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Originally Posted by Tien
Well, people being run over by vans in crowded areas and sliced by machetes does happen to be news worthy.
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Originally Posted by SuperUberBob
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."
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Just stop talking about it. Every post (even this one) is free publicity for ISIS.
If everyone shut the f*** up about it terrorism would end tomorrow, but of course that would never happen.
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Originally Posted by Tien
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.
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.