ABC TV Does Two Major Cracker Stories

karma vs Dogma writes "ABC ran a couple of stories tonight on the "Evils of Crackers/Hackers". Read the summaries of the World News Tonight story and the 20/20 story. I am just wondering where they keep getting these huge figures on the costs of replacing one html document with another."

Comments

Selling Fear

[theonetruekeebler]

Fear sells. This has been a major tenet of yellow journalism and of publishing in general for some time.

And the easiest thing to make someone afraid of is something they are dependent on, but can't control or don't understand. Fear is a great hook--you're watching Friends or whatever and all of a sudden some talking heads pop up and says, "Why bottled water may be bad for you, tonight on the 11AliveCast." So you watch the 11AliveCast and they keep teasing you along until 11:26PM, when they tell you bottled water isn't fluoridated so please for ghod's sake brush.

And the next week bottled water sales are down. They really are. Air travel drops a small but significant amount after airline crashes, and boy-oh-boy do those ever grab airtime. The irony is that lots of those panickers end up driving, which is far more dangerous than flying.

Or one sociopath goes and puts cyanide in Tylenol capsules in Chicago in 1982. The press went absolutely batshit over that one, and within a month seven local poisonings became 270 copycats poisonings nationwide, and every bottle of Tylenol in the U.S. had to be taken off the shelf. Within a year all OTC pharmeceuticals were repackaged to be tamper resistant, for over $1.3 billion per year in direct costs, never mind the indirect costs of making otherwise harmless medicines impossible for elderly people to open.

Sending the population into a panic also makes governments adopt hasty, poorly thought-out measured to remedy what their citizens are convinced are terrible, terrible problems. Does anybody remember the plastic handgun scare of 1985? Huge panic, many laws passed, product did not exist and is still technologically unfeasible.

Whipping up a frenzy of concern and fear may not be responsible journalism, but it brings in readers and viewers, consequences be damned. Speaking of hasty government actions, read about W.R. Hearst's interest in the Spanish-American war some time, if you're ever curious about the lengths people have gone to to sell papers.

Moral: The manipulation of public perception can turn minor problems into major problems, not the least of which will be the public perception itself.

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