Jun 15 2006
Link Between Press And Terrorist Attacks
I recall my days starting my blog and how daunting it was last summer. So I am glad to link to a brand new blog with an important discovery: a research paper that shows a connection between media stories and increased attacks by terrorists to get news media attention. I have always felt the connection was there. Now someone has done some scientific research it seems and there is a detectable connection. I am not surprised at all.
Silly me! I thought I would skip the Wapo writeup and go directly to the research document. Was doing OK, even tho my decades-old mathematics made it necessary to accept their mathematical models as axiomatic, until I hit their assumptions about the objectivity of the NYT (pg 15). Unfortunately, I was drinking a coke, which is now dripping from my keyboard!
Seriously, I have to agree as common sense with all of their conclusions except one. They identify increased educational levels and a better life as a major way in which to reduce terrorism. Fails to explain the motivations of the 911 terrorists, none of which were poor, IIRC.
Major conclusion, tho, is that media coverage increases acts of terrorism and vice versa. I would have considered that axiomatic as well.
They are parasites. The press and the terrorists feed off each other.
The press has a two-pronged agenda. One thrust is to report everything they can that might be negative to President Bush. As Bush is being portrayed as some kind of poxy of Republicans by the Democratic Party in their election strategy, there is this notion that by promoting all possible information that could be bad for the administration, you are creating an image that Republicans in general are bad news.
The second prong is to attempt to create the same conditions in the American psyche now as existed toward the end of Viet Nam. They would attempt a political time warp where Bush is turned into Nixon and the War on Terror is turned into Viet Nam with Haditha turned into My Lai. They would want to create the conditions today that existed then that swept Democrats to power and vaulted the press to exalted status.
Both of those prongs have now seem to have run aground.
In the first instance, I am begining to get a distinct feeling that many are getting tired of the very obvious spin the press has been putting on things. They are seeing through it and it is starting to get old, it is becoming less effective as people become numbed to it. It doesn’t help that so many of their attempts to spin things in a negative manner have turned out to be inaccurate. Another problem with it is people realize that Bush isn’t running for election. His approval ratings don’t mean anything. They certainly don’t mean anything to President Bush who appears to have decided to do what he thinks is best for the country regardless of the poll numbers. If the constant harping on Bush’s poll numbers is designed to spook the President or Republicans to change their policy, it isn’t working. In fact, Congressional Democrats who *are* running for elections routinely poll lower than Bush so the utility of this reporting seems suspect to me.
In the second instance, people realize that Iraq isn’t Viet Nam for a very large number of reasons. Bush is also not Nixon for a large number of reasons. In Viet Nam we were proping up a corrupt and unpopular government against a popular uprising. In Iraq we knocked down a corrupt and unpopular government and are allowing the people themselves to build a new one. That the press would want to interfere in that is telling. It shows a deep cynicism bereft of any decent notion of support for a people that have been so butalized over time. The media have cast their lot with the bad guys for their own domestic political purposes. I also believe that this reality is dawning on a greater number of people and this also reduces the effectivness of the media’s attempt to create this time-warp.
So while it is in the interest of the political agenda of the media outlets to widely and prominently report terrorist attacks, I agree with the conclusion of that paper that there is a symbiotic relationship with the terrorist themselves and that they promote each other’s agendas.
But the support offered to the terrorists goes beyond the reporting of their deeds. Our media would also expose our intelligence efforts and other programs we might use to defend against or ferret out the bad guys. This goes beyond a simple intersection of interests and exposes a direct support relationship where it is in the outlet’s political interest to actively support the terrorists by alerting them to methods we are using to defend ourselves or attack them.
In a groundbreaking academic study…….
….two researchers have found that media coverage increases terrorism. Bruno S. Frey of the University of Zurich and Dominic Rohner of Cambridge University applied game theory principle……
VERY interesting and possibly laying the groundwork for a major smackdown of the MSM.