Struggling to cover terrorism in the media age
buzzfeed.com
buzzfeed.com
I think the BBC has somewhat changed its tone in respect to events like this; it's usually slow or last to report casualty numbers and attacker names, but being last doesn't effect social change if lots of competitors are doing it anyway.
- no longer showing the faces / names / manifestos of the suicide bombers on media
- showing the people who stand up, who demonstrate, who fight for our values rather than showing the panic, chaos, people running for their lives
would that help?
In reality terrorism accounts for less than 0.01% of premature deaths, yet nations spend magnitudes more surveilling their own citizens and fighting stupid wars (to no apparent avail) than they spend on fighting various other things that kill more than a thousand times (> 1000x) more people.
Here's a nice chart visualizing the disproportional response: https://i1.wp.com/thinkbynumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008...
Sure death by terrorism is only a blip. But the amount of money spent on spreading terrorist idealology is insane.
The problem is, our ally, Saudi Arabia, is spending Billions on Wahhabist Terrorism Propaganda aka Petro-Islam. In fact, money trails show KSA funded 90% of Wahhabist Terrorism Propoganda (Petro-Islam) around the world through mosques and literature.
From Wikipedia:
>Wahhabism has been accused of being "a source of global terrorism", inspiring the ideology of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and for causing disunity in Muslim communities by labelling Muslims who disagreed with the Wahhabi definition of monotheism as apostates (takfir) and justifying their killing. It has also been criticized for the destruction of historic mazaars, mausoleums, and other Muslim and non-Muslim buildings and artifacts.
>Saudi Arabia is called the "cradle of Wahhabist Terrorism". In fact, Saudi Arabia funded an estimated "90% of the expenses of the entire faith [wahhabism]", throughout the Muslim World, according to journalist Dawood al-Shirian.
>It extended to young and old, from children's madrasas to high-level scholarship. This spending has done much to overwhelm less strict local interpretations of Islam, according to observers like Dawood al-Shirian and Lee Kuan Yew, and has caused the Saudi interpretation (sometimes called "petro-Islam") to be perceived as the correct interpretation – or the "gold standard" of Islam – in many Muslims' minds.
>The Salafi movement is often described as being synonymous with Wahhabism.
Keep calm and keep going.. also means keep reporting.
While everyone agrees that media that cares for views and nothing else can be nasty, it's the inly 'objective' measure of what media should show that we can get. When media editors start using their influence for (in this case, very noble) political goals, we find ourselves at their mercy.
There's a constant theme in modern democracy that when a certain institution tries just to be a projection of it's customers wishes, it can reveal that these wishes aren't that good. Like Airbnb hosts being racists - is it the problem with individual hosts, or should Airbnb be responsible? Same with media and views: if people react better to sensationalizm and terrorist manifestos, should the media filter their disguisting desires, like a big caring brother, that knows what's best for us? Or should it do whatever we want, showing us all the gore and uglyness?
I don't have the answers, and most importantly, I don't think I have a logical framework for these problems. Do you?
The UK authorities tried that approach through the 1980s regarding the situation in Northern Ireland; PM Mrs Thatcher's infamous "oxygen of publicity" policy was a response to a general feeling that the media were advertising for the terrorists.
However it was worse than ineffective; no-one receiving their primary news of the situation from TV was likely to volunteer for action, and it became symbolic of the Government's seeming powerlessness, that they had to hide the bad news behind censorship.
Aside: I remember being disappointed when hearing Gerry Adams' actual voice for the first time, having heard him dubbed by an actor throughout my childhood. The actor sounded more authorative!
About a month ago we celebrated the mother of all bombs that flattened what amounted to a small village in Afghanistan. We were told that it killed ONLY 90 terrorists, assuming the vast area it affected was inhabited only by the killed terrorists. Not a single civilian was killed, we were told.
The pilot and his crew are our heroes.
Somewhere there's an Afghan from that flattened area. Even if he doesn't subscribe to ISIS/Taliban ideology, he can't be too happy.
Most people in his position would feel that they have a score to settle. And when he has the opportunity, we don't make the connection.
He's a terrorist, but we have our heroes.
Sometimes I feel like crying, not for the dead (that won't help them), but for the rest of us still alive.
Ha! That is probably because there's comparatively less correlation between terrorist attacks and foreign politics, than there's between terrorist attacks and attacker's religion. In case you are not aware, various islamic groups perform terrorist attacks in Philippines (look up recent news), India and Russia, the former two being 100% internal affairs.
Terrorist activity in India? Look to Kashmir.
In Russia? The Russians fought their own war on terrorism before we went into Afghanistan. In some ways going into Afghanistan diverted fighters streaming into Chechnya to fight the Russian army to Afghanistan. We gave them a target they hated more than they hated the Russians. From reports, many of the best fighters on the side of ISIS are Chechens.
The Russians, by the way, are still fighting terrorists.
And whether these wars are "internal affairs" or not is immaterial.
If by 'something the terrorists hold dear' you mean power and prevalence of islam, I absolutely agree! When Chechnya de-facto separated from Russia in 1990s, they run multiple ethnic cleansings: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AD%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%87... (no translation to English unfortunately).
It looks like something similar is happening right now in the Philippines.
However, just watching another person destroy your homeland can tick most people off.
Every left leaning journalist has perfect job security - something that this profession has nit seen in a decade. And highly improved social status among the crowds.
You've crossed over to hyperbole now. While the current administration has been colorul, there's a click fatigue induced when outrage becomes normative.
Or have you come across some data about the decline of syndicated coverage and the resurgence of investigative reporting?
- Buzzfeed (a couple of years ago) published an exclusive that ISIS wants it's followers to find employees of company X and slit their throats.
- The Times (last week) published that ISIS wants it's followers to (attack pubic in specific manner).
Anyone, worldwide, who sympathises with ISIS would simply read those instructions and follow them.
Because ISIS get instantly blamed a legitimate struggle against a Washington ally can be blamed on ISIS and not whatever nationalist movement was behind the incident. Things can only be done by people assumed to be ISIS sympathisers, not by anyone else.
> Things can only be done by people assumed to be ISIS sympathisers
No, certain things are done by people who identify themselves as ISIS symathisers
> not by anyone else.
Huh? I think we all know far right and far left groups who are responsible for violence and nobody pretends they're ISIS.
Limiting the media would only work if we limited all media in this way. The media needs to cover our peaceful defiance and we need to give the media more of that defiance to cover.
[1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/23/world-monuments-i...
It is profitable to report on such things. Outrage sells. The UK (and I assume others) suffer horribly because of the death throws of print media. The dailymail would lead with every big ISIS video, simply because people would visit their site.
Until the link between peddling/stirring outrage and profits is severed, we will continue to have problems like this.
I can avoid reading such journalism but the vast population is attracted to car crashes and will look.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...
On a more serious note, we westerners are probably not the target audience of these attacks, so I'm not sure hiding them from our population will do anything to prevent the news from reaching their target audience. I seriously doubt ISIS potential recruits get their news from Buzzfeed.
There are discussions of Islam and ISIS - the Atlantic's most popular article covers just that (so thorough that it's praised by ISIS even.) And then there's the likes of the Daily Mail, which rather than heal serves to deepen divisions and hatred - that is the aim of terrorists.
The coalition's terrorist media strategy is a bit more subdued.
The statistics are mind-boggling. We are at war, people, FFS.
Stop being so surprised when that war arrives within our borders.
If those governments didn't bring war to those places, maybe less people would be prone to follow the message "attack those who attacked us first", lowering the feasibility of mass murders.
This disconnect between citizen responsibility and political culpability is the problem. We cannot butter our bread on both sides: either we live in a society where our armed forces are governed by our democracies, or we don't.
Also, "assimilating the young ones into the local culture"... I am not sure what openly racist stuff like your post has deserved being on HN - I'd say /r/The_Donald is a better place.
Why should people not assimilate into the local culture of where they are fleeing to? Or at least discard elements of their previous culture which are incompatible with where they are now? Especially if the place they came from was so bad that they had to leave?
If they cannot or do not want to assimilate to the new culture, or discard incompatible practices in their new location, then they are always free to return.
It's not racist to call out faults with cultures and ideologies, no culture is perfect, but some cultures are objectively better than others.
Note that culture is not the same as religion, and it's not the same thing as race.
Lets just call it what it is - intolerance. "Why can't those foreigners just behave like I want them to! They make me uncomfortable" is what small-minded folk all over the world say about immigrants. Have said, for centuries.
So when people move from cultures where these things are practised to where they are not, they should either drop them, or move back.
But I like to keep aware that, much that we do is viewed as appalling by others. Some is objectively worse (like healthcare, prisons, racism). Yet we struggle at the highest levels to preserve these cultural features.
Sigh.
Forcing someone to assimilate just because the other person is "not from here" certainly is racist.
> Also, you seem to be very unfamiliar with radical islamic schools in Britain
So what? Radical religious schools are nothing new, in fact they're a price of having religious freedom.
Did you forget the Irish history? Boiled down, religious war. And even today, every major religion has their boneheaded backwards-oriented buffoons which don't shy off from corporeal or capital punishment - the Catholics have Opus Dei (and whatever more is going on in Vatican, but I won't go down that tinfoil hat now), the Jews have the Orthodox movement, Islam the Salafists, and for what it's worth people also kill and maim in the name of Buddhism and Hinduism.
Certainly they have no need of going to a place where they cannot adapt to the local culture? They crossed many otherwise peaceful countries. There's many other places where they can go to where they can keep 100% of their cultural habits with no friction with anyone else.
Moderate muslims have no freaking problem with playing along with local rules. It's always some radical jackass pretending that every other muslim is getting as offended as he is by the suggestion and some braindead panel show or journalist playing along with it.
> So what? Radical religious schools are nothing new, in fact they're a price of having religious freedom.
Nice bait. Some of these schools are riddled with all sorts of abuse of its students, including physical. Passively letting muslim kids get educated, abused and raised by islamists in your own territory is a far greater betrayal to these kids than it would have been to put them in a school system where they don't hear about islam at all except in the context of "here's a list of the major religions in the world, here's the main ideas about them, I guess nobody can really be sure about what's out there after all, right? So let's all try to get along, and if someone is trying to get you to kill for your religion, you turn them in to the police, because that's very messed up. Also, atheists are okay people tips fedora."
> lel what about christian past or people elsewhere fighting back after decades of terror
Hey, how about you give me a list of present day British Christian suicide bombers, or Hindus or Buddhists causing terror in Europe before you give me this false equivalence garbage. It's so strange that Hindus and Buddhists are turning violent only where they have extensive conflict with radical Islam, colour me very surprised.
> Opus dei
My friend, you need to put those Dan Brown books down. They aren't even good.
I don't think its realistic to expect the media to change how it covers terrorism. I do think much more could be done to celebrate, reward and publicize those preaching against violence and for peace.
http://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/world-economy/bury-th...
But to ease your pain: "media" isn't a person, and therefore doesn't like or dislike or fancy or abhor anything.
As to journalists: From nytimes.com getting 10% more visitors on some day because of some terror attack to anyone's actual pay check or job security takes so many steps it's basically meaningless as a conditioning signal.
Terror attacks can be played in a number of different ways, depending on the audience and what they're afraid of; whether it's immigrants, other religions, or social freedoms and militarization of the public sphere, there's plenty of fear all around to write about and get the audience riled up on. And if you don't think there's a profit motive in a media source engaging with its audience, there's not much hope for you.
As you say, there are so many steps between getting visitors and someone's paycheck that you can't really blame a particular person within the system. That doesn't change the overall system behaviour, though. Everyone there, in aggregate, optimize for maximum fear and outrage.
Conventional media reporting is much easier to improve than social media.
* Focus on the victims not the witch hunt
* Don't immediately switch into full crisis mode, dropping the program schedule
* Don't speculate on whether it's "terror" (in fact, drop that terminology altogether - it's all crime)
This is not new thinking.
Social media is a much more challenging issue though, with professional irritants like Katie Hopkins in the UK.
Edit: formatting
[0]https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/42038209-days-of-rage
[1]https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/...
I'd like BuzzFeed to lead the fight with a good example - by shutting itself down.
Look I'm not saying we just trash the 1st amendment but there has to be some reasonable compromise that can be made in cases where violent crime is used in order to grab headlines for some political cause. I'm not saying don't do any reporting on terror either but there's gotta be some hard line of what's definitly being irresponsible.
We'd all be far less inclined to knee-jerk react to a 'terrorist attack' if we were more aware, daily, of just how many civilians WE have killed recently.
Alas, nobody wants to hear that news.