Media criticism

Andrew Sullivan takes Glen Reynolds to task for the suggestion that media images of violence fuel the terrorism in the same way that covering streakers and idiots running on to the playing field encourages more of that behaviour.

What he misses is the following point; even when you stop showing them on TV, you still get streakers and idiots running on the field, maybe not as many, but it would be naive to think they will vanish. What stops isn't the act of violence but the reportage of it.

A media blanket on terrorism violence would not only be irresponsible for the reasons given in Sullivan's response, but it would also not actually end the violence. You would have the worst of both worlds, violent subversive terrorist acts and a paranoid, centrally censored, media state.

Ironically, that is the ulitmate goal of terrorism. Not the effect of the violence itself, the body count is not irrelevant to terrorism, but it isn't the point of terrorism - the actual aim of it is to generate a totalitarian reaction that perversely serves to justify the terrorism.

In the case of the London bombings and 9-11, the terrorists goal is still the old Marxist ideal of revolution, even if that ideal now speaks in Farsi and dreams of a utopian pan-arabian Caliphate rather than a Worker's Paradise.

Nobody seriously thinks the terrorists can ever defeat the US or GB. Nobody seriously thinks they can defeat even a city like New York or London. The plan is much simpler. Create havok and watch the governments defeat themselves.

Which is why the subdued Brit reaction of the last few days is so much more gratifying than the American 'War on terror', 'with us or against us' rhetoric.