The State of Fear

Crichton (2004) throughout the novel has tried to explain how environmental groups and the mass media have created this state of fear. It works on the principle of “realities of truth”, where journalists use power knowledge constructions and where journalistic knowledge which is linked to power has the authority to speak a given truth, at least in terms of effect (Foucault, 1980), this is created through the discourse of global warming. The text shows that the mass media and the government have used this state of fear to control the public, if one fear is lost in this case the collapse of the Soviet Union then a new is needed to continue control over the general public, in this case the fear of global warming. The creation of a looming disaster has led to a force of new controls such as green taxes and new governmental policies, the media will use scare stories as a way to captivate their audience.

“If you study the media...you discover something extremely interesting....There was a major shift in the fall of 1989. Before that, the media did not make excessive use of terms such as crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, plague or disaster... but then it all changed, These terms started to become more and more common. The word catastrophe was used five times more often in 1995 than it was in 1985. Its doubled again by the year 2000. And the stories changed too. There was a heightened emphasis of fear, worry, danger, uncertainty.... 1989 seemed like a normal year: a Soviet sub sank in Norway; Tiananmen Square in China....a San Francisco earthquake flattened highways.... rise in the term crisis can be located with some precision in the autumn of 1989. And it seemed suspicious that it should coincide so closely with the fall of the Berlin Wall....The Berlin wall marks the collapse of the Soviet empire. And the end of the cold war that lasted for a half a century.....for fifty years, Western nations had maintained their citizens in a state of perpetual fear...The Communist Menace...politicians need fear to control the population...The media need scare stories to capture the audience”. (p 537 – 542)