Once Again, Media Terrorize the Public for the Terrorists — FAIR
▻http://fair.org/home/once-again-media-terrorize-the-public-for-the-terrorists
Terrorism—to the extent the term is useful—is a fundamentally postmodern crime. It requires two parties for it to be effective: the violent actor and the media. As I’ve mention here at FAIR before, blowing up a market 1,000 years ago, for example, before mass communication, would have been entirely pointless. To properly terrorize a population, the population must be aware of the threat, and to be aware of the threat relatively quickly, mass communication is required for economy of scale to be achieved.
Does this mean the media should not cover acts or threats of terror at all? No, of course not; this would be a dereliction of duty and infantilizing. What it does mean is that when covering terrorism as such, a distinction between terror and meta-terror (i.e., terror caused by terror coverage) is an important part of journalistic discretion.
Unfortunately, as we saw after 9/11, many news outlets have failed to make this distinction, aiming instead for non-stop panic—even when the “threats” proposed are thin and designed to elicit just such a reaction. By amplifying every idle threat, the media have once again become ISIS’s defacto PR wing, in a fashion that’s as journalistically sloppy as it is depressingly predictable.