Politics of Fear and Attention-Based Politics Promote Donald Trump and Other Right-Wing Autocrats

Any society runs on fundamental assumptions about rights, liberty, justice, and routine social processes that are implicitly and explicitly communicated. While these have often been problematic for minority group members, they are now less certain for many Americans and citizens in numerous democratic countries since Donald Trump refused to accept losing the 2020 presidential election and then incited an insurrection against the Congress of the United States on January 6, 2021, just weeks before his term ended. This shift is mainly due to policy changes, such as abolishing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Fairness Doctrine in 1987 that facilitated right-wing news organizations like Fox News (Honig, 2019), along with the rise of digital media that altered the communications ecology and promoted disinformation for profit (Benkler; Faris and Roberts, 2018; Benkler et al, 2017; Bennett and Livingston, 2018). These changes were the foundation for President Trump’s weaponizing of fear, especially his rhetoric about murderous illegal immigrants and the pursuit of a multi-billion border wall to keep Americans safe and keep his supporters fearful. Propaganda and false claims about immigrant criminality contribute to Republican supporters’ anger, but most anger is based on deep-seated fears and misinformation

Politics of Fear and Attention-Based Politics Promote Donald Trump and Other Right-Wing Autocrats

Any society runs on fundamental assumptions about rights, liberty, justice, and routine social processes that are implicitly and explicitly communicated. While these have often been problematic for minority group members, they are now less certain for many Americans and citizens in numerous democratic countries since Donald Trump refused to accept losing the 2020 presidential election and then incited an insurrection against the Congress of the United States on January 6, 2021, just weeks before his term ended. This shift is mainly due to policy changes, such as abolishing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Fairness Doctrine in 1987 that facilitated right-wing news organizations like Fox News (Honig, 2019), along with the rise of digital media that altered the communications ecology and promoted disinformation for profit (Benkler; Faris and Roberts, 2018; Benkler et al, 2017; Bennett and Livingston, 2018). These changes were the foundation for President Trump’s weaponizing of fear, especially his rhetoric about murderous illegal immigrants and the pursuit of a multi-billion border wall to keep Americans safe and keep his supporters fearful. Propaganda and false claims about immigrant criminality contribute to Republican supporters’ anger, but most anger is based on deep-seated fears and misinformation

“Our Relationship? It’s the Odd Mucky Weekend, Not a One Night Stand”: Journalists and aid agencies in the UK, and the current challenges to sourcing in humanitarian disasters

In humanitarian crises, the sources that journalists employ have always helped determine which stories achieve a high media profile, as well as play a part in framing the story. In particular, aid agencies acted as powerful gatekeepers to disaster zones, providing flights, transport, fixers and translators to journalists–and more recently, text, images and resources for the social web. Questions have been raised around transparency and objectivity in such reporting as a result. This paper draws on 40 semi-structured qualitative interviews with UK national journalists (broadcast, print and online) and aid agencies belonging to the UK's Disasters Emergency Committee. As a result, this paper builds on journalism studies looking at boundary (re)negotiations in journalism and the source-media relationship to show the current patterns in what has been described as a “mutually exploitative” relationship. It compares and contrasts what assistance journalists say they accept from aid agencies and what aid agencies report. It examines how both sides are often unwilling to acknowledge the close association. It will also look at how the increasing professionalisation of NGO operations including the employment of former journalists and producing their own content may be affecting the power dynamics. Finally, it asks whether the slow emergence of scandals means this relationship has not only affected stories that are covered but those that are not

Pelko ja ahdistus : Nationalistinen ja rasistinen fantasian politiikka

Crises have become a new normality. This normality is turned into grounds for the politics of fear. The hegemonic principle of the politics of fear is security. This politics, which invents objects of fear, is intimately linked to the nationalist identity politics shaped by a particular nationalist essence. Racism is an elemental part of the nationalist identity politics. In the text, racism is considered in relation to, on the one hand, fear and anxiety and, on the other hand, the imaginary and symbolic orders and the structure of fantasy. This analysis shows how xenophobic images, nationalist signifiers and racist fantasies create the vicious circles of fear and hate that gives justification for the nationalist identity politics that raises security as the hegemonic organizing principle. To counter the nationalist identity politics, the nationalist and racist fantasy must be traversed. Therefore, an anti-racist politics cannot be based on any pre-given identity. It takes place only as emancipatory events that confront the racists and nationalist fantasy.Peer reviewe

Climate change adaptation and cross-sectoral policy coherence in southern Africa

To be effective, climate change adaptation needs to be mainstreamed across multiple sectors and greater policy coherence is essential. Using the cases of Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia, this paper investigates the extent of coherence in national policies across the water and agriculture sectors and to climate change adaptation goals outlined in national development plans. A two-pronged qualitative approach is applied using Qualitative Document Analysis of relevant policies and plans, combined with expert interviews from non-government actors in each country. Findings show that sector policies have differing degrees of coherence on climate change adaptation, currently being strongest in Zambia and weakest in Tanzania. We also identify that sectoral policies remain more coherent in addressing immediate-term disaster management issues of floods and droughts rather than longer-term strategies for climate adaptation. Coherence between sector and climate policies and strategies is strongest when the latter has been more recently developed. However to date, this has largely been achieved by repackaging of existing sectoral policy statements into climate policies drafted by external consultants to meet international reporting needs and not by the establishment of new connections between national sectoral planning processes. For more effective mainstreaming of climate change adaptation, governments need to actively embrace longer-term cross-sectoral planning through cross-Ministerial structures, such as initiated through Zambia’s Interim Climate Change Secretariat, to foster greater policy coherence and integrated adaptation planning

Cloning colonialism: Residential development, transnational aspiration, and the complexities of postcolonial India

Within this article, we discuss/unpack a speculative international property development born out of a license agreement between the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and real estate investment company, Anglo Indian. The proposed building of twelve cloned, MCC branded, cricket communities in India–targeted to the consumption-based lifestyles of India’s new middle class–is addressed within the context relational to the political, economic, and cultural rationalities of postcolonial India, shifting power dynamics within the international cricket formation, and the associated re-colonisation of cricket-related spaces/bodies. Anglo Indian’s proposed communities are understood as part of a complex assemblage of national and global forces and relations (including, but certainly not restricted to): transnational gentrification; urban (re)development; and, revised understandings of historical and geographic connections between places, governance, and the politics of be(long)ing in branded spaces. This analysis explicates how Anglo Indian’s idealized community development offers a literal and figurative space for embodied performance of “glocal competence” for consumption-based identity projects of the new Indian middle-class (Brosius, 2010, p. 13) through the somewhat ironic mobilization of colonial spatial logics and cultural aesthetics

Notes towards a politics of fear

"A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear." Franklin D. Roosevelt "People react to fear, not love-they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true." Richard Nixon "Al Qaeda is to terror what the Mafia is to crime." George W. Bush I wish to chart the conceptual terrain of crime, terrorism, and victim by examining the connection between the mass media and the politics of fear, or decision-makers' promotion and use of audience beliefs and assumptions about danger, risk and fear in order to achieve certain goals. My map is communication logic that is capable of time travelling and gaining "depth" for perspective, rather than two dimensional space that is time bound. My "compass" is the discourse of fear or the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of everyday life. This discourse hones in on seemingly magnetic poles that distorts experience and language. I suggest that the politics of fear is a dominant motif for news and popular culture. Moreover, within this framework, news reporting about crime and terrorism are linked with "victimization" narratives. While most of the essay examines media depictions of crime, terrorism, and victim, I will present preliminary data from an ongoing study on news and the politics of fear. A central argument of previous research (Altheide, 2002) was that fear is cumulatively integrated into topics over time, and indeed, becomes so strongly associated with certain topics that, upon repetition, is joined with that term-as with an invisible hyphen-and eventually the term fear is no longer stated, but is simply implied. Examples from previous work include gangs, drugs, and in some cases, even crime, although crime continues to be heavily associated with fear. My aim here is to show the continuity between major events-the attacks of 9/11-and a history of crime reporting emphasizing fear and social control. This context of crime reportin