used by almost every political party in the world. It is a tool that plays with the fear of the people and scares them into something. Though we know that fear is one the strongest feeling we have as George Orwell would agree on, where he is used in many fear mongering topics as a reference for the worst. Political fear mongering is an extremely effective tool to use as we can see that many elections were won because of the better advertisement with the stronger fears. The Question of whether or not it is actually fear mongering is easy: as long someone is using fear as a way to build up support or to gain power it is fear mongering, in a political context: political fear mongering.
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| Atomic bombs where and still are one of the biggest issues to american people |
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| Communism was a big topic in the past century and was the main reason for McCarthyism |
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| The Ad 'Daisy' was a influencing ad in presidential election in '64 |
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| A Cartoon about political fear mongering |
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| Joseph McCarthy with his 'list' of communists in the Government |
Wikipedia is always a good start into topic because it gives you an overview over your topic so that you know what you are dealing with. Therefor I found helpful informations on here to get started into the research about Fear Mongering and some of its aspects.
Again it was just to catch an overview and to be able to understand what is going on. I found usefull information Joseph McCarthy and what he did in his life to become on of the more famous american politicians in america.
In my research I needed to find examples of fear mongering today and was happy to find this page where they have listed 10 videos about topics that are the most famous political fear mongering examples that are caught on film.
This was an article about the how. How american politicians use fear to change public opinion. Also in that source I found good examples that illustrated really good what the article was talking about and so enhanced my understanding of fear mongering.
This webpage was about how the fear of vaccines was overhyped and partly wrong. Also here I understood more about the concept of fear mongering.
This article was talking about how the fear of something can be actually more dangerous than the thing itself. Examples for that where Ebola and Immigrants. This Website helped me understand how to prove that something is fear mongering and also gave me an insight in two of the topics that I would later discuss in my post.
This article was about the Republicans using fear mongering to gain political support. I found a good example of actual fear mongering just with reading it and this is the main use of this source: a first hand example of political fear mongering.
This source is about republicans that can’t understand to war against terror but using in all of their ad. This source was as well as the source above used as a first hand example of political fear mongering.
This Article about the new fear of immigrants was my main source for the paragraph on european fear mongering. In the text was included both the fear mongering itself as well as a clear showing of facts why it is nothing more than fear mongering.
This source was about on the most famous political fear mongering in US history. The TV ad “Daisy” is a first hand example of fear mongering. Also included in this source are a couple facts about the ad, that were helpful evaluating the ad.
The history textbook was a really good source about the McCarthyism. How the McCarthyism emerged and what ways it went and finally went down. Also about what McCarthy did in his popular time.
Those two sources are, first the Advertisement about how republicans caused ebola to spread faster and then the Washington Post fact check that proves it wrong. This sources are first a primary source as political fear mongering and then a source to prove that is actually fear mongering that is not based on real data.
