Why do we get so much delusional fearmongering in times of crisis? Because it works. It gets clicks and riles people up against designated hate objects. The dopamine hit is enormous. Money often changes hands. And when the doomsday predictions don't happen, there is ZERO penalty.
How many doomsayers and hysterics have ever been completely discredited by their predictions failing to come true? Not well-meant warnings that were a bit off, but misses on the scale of the "population bomb" scare. Has a fashionable hysteric gone out of business since the 70s?
If hysteria matches political preconceptions, it doesn't matter if it fails to come true, or even if it's 180 degrees wrong. The doomsday prophets get unlimited credit for good intentions. They predicted what SHOULD have happened according to dogma that will never change.
Modern society has a weird passive-aggressive combination of lethargy and frenzy that provides the perfect environment for doomsayers. You have to predict outrageously magnified disasters to get people to care, and once they start caring, they become obsessively focused.
The dark side of the "preference cascade" phenomenon creates stampedes. As soon as they see other people reacting to a crisis and it's actually affecting daily life, the public suddenly shifts from apathy to frenzied activity and demands for SOMEONE to do SOMETHING immediately.
Of course there are political predators lying in wait to take advantage of the frenzy, like the Democrats who tried to stuff abortion junk into the coronavirus emergency bill. Their whole agenda revolves around catching panic waves and surfing to greater power on them.
Among the many ways the media makes it worse is by keeping the same people on speed dial for analysis and commentary. It doesn't matter how wrong they are, and always have been, as long as they're narrative-friendly and good for hot and spicy sound bites.
Social media unquestionably made the media worse by giving it a bottomless well of hysteria to dip into whenever it needs a quick fix. It's absolutely insane how much of "news" coverage is now shaped by 280-character messages, often composed on cell phones.
Rest assured that when the coronavirus panic is over (and the actual coronavirus problem is resolved) that the people who made the most hysterical doomsday predictions will suffer zero damage to their credibility. They probably won't even be asked how they got it so wrong.
The lesson modern media takes from the Boy Who Cried Wolf is not that crying wolf is wrong. It's that the Boy should have cried louder, monetized his crying, demanded more funding for the Department of Wolf Control, and gotten himself on a few Rolodexes as a wolf expert. /end
