scaremongery

English

Etymology

scaremonger +‎ -y

Noun

scaremongery (uncountable)

1. The act of spreading alarming information that is either exaggerated or untrue in order to scare others.
   • 1955, New Zealand. Parliament. House of Representatives, Parliamentary Debates, page 3302:

     The honourable Member's statement is a form of scaremongery.

   • 1956, Australia. Parliament. House of Representatives, Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). - Volume 10:

     The magazine Time is not a journal that is given to scaremongery, but in its issue of the 3rd March, 1952, it reported the result of an investigation into television, as it affected children, by a committee of mothers.

   • 1979, Latin America Regional Reports: Brazil, page 135:

     As the businessmen have been lobbying hard for the government to take measures to reflate the economy, there may have been an element of scaremongery in their forecast.

2. Alarming information that is exaggerated or untrue.
   • 1979, Peter Flynn, Brazil: a political analysis, →ISBN, page 186:

     This deliberately alarmist scaremongery has since been repeated on various occasions, notably in Brazil before 1964 and in Chile under Allende.

   • 2012, George N. Christodoulou, Psychosomatic Medicine: Past and Future, →ISBN, page 117:

     The Natural Childbirth movement, a private organisation, was fiercely criticised by some obstetric specialists who were very scathing of natural childbirth techniques and put about a lot of medical scaremongery – for example, that a baby would be exsanguinated if it were placed on the mother's abdomen before the placenta had been delivered and before the umbilical cord was cut.

   • 2011, Philip Reeve, Fever Crumb - Book 1, page 5:

     As our Order's librarian, it is one of Dr. Isbister's duties to read the city newspapers, and I'm afraid they fill his mind with rumors and scaremongery.

   • 2018, Natasha Devon, A Beginner's Guide to Being Mental: An A-Z, →ISBN:

     And, reader, the further you take this analogy the more beautifully it works: my anxiety disorder thrives on irrational scaremongery and paranoia, it often demands booze (but should not be given alcohol because it only makes it worse) and just when you think you have got rid of it for good, it pops up again.