I returned home last night to find a facebook message asking me to join the group “10,000 to Tell the Media to Stop Inciting More Fear and Panic!”
This is part of a now widely used right-wing talking point: that the Obama administration and the media are using fear-mongering to ram through their economic agenda without proper, sober consideration of the vast consequences of Obama’s proposed actions.
What is fear-mongering? A workable definition would be the deliberate exaggeration of a threat in order to scare the public into supporting actions that it would not support if it were presented with a more reasonable and objective picture of reality. One might add to that the concern that decisions made under impaired judgment might be self-defeating in the long run.
If you marshal lots of valid and widely credible evidence and analysis to support your presentation of the threats we do face and then call for action consistent with that evidence and analysis, that’s not fear-mongering. That’s responsible leadership. If you report on something serious and call it serious, that doesn’t count as over-hyping. That counts as reporting.
So, what is behind this sudden right-wing concern with fear-mongering? In a word: projection. For eight years the right-wing lustily cheered on the most fear-based presidency we’ve ever had. For a brief refresher course, consider:
1) President Bush’s warning to the American people in the Fall of 2002 that:
“America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
2) Dick Cheney’s warning during the 2004 presidential elections that a Kerry victory could well mean another catastrophic attack on American soil.
Of course, Cheney’s entire worldview, the one percent doctrine, was premised on the idea that any threat, however probabilistically small, had to be treated as if it were a near certainty to occur. Can you think of a better basis for fear-mongering than that operating principle?
3) Or how about the repeated warnings that to even criticize the President during “war-time” was to leave us more vulnerable to attack by enemies determined to kill us all?
4) And, how about the McCain campaign, which settled on the up-lifting theme “Who is Barack Obama?” in the closing weeks, in order to stir the ugliest imaginings of what Barack Obama represented and the dark night that America faced were he to be elected?
Needless to say, I could go on and on and on.
As to the media’s role in all of this, space constraints preclude anything like a full cataloging of all of the ways in which it enabled this unprecedented record. From the shameless hyping of the fraudulent WMD story to its dutiful and constant reporting of the ridiculously hyped terror threat level throughout the summer and Fall of 2004, mainstream media mindlessly conveyed incorrect or meaningless information designed for one purpose - to scare America into thinking that only George W. Bush could keep us safe from imminent attack and death.
As one illustrative example of this new right-wing talking point, here’s former McCain Deputy Communications director and pundit Michael Goldfarb, writing recently in the Weekly Standard:
Steven Chu, our new Secretary of Energy, tries to spook the public:
“I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen,” he said. “We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.” And, he added, “I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going” either.
He went on to say that “facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” (Just kidding.) Elsewhere Obama was warning today that if his stimulus, which has so far failed to garner a single Republican vote and is hemorrhaging Democratic votes as well, fails to pass, the American people face a “catastrophe.“
Good for the Democrats, let them play the politics of fear — on the economy, on global warming, on any other issue they please. But let’s not pretend that this is any different than the warnings offered by the Bush administration in the run up to the war in Iraq. And let’s keep in mind that Obama’s plans for the economy and the environment are going to make the Iraq war look like a bargain.”
If you actually read the full Steven Chu quote from the Los Angeles Times article that Goldfarb links to, you’ll see that Chu did warn of these dire possibilities, by the end of the 21st century. You’ll also see that Chu, a Nobel prize winning scientist, is repeating warnings similar to those that appear in a recent issue of Nature, one of the top scientific journals in the world, and a recent study from Cal-Berkeley. In other words, Chu is basing his conclusions on, you know, credible evidence and sources.
Compare that, for example, to the way in which the Bush administration deliberately misused its own data in the run-up to the Iraq war, “politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.”
On the subject of climate change and media, the problem on balance has not been that journalists have over-hyped climate change. In fact, it’s been quite the opposite - a general failure to convey clearly the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change.
Goldfarb’s claim that the Iraq war will look like a bargain is pure denial. The Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has estimated that the Iraq war could end up costing three trillion dollars. And, of course, the Bush tax cuts, aimed overwhelmingly at the well-off, also cost over a trillion dollars.
The claim that what Obama is “exactly the same” - well, you know by now.
In sum, the Bush administration rushed into war based on cherry-picked or discredited intelligence and otherwise went to war on Americans’ most basic liberties all by constantly invoking the specter of the catastrophic attacks of 9/11. In the process, it engaged in reckless and profligate fiscal policies contributing greatly to our current economic crisis. And the right doesn’t start complaining about fear-mongering, over-hyped threats and media complicity in same until a new President, facing an actual crisis crafts an actually fact-based set of argument for why we have to do deal with the problem resolutely.
It goes without saying that Obama might turn out to be wrong about any number of things, including in his broad plans to deal with current economic realities. He will certainly, at a minimum, make many missteps along the way.
But right-wing hand-wringing about fear-mongering?
Spare us all.
Update: Glenn Greenwald today wrote a post strikingly similar in theme, if not specific content, to mine.
Tags: Fear
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