WELCOME TO OUR WEBSITE!

Hi there folks! You are currently feasting your eyes upon our at our English 101 project through the form of a website. We kinda suck at using WordPress so our apologies for the limited content and usability. Sean Hannity invites you to take a gander at our project about fear in the media and use the tabs in menu above to direct yourself to where you wanna go. The side bar is a little distraction we created to entertain the poor professor or teacher that has to look at the hundreds of these projects.

The purpose of this project is to investigate to what extent does fear play a role in media literacy. Specifically analyzing the frequency, and how it affects views on marketing or news. Through this research we can obtain a clearer definition for the fear tactic. Hopefully gain knowledge that will help the populous in understanding when it’s present, and how often it is used. Enable them to become aware of when manipulation by fear is displayed in media. We are studying this through a survey containing both multiple choice questions and individual written responses from those consuming social media.

So far we have made a poster on our findings and created a survey through Google Forms to get data from the public. We amassed a massive 57 responses were able to conclude that a most people believe that fear tactics are used in the Press to report the news.

Consumers of media frequently see fear placed in the media depending on what their intake is. We’re looking in the appeal to fear for media outlets and how often they choose to use it.

APPEAL TO FEAR: /argumentum in terrorem/ When fear, not based on evidence or reason, is being used as the primary motivator to get others to accept an idea, proposition, or conclusion.

The way the fear is presented is usually in the form of Advertisements, exaggerated Headlines, Opinion Pieces, and Televised or Radio broadcasts. This affects media literacy by prohibiting context from being established and encouraging impulse reactions prior to a full reception of the event.  As it stands now, we’d like to answer that fear plays a role in media literacy to a great extent. Fear morphs and solidifies knowledge based off of the severity of the content observed. Further research is necessary to include those who take in this kind of media in other ways besides social media.

Thank you for visiting our site!

— John Carroll & Sam Dickman