ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a fundamental argumentative move in authoritarian discourse, the ‘politics of fear’ as a political and media practice that is consistently mobilized in relation to critical incidents related to crime and terrorism and is also exploited during election campaigning. The politics of fear vividly highlights the problematic convergence between authoritarian politics and news journalism. This chapter is organized around two case studies: Donald Trump’s deployment of the fear tactic in the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns and a comparative critical discourse analysis of the news coverage of two terrorist attacks in Stockholm and at London Bridge in the year 2017. The latter study documents the mobilization of three contrastive discourses in the mainstream press coverage of the attacks in Swedish and UK news reports and opinion articles. These discourses affirm, give rise to, but also resist and counteract the constitutive elements of the politics of fear. Based on these findings, we address the ensuing challenges for journalism, as well as the implications of the normative division between news and opinion journalism for the normalization of a politics of fear.
