Well, people being run over by vans in crowded areas and sliced by machetes does happen to be news worthy.

Pretty unrealistic to expect the media to go, "Hey look at this story about a criminal on the loose killing people. Let's not inform the public of that."

He does have a point though, school shootings by crazies probably wouldn't happen as much if it didn't get the 24/7 CNN coverage for weeks.

That's purely subjective. You don't know and don't care about all the people dueing of cancer, being stabbed in random street incidents, or infants dieing of a range of treatable diseases. Those things don't get reported or discussed. It is arbitary.

But of course I'm probably wasting my time trying to get people to understand that their blabbering makes the problem significantly worse. Much easier to blame the problem on something external.

It's true that if we didn't flinch whatsoever in these situations terrorism would lose its power. We'd also probably be psychopaths, which may bring its own problems. I agree the balance is probably more on the side of idiots saying idiotic stuff, though.

We don't care about deaths from cancer etc. I mean we are supposed to care in the abstract but it doesn't affect us in any real sense unless we know someone with cancer. I wouldn't say that makes us sociopaths.

GBV

Humans love drama and get attracted to it like moths to a flame. That's just our nature.

Watching Europe slit its own throat is a wonder.

Cancer is one of the best ways to raise money, people care. If the news showed people dying miserably from cancer they'd care more (and it sometimes does and then people do). These are obvious facts, and relate to perfectly normal ways human beings empathise with one another. They don't lead to the most rational society, but they're not the sort of thing to be amazed by or think you might stamp out with posts.

These ****s have their own social media to publicise and promote their crap, youtube and whatnot.

Never silencing this and even if we stfu here it makes no difference.

Harkin, I don't think this is the time for snarky remarks. Pretty awful stuff happened tonight.

I don't buy this theory that these guys are primarily interested in getting in the papers. For sure that's a side benefit, but the main goal is just to kill a lot of people. Like, if they were after media attention, they'd kidnap someone and have a prolonged hostage crisis livestreamed.

Same thing with school shooters: the Columbine kids weren't trying to be famous, they were just deranged ****s who wanted to kill a lot of people. We shouldn't try to assign rational motives to bat**** crazy people.

There's obviously a public duty for the news media to report on attacks and the motives behind them.

Still, media critics and academics and the like that terrorist attacks (and school shootings and other types of mass rampage killings) can provide a certain type of notoriety and recognition for the perpetrators, and they have provided sound advice about how to cover both terrorist attacks and school shootings to both provide adequate coverage and inform the public but avoid aggrandizing the attackers and producing 'contagion' effects:

- focus intensely on the victims, not the attackers
- don't provide lurid but ultimately non-informative details about the attack ("at 10:02pm the first shot range out, and the attacker then turned his attention the next room as the victims screamed and frantically tried to hide") etc. etc. are not functionally informative but turn the attackers into larger-than-life anti-heros whose actions take on tremendous importance in the narrative arc
- don't put undue focus on the attackers photos, names, motives or manifestos, or the manhunt for them after the fact
- stick to factual reporting immediately, and save punditry and expert opinions for much later rather than in the immediate aftermath

Basically, intense media coverage and focus on attacks provide the notoriety and recognition the attackers seek. Responsible reporting should balance the need to inform with the public interest of deterring this sort of behavior. The temptation to seek clicks/ratings by providing titillating details about the attackers but ultimately are servile to the interests of psychopaths and/or terrorists and do nothing to educate or inform the public.

https://www.apa.org/news/press/relea...ion-effect.pdf

Edit to add:

http://www.apsa.org/content/blog-ter...ats-difference

I can't be the only one struck by the inefficiency of many terrorists. This seems to have involved a ton of effort and planning, yet the body count is low and this isn't likely to trigger a response that helps terror groups achieve their goals. I know it's awful to talk about, but when someone makes the decision to sacrifice their life as a terrorist, surely "stabbing some people" isn't the most effective play?

Their lives haven't been sacrificed yet.

In short, you can cover these kinds of events without supernaturalizing them. I feel like I'm watching Raiders of the Lost Ark, not coverage of some violent crime. Cover them like any other violent crime, report on them thoroughly, but don't act like a superhero movie has suddenly launched itself into our universe and we have to cover these mystical magical people as if they are ****ing The Joker and they just bombed the **** out of Gotham City.

Ignoring problems is guaranteed to make them go away.

Yeah. Basically this. This is the funnier, more catchy way to say what I was saying. As Riverman notes, these supervillain terrorists spent years (but more likely months or even days) brewing these plots and settled on stabbing people with sharp objects and driving over people with heavy machinery. It's hardly fantastical stuff.

72 posts in and Bill Maher finally gets the blame.

dvaut1

Good points there. I agree.

However, in our lifetime and probably till an asteroid hits planet earth, the media will squeeze every ounce of ratings it can, however it can.

FWIW, responsible media were reporting on this before they knew it was terror related. Chew on that.

Not reporting this story prominently is no different from not reporting the plight of cancer or heart disease victims.

It is not a difficult concept to understand.

Terrorism is an insignificant cause of mortality in this country. A rational approach to news reporting would mean it would virtually never get reported.

The reasons it does are mostly very ugly: visceral spectacle (explosions, violence), latent racial hatred, engagement-through-fear of the viewer/reader.

At very least there is no reason at all for the reporting to continue for days after the event with little to no new information. BBC reporters will be standing around in London interviewing each other for at least a week after this event.

This is why the argument that "only X number of people died therefore it's not a problem" tends to be misleading. Most terrorists are real ****ing bad at terrorism. They're trying to kill a ****load of people, but usually fall far short, including many caught before they can do a single thing.