OK. these are mixed metaphors but these are crazy times with conflicting and contradictory narratives being fed to us everywhere. all the time.
Fear has become a constant. I don’t watch broadcast TV and haven’t, until recently, listened to radio for a long time. Over the weekend, I took the radio out of the cupboard and pre-tuned it to Radio 4, LBC, Radio 3, Jazz FM and Classic FM. In the time that I listened to the five channels, coronavirus fear porn and lockdown propaganda were repeated consistently on all five. I knew that people were being subjected to this Orwellian nonsense non-stop but experiencing it is quite a shock when one’s dismissed/ignored it from the outset.
So, there’s the barrel of fear; manipulating the terrified majority is like “shooting fish in a barrel”… metaphor number one.