Massemedier og politisk kommunikation - 2. udgave

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News Judgment and Jihad Terrorists depend on the cooperation of the media. It's time to stop providing it By Mark Bowden As I write this, three more Western workers have been kidnapped and beheaded by insurgents in Iraq. The pattern is by now sadly familiar. Foreigners are taken hostage. Videotapes are released of the captives kneeling before their masked, armed captors, and demands are made. As the deadline approaches, new videotapes are released of the captives pleading with their governments, often tearfully, to meet the kidnappers' demands. Then comes video of the grisly beheadings. The first time this happened, it was horrifying and startling. Now it has become horrifying and predictable. Yet many of America's newspapers and TV networks continue to treat these criminal atrocities as the most important news of the day. Newspapers play the wrenching stories on the front page, often above the fold, and the networks feature them prominently, often as lead news items. Good taste has, thank goodness, banished the videos of the beheadings to obscure regions of the Internet, where those who must see such things can find them, but editors and producers have yet to display any equivalent exercise of judgment. It is time for American journalism to voluntarily adopt more sensible and prudent standards for covering all acts of terror. Without a doubt, the recent beheadings in Iraq were newsworthy and deserved to be widely reported. The American press should never be in the business of censoring or burying bad news, or of becoming a propagandist for the government or military. But those beheadings were not the most important events in the world on the days they occurred. Nor were they even the most important developments in the region, where American soldiers and volunteers for the Iraqi police force continued to be targeted, and where officials were wrestling over when to hold national elections. The beheadings led the news in so many places strictly because they were so terrible and because they were on videotape, a medium that so vividly conveys the horror. They led because the cold men behind them wanted them to. I think we should consider the consequences of continually giving those men their way. Uddrag fra artikel fra Atlantic magazine, December 2004 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/12/news-judgment-and-jihad/303626/