Mass media always take part in terrorist actions
Every human tragedy is a moment of truth, which erases the old and creates a new vision of seemingly ordinary things. The recent events in Moscow were no exception. It turned out, for example, that not only some take to war like fish to water but that some others used the nightmare to boost their popularity and profits. When real-life, not imaginary, terrorists come around, it is absolutely futile to debate whether television influences the reality or vice versa.
Terrorism is as old as human society. While times and states, ideal and slogans, weapons and ways of killing hostages has kept changing, the terrorist tandem — terrorists and their victims — always remained unchanged. But we can firmly say after the Moscow nightmare that the tandem has turned into a triad, with the mass media customarily “participating” in all contemporary terrorist actions. Of course, this is not complicity which ends up, as the old German saying has it, in Mit gehangen, mit gefangen (“Caught together, hanged together”). According to authoritative experts, one of the crucial points in controlling terrorism is the place, role, and behavior of the media. As early as 1986, the report of the US vice president’s task force on combating terrorism said, “Among the factors cited for the increases in both the number and sensational nature of incidents is the terrorists’ success in achieving wider publicity and influencing a much broader audience.”
The sense (if the word is appropriate at all in this case) of any terrorist action is not killing as such but the fear that this killing or its probability raises. Therefore, terrorism, as a political technology, needs intimidated, not just ordinary, eyewitnesses. And the more eyewitnesses of this kind, the greater the critical mass of fear, which turns not just into a collective emotion but into the main instrument of political impact. In a world full of violence, any terrorist action is still a sensation, and the rival media outlets feel no scruples about getting the latest scoop. During the Moscow events, television reporters and commentators, in an attempt to capture audience attention, would blurt out not only the technical details of what was going on but also confidential information the terrorists were not aware of. The opinions of numerous experts who occupied the air and screen were often nothing but specific information on possible ways and means of neutralizing the terrorists. And what about the journalists’ attempts to get in touch, without an antiterrorist headquarters sanction, with the terrorists? What about the irresponsible, in fact provocative, televised allegations about an early assault operation, which could have brought about a slaughter of the hostages?
Why did the millions in the audience have to know the terrorist leader’s life story? To establish credibility? Television was not just reporting on but reproducing and multiplying violence by broadcasting it to millions of households. Why did the television people indifferently show us, as they were professional gravediggers, the close-ups of dead spectators? Were they persistently showing us faces of the people whose kith and kin perished in the concert hall inferno to make us feel our own helplessness and the paralyzing horror of terrorism?
Television was trying not just to intimidate but to disunite us, the viewers. It is for this reason that they suddenly announced their so-called information, thank God, ignored by Ukrainian television channels, that the bandits were ready to release the Ukrainian nationals and, to this end, had already separated them from the Russian hostages. Death is indifferent to ethnicity or nationality. The broadcast idea of rescuing, above all, “our hostages” could hardly contribute to further strengthening interethnic harmony in Ukraine.
A maxim says that people learn from their own mistakes (not very wise ones) or from those of other people (wise ones). Let us hope we are still (or perhaps thus far) wise. So what should we do not to be afraid of our television sets? We can, of course, keep repeating that true democracy has only two genuine values: freedom of speech and freedom not to resort to it. We can also refer to professional ethics, but can there be any ethics in market conditions, when any human woe is just another piece of information? So how can we curb modern television’s craving for blood bath esthetics? This will not amount to civil rights infringement, for there cannot be even partial freedom in a place permeated with constant fear. And if television is unable to set at least a few boundaries for itself, these should be imposed from outside.
For this reason, on the one hand, a law should be passed to make it impossible to hide vital information on emergencies from the public, for panic and fear are aroused not only by information but also by the absence of it. On the other hand, the law should impose a tough restriction and even a ban on any open and wide proliferation of information that:
— gives away the special technical and tactical details of an antiterrorist operation;
— can jeopardize such an operation and endanger the lives and health of the populace, hostages and antiterrorist unit servicemen; or
— propagates the ideology of terrorism, extremism, and violence, as well as the methods of criminal actions.
It is hardly worth in this case heeding the reproaches, inevitable in the conditions of -permissive democracy, about “censorship and restriction of democratic rights and the freedom of information.” Incidentally, censorship is not always imposed via bans. True information can also encounter such barriers as twisted or false facts (when rumors are presented as an indisputable truth and unimportant facts as the main thing) and the excessive presentation of unnecessary and trivial details. For the right of hostages and those who enter into a direct clash with terrorists to live is immeasurably higher than the right of any other individuals to receive and spread information.
P. S. In castigating the media’s indifference, one should not forget, however, that journalism has become one of the most dangerous and socially important professions, in which personal safety often depends on one’s professional level which, in its turn, is impossible if one does not have proper skills and knowledge. Immediately after the Chornobyl disaster, top executives and young teachers at the Kyiv Taras Shevchenko National University’s School of Journalism tried to launch an emergencies-coverage course. Should we perhaps repeat this attempt now in an equally extreme situation?
