A plea for media bias
Glenn Reynolds has stated several times that, "Terrorism is an information war disguised as a military operation." (Well, it's not a disguise; I'd phrase it that terrorism is, in part, not whole, an information campaign using violent methods.)
Today Newsday's James Pinkerton writes about "feeding the beast," the imperative of media outlets to meet deadlines without fail. Noting that media-saturation coverage of natural disasters cannot make the disaster worse,What about terrorism? Those are the challenging questions asked by two academics, Bruno Frey of the University of Zurich and Dominic Rohner of Cambridge University, who argue that reporters and terrorists are playing a "common-interest game" - that is, a win-win for both. Frey and Rohner studied terrorist activity from 1998 and 2005 and concluded, "Both the media and terrorists benefit from terrorist incidents." Terrorists gain publicity for themselves and their cause, while the media make money from greater sales and "buzz."
The Washington Post summed up Frey and Rohner's argument: "Coverage caused more attacks, and attacks caused more coverage - a mutually beneficial spiral of death that they say has increased because of a heightened interest in terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001." Perhaps the relationship could be stated as an even simpler equation: More media equal more terrorism. ...
But the problem raised by Frey and Rohner is the same problem that many observers have intuited all along: In portraying violence, especially terror violence, the media are unwittingly - or maybe wittingly - encouraging such violence.
So we are reminded of that old line from the "Pogo" comic strip: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." The beast was hungry, so we fed it. Then the beast got hungry again, so we fed it again. At this rate, the beast will eventually come hungering for us, too - for all of us.
I do not call for the media to be unbiased. I am biased, darn tootin', but I admit it. I want the media to be biased, too.
A bomb blast is seen as more newsworthy than the steady progress of rebuilding communities and lives, remodeling schools and running vaccination programs and water purification plants.
I assessed the symbiosis between terrorism and the media in 2004 thus:
There are only four basic outcomes of this war:
1. Over time, the United States engenders deep-rooted reformist impulses in Muslim lands, especially Arab countries, leading their societies away from the self- and other-destructive patterns they now exhibit. It is almost certainly too much to ask that the societies become principally democratic as we conceive democracy (at least not for a very long time), but we can (and must) work to help them remit tendencies toward violent Islamism from their cultures so that terrorism does not threaten us or them. This goal is what amounts to total victory for the United States.
2. The Islamofascists achieve their goals of Islamismicization (there’s a word for you!) of the entire Middle East (at the minimum), the ejection of all non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Persian Gulf, the destruction of Israel, and the deaths of countless numbers of Americans. This outcome is what amounts to total victory for al Qaeda.
3. Absent achieving the goals stated just above, al Qaeda successfully unleashes a mass-destructive, mass-casualty attack against the United States and full-scale war erupts between the US and, at the minimum, Syria and Iran. This would amount to a defeat for all concerned.
4. None of the above happen, so the conflict sputters along for decades more with no real changes: we send our troops into combat intermittently, suffer non-catastrophic attacks intermittently, and neither side possesses all of the will, the means and the opportunity to achieve decisive victory. The war becomes the Forever War.
Perhaps you can think of other, different outcomes, but I think these pretty much cover the possibilities.
So the question for us commentati, whether based on the web or in traditional media, is simply: which of these outcomes is best? Which will be most favorable to human flourishing?
As for me, I choose the first, and have no qualms admitting I am heavily biased in favor thereof. And that bias certainly shapes my blogging!
The basic issue for news media: Which outcome do you want?
It is not possible to pretend neutrality here, for the power of the media to frame the public’s debate is too great to claim you are merely being “fair and balanced.” There literally is no neutral ground here, no “God’s eye view” of events, and hence no possibility of not taking sides. One way or another, what you print or broadcast, what stories you cover and how you cover them, what attention you pay to what issues and how you describe them - all these things mean that you will support one outcome over another. Which will you choose? How will you support it? These are the most important questions of your vocation today.
It's nice to see Mr. Pinkerton facing them. Let us hope other media managers will, too. Cross posted at donaldsensing.com