When everything is a crisis, nothing is

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project

How many crises does Colorado have? I don’t know that I can count them all for you, but to give you a sense, I did a Google site search for four major Colorado media outlets: The Denver Gazette, Colorado Politics, CPR, and Colorado Sun. If you’re curious to tool around in there, you’ll find the searches linked below in that same order.

We apparently are beset by crises. A quick survey through the first four links below shows a climate crisis, a budget crisis, a Colorado River crisis, a mental health crisis, a healthcare crisis, a childcare crisis — the list goes on.

I am not surprised by advocates and politicians using the word crisis. The fifth link below is to Senator Hickenlooper’s Twitter feed and, sure enough, he uses it all the time.

But media are different.

It’s one thing to see someone quoted in an article use the word crisis to describe a problem — see the above about politicians and advocates — but you see it over and over in the reporter’s own writing. It’s the reporter using the word to characterize a situation.

I’ve written in the past about the media letting their lexicon get co-opted by advocates, often in a one-sided fashion. Instead of a more neutral term such as “transgender” care, it’s “gender-affirming” (and don’t dare even think about the opposite advocacy term: “sex-rejecting”). When everything is a crisis, I have a hard time seeing how that’s also not letting advocates co-opt your lexicon. I suppose that the move to make everything a crisis could be a way of boosting readership too; nothing gets the clicks quite like a good old fashioned emergency.

I forget now where I first heard it, but this all made me think of a concept called alarm fatigue. When you’re surrounded by flashing lights and blaring annunciators all the time, you cease to notice them. I would not at all be surprised to find that many people nowadays have crisis fatigue.

When everything is dire, nothing is.

Whatever is driving the media’s (over)use of the word crisis, they along with the advocates who are gladly sitting by while their words are echoed would do well to temper their enthusiasm for the label.

It’s not helping either group in the long run.

Denver Gazette

Colorado Politics

CPR

Colorado Sun

Senator Hickenlooper

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT

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