When shock jocks become toxic.

Fear is an awful thing. It’s different to being skeptical. It’s different to asking healthy questions. Fear is base. Fear is that instinctual feeling we have when we don’t quite understand something. And when we don’t quite know how something will pan out, well that’s a pretty scary thing. But what happens when fear overtakes actual debate? When the panic sets in?

In fact, cynical politicians know that fear is political capital as worthy as any. It motivates people. But not always to a useful end.

Where do you go when fear hijacks the conversation? On any issue.

Broadcaster and journalist Virginia Trioli takes a look at the difference between debate and inducing panic. She writes: .

“It’s called the ionosphere. The part of the upper atmosphere that forms the inner edge of the magnetosphere and creates the almost supernatural trick of transporting radio waves over improbable distances. One pre-dawn morning in Sydney several years ago, I even heard Red Symons’ ABC Melbourne breakfast program crackling over the airwaves as I negotiated the cross-city tunnel. One other morning, a morning that I can never forget, I heard the strangest broadcast ever, something that sounded as if it had bounced back to me from another century. It must have been because of the ionosphere.

The man’s high-toned tenor was urgent, hectoring. It was alarmed and alarming, and the man was warning of great danger. As I recall, this monologue went something like this. “And you know who they are; we all know who they are, don’t we? What’s the description we see here? Come on, say it with me: ‘Of Middle Eastern appearance’. That’s right, that’s right. ‘Of Middle Eastern appearance.’”

The rhetorical skills were familiar and accomplished. The call and response; the repetition; the urgent refrains. It was shrill and quite frightening. Who was this man?

Many mornings I heard this voice, warning that the government was not to be trusted, that public servants were not doing their jobs, that ethnic groups were running riot, that the streets were unsafe, that the system was letting you down. It would appear that the only man to trust in the dreadful, dark world that this voice conjured up, was this man himself. Alan Jones of radio station 2GB.

This was the week before the Cronulla riot and I had never heard an Alan Jones broadcast before. I was of course listening with the ears of an outsider and initially I simply couldn’t take the semi-hysterical tirades seriously. It took me some time to realise, with awful foreboding, that this point of view defined the entire outlook of a radio audience that politicians around the country took – and still take – very seriously.

This point of view had its most recent and toxic flowering at last week’s anti carbon-tax rally, and no one who listens to such radio should have been even a little surprised by it. The discontent, the anger, the absolute lack of trust, have been long-nurtured by this kind of broadcast. It is almost anarchic in its distrust of any officialdom. In its worst form this view becomes an incipient bunker mentality: let me earn my own money, do what I want with it and leave me alone.

But these people have been scared, and this is how frightened people lash out. As agent K bluntly observes in Men in Black, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.” The mob is in all of us, and we can be easily frightened into a stampede. For this reason, it is dangerous to feed legitimate political discontent over broken promises or inadequate services with the inherently antisocial distrust of broader democratic institutions – parliaments, courts, bureaucracies.

When I interviewed former prime minister John Howard on News Breakfast last year about his autobiography, I asked him if he thought a Tea Party-type movement was possible in Australia. He did not, because, he said, Australia’s federation encouraged a commonality of purpose and sense of connection that the still-strong and very individualistic “states rights” doctrine of the US could not.

I thought that analysis was very sound, and still do. But the ties that bind us, that bind any society, are most easily unpicked by fear – something history has surely taught us well.”

 

To read more about the Tea Party movement in America you can go here.

Is fear on the loose in public debate in Australia? More to the point, is it genuine fear or is it manufactured for effect?