Should Terrorism be Reported in the News?

[mindspell]

Please read the whole thing, it is pretty good:



http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/05/should_terroris_1.html



In the New York Times (read it here without registering), columnist John Tierney argues that the media is performing a public disservice by writing about all the suicide bombings in Iraq. This only serves to scare people, he claims, and serves the terrorists' ends.

Some liberal bloggers have jumped on this op-ed as furthering the administration's attempts to hide the horrors of the Iraqi war from the American people, but I think the argument is more subtle than that. Before you can figure out why Tierney is wrong, you need to understand that he has a point.

Terrorism is a crime against the mind. The real target of a terrorist is morale, and press coverage helps him achieve his goal. I wrote in Beyond Fear (pages 242-3):

Morale is the most significant terrorist target. By refusing to be scared, by refusing to overreact, and by refusing to publicize terrorist attacks endlessly in the media, we limit the effectiveness of terrorist attacks. Through the long spate of IRA bombings in England and Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, the press understood that the terrorists wanted the British government to overreact, and praised their restraint. The U.S. press demonstrated no such understanding in the months after 9/11 and made it easier for the U.S. government to overreact.​

Consider this thought experiment. If the press did not report the 9/11 attacks, if most people in the U.S. didn't know about them, then the attacks wouldn't have been such a defining moment in our national politics. If we lived 100 years ago, and people only read newspaper articles and saw still photographs of the attacks, then people wouldn't have had such an emotional reaction. If we lived 200 years ago and all we had to go on was the written word and oral accounts, the emotional reaction would be even less. Modern news coverage amplifies the terrorists' actions by endlessly replaying them, with real video and sound, burning them into the psyche of every viewer.

 

[avi]

it's a really interesting question with no definite answer. both sides have strong points.

 

[mindspell]

I am having a lot of trouble not agreeing with Schneier though, perhaps only because I agree with his common sense about security, both physical and technological, most of the time (if not all). He covered the RealID mess extensively in the past few weeks and he is pretty much spot on on that issue too.

 

[xfer]

I disagree that neither side has more merit than the other. I was about to respond with something very similar to this (but then I took mindspell's advice and clicked and read the rest):

"So why is the argument wrong? It's wrong because the danger of not reporting terrorist attacks is greater than the risk of continuing to report them. Freedom of the press is a security measure. The only tool we have to keep government honest is public disclosure. Once we start hiding pieces of reality from the public -- either through legal censorship or self-imposed "restraint" -- we end up with a government that acts based on secrets. We end up with some sort of system that decides what the public should or should not know."

Access to information is THE key feature of our age, and it is our greatest asset (coupled, necessarily, with the knowledge, education, and intelligence to interpret it and recognize possible inaccuracy). The answer to the problem of information empowering evil isn't to reduce information--that's totally backwards. It's to provide MORE information, more education, more points of view.