Writer and photographer, Laura Dodsworth, in her article ‘The Manufacturing of Fear’, describes the Covid-19 fear-mongering in the UK. The same applies here.

In Britain, death tolls were “constantly brandished” without the context of how many die every day in the UK without Covid-19. Hospital admissions were reported, while recoveries were not reported. Covid often appeared as a “death sentence”, and illness you did not recover from even though it was known from the outset that Covid was a “mild illness” for most people.

The British were one of the “most frightened populations in the world (same here) according to Dodsworth. They believed that 6%-7% of their people had died from Covid; that figure was around 100 times the actual death rate at the time”.

People interviewed for Dodsworth’s book, ‘A State of Fear’, reported that the media had “elevated their alarm”; they stopped watching the BBC because it took away their hope with a daily drip feed of new cases, new strains,and ‘dangerous’ vaccines.

Laura Dodsworth is kind enough to say that, perhaps, reporters allow their own fears to cloud their judgement in the first instance but, more likely, it’s the “financial incentive to be sensationalist”. Pay rises and fame are linked to articles with the most views. The proximity of mass media to political and economic power is also mentioned, as is proprietorship bias and advertising revenue

And, there is always the possibility of being attacked, or cancelled, for spreading “misinformation” if reporters don’t toe the government, ‘expert’ line of propaganda. A Dutch study has suggested that ‘strong’ messages in the media “induce more fear and more compliance” with what controlling governments want. That certainly fits in with the politician/media chumminess.

The “Fourth Estate has helped to shape citizens’ behaviour during lockdowns … (and) is also now impeding exit from lockdown.

Frightened people in Melbourne wearing masks and trying to get vaccinated. But, who wouldn't be frightened of a government that let 800 people die of the WuFlu because of their quarantine stuff up? And the same rotten people are still in their jobs, and have received huge pay rises while innocent victims of the worst government in Australia are unemployed or have had their businesses ruined.

ttbn, you left out one of the biggest killers from Covid in Britain, that hero of yours and Tory clown Boris Johnson's and his incomperdence which led to the needless deaths of thousands. According to Johnson's former chief adviser Dominic Cummings, when giving evidence to a parliamentary committee that "when the public needed us most the government failed." To date, more then 127,000 British citizens have died within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test. Its also reported Johnson said he would rather see bodies piled in the streets than have a lockdown.

Socialists might tax you, but Conservatives will KILL you!

Paul

Apart from your rant being totally irrelevant to the theme of my thread, you will never be taken seriously as long as you see things in terms of right versus left politics. Boris Johnson is a total idiot. If I was childish enough to have 'heroes', he certainly would not be one of them.

I do not support any political party; I hold them all in contempt. After a brief 'fling' with what was to be the Australian Conservatives - you seem to get a thrill out of reminding me of it - I came to the conclusion that Australians do not like conservatism (gawd only knows what they do like apart from Big Government and free stuff), unlike you, still clinging to the 8% Greens, also disliked by most Australians.

Both Labor and Liberal have gone far enough to the left to make the pissy Greens redundant. All their ratbag climate/energy policies, zero-emissions-by-Tuesday idiocy will all be put in by Morrison and his gang. You might as well spend your subscription to the Greens on beer, which seems to be what fuels your cranky posts.

The Queensland politicians are about to get a pay rise for their scaremongering and suspension of rights and freedoms on the populous.

It seems that in Germany the fear of Covid and authority has been replaced by a fear of living in freedom.

There is a sense of "insecurity and permission dependency", independent of the threat of the virus itself. There is a fear of exercising individual moral responsibility, which was taken away by Big Brother. "freedom can only be enjoyed with express permission, which is living on even as the threat from coronavirus recedes."

A state-imposed culture of prohibition has now been absorbed and integrated into private life. "The politics of the pandemic has established that freedoms, hitherto considered sacrosanct, can be suspended to achieve higher goals.

What the low information, heads-in-the-sand types have been sneering at is actually happening. The new form of despotism we allowed because of manufactured fear will not go away quickly, if at all