Fear and The Media

During the time of the November attacks in Paris, I was living just an hour by plane from the French capital city where 130 innocent civilians had just been killed, and I had just landed to spend a weekend exploring Morocco. This experience made me more aware of how fear not only has to be founded, but that the media does a tremendous job of creating panic among American citizens, that is often unnecessary. Many supposedly reputable news sources and programs referred to the terrorist actions, as they have to many others throughout history as ‘Islamic’ attacks. As soon as the news had reached my friends and I in Tangier about what had occurred in France, I could not help but worry. I was an American citizen, a target of ISIS, and I was closer to their native countries, in the Islamic nation of Morocco, than I had ever been before. 

However, my time in the country proved to be eye opening and well timed, as my fears subsided and they proved to be a result of the inaccurate perceptions and generalizations that the American media promotes. As I walked through the markets of Morocco, I watched as the men and women of Tangier engaged in prayer, were devoted to work, and the people that I encountered were so compassionate and hospitable. I walked into a shop in the market where a small TV with antennas displayed local news coverage of the Paris events in the Arabic language. The owner of the shop expressed in broken English that the people that committed the acts were “terrible,” and he did not understand the reasoning for it all. I recall another person that led our tourism group was from Morocco, and he explained that these violent actions are not practices of Islam, or nearly indicative of what Allah would want them to do.

This experience was so valuable to me because it made me realize more than ever, how much power and influence the media has on the mindsets of so many Americans. There are more than one billion Muslims in the world, however the news does not discuss this figure. The American news also does not shed nearly as much light on the positive societal contributions of Muslims globally.

Similar to how Orson Welles falsely led thousands of radio listeners to believe that an alien invasion was in progress in 1938, audiences fall victim to false panics created by the media more often than many would think. There are many ways in which people are often misled by the media, even in current events.

One of so many examples of misconceptions and worries that have been instilled in the minds of many by the media, are that sharks are creatures to fear more than most others. This is validated by the fact that there are movies such as Jaws, Sharknado, and even Finding Nemo which play upon the idea that sharks are deadly and malicious creatures that go as far as to often bite and kill humans. According to the National Safety Council however, about one single person in the United States dies from such an attack every year. Meanwhile, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that about 22 people are killed each year by cows. Nonetheless, there is not nearly as much mention of cows as deadly creatures, and the general perspective of the common public is that cows are friendlier than they are not.

In fact, during the summer of 2001, when a boy and a man on the outer banks of Florida both fell victim to shark attacks, and one died, there was a nationwide panic over what Time Magazine was referred to on their cover to as “The Summer of The Shark.” Following these stories also, cities around the United States such as Avon, North Carolina decided to officially advise swimmers to be cautious, “especially near dusk and dawn, when sharks seek food near shore,” according to a September, 2001 New York Times article. Nonetheless, only five people died from shark attacks that year, which shows just how much power the media has, and how capable they are of instilling fear in citizens nationwide, or even internationally.

Perhaps some might disagree, and find that sharks and cows are not the best example of how the media makes a spectacle of the headlines that they know will instill enough fear and interest in viewers to keep them watching. I can list many other examples of how the media creates fear in the lives of many, such as how the number of kidnappings that occur annually are not proportionate to how often they are reported and the irrational fear so have of their ability to potentially happen. Aside from the fact that it totally goes against the principles of equality that our country is founded upon, I think that when we consider how many Americans are voting to ban Muslims as a result of such intense fears in this country, we are shown that the media has too much power over how we function. It is important that we do not let anyone but ourselves, and what we know as fact determine what is the best for our lives. We cannot stereotype and generalize based on what the images that the media sells us. The fact is that Christian, Muslim, and otherwise, there are violent and extremist individuals that belong to any religion, and they are typically a rather small population of the much, much larger religious groups.

by Alexander Hammond