Find the full handbook in French here, and click here for the English version
Introduction
Terrorism and the fight against terrorism have become major elements of domestic and international politics, with the media firmly on the front lines, especially when attacks target civilian populations.
The dilemmas and challenges that result are immediately clear. Citizens expect the media to inform them as completely as possible without going overboard or resorting to sensationalism. The authorities call for restraint by evoking the risks of excessive coverage for the integrity of operations or the calm of the population. Accusations of being the megaphone of terrorism to attract audiences weigh constantly on media, who are often operating on over-drive.
Despite the significance and recurrence of terrorist acts, the media often struggles to find its footing. “Often questions are asked and matters settled only in an emergency, at the risk of incoherence and blunder,” says Christophe Ayad, a Middle East specialist at Le Monde. “Everyone fumbles around, advancing on a case-by-case basis.”
The quality of terrorism coverage obviously depends on many factors. It is determined, among other things, by the degree of freedom of the press in each country, the economic resources available to the media, cultural factors and singular conceptions of ethics and the social role of the media, notes Shyam Tekwani, regarding the situation in Asia.
The issue is crucial because this coverage of terrorism reveals the position of the media within society. “A reporter’s ability to practice responsible reporting and due-diligence with the speed needed in our digital age is critical to fulfilling the civic duty that journalists maintain in our world,” said Somali-American journalist Mukhtar Ibrahim following the 2013 attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi.
Their reactions also determine the impact of terrorism on society. “The media are caught in an infernal dilemma,” writes French lawyer Antoine Garapon. “On the one hand, the media echo is likely to make victims the unintentional messengers of their executioners’ search for glory; on the other, self-censorship could be interpreted as a capitulation. Fear can lead to the reclamation of hardwon freedoms and eventually reduce the difference between democratic states and authoritarian regimes — precisely what terrorists seek.”
After each attack, experts question the extent and tone of media coverage. They compare the deaths due to terrorism to the number of victims of natural disasters, wars or road accidents, calling for more restraint on the media. But the comparison is most often specious because of the eminently political and societal nature of the attacks: “In 2014, the average rate of homicide worldwide was 6.24 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, while the number killed by Terrorism was only 0.47 per 100,000, but if these figures are relatively low compared to other causes of death, the consequences of terrorism are beyond measure”, writes the Venezuelan political scientist Moises Naim. “Terrorism is not the deadliest threat of the 21st century, but it has undeniably changed the world.” Yet despite this, is the amount of terrorism coverage in the media not disproportionate?
The purpose of this manual is to review these considerations and challenges. It is based on essential and universal principles: the search for truth, independence and a sense of responsibility, by placing them in the complex context of a pluralistic and interconnected world. Its ambition is to assist the media in finding the balance between freedom and the responsibility to inform; between the right to know and the duty to protect, while respecting the fundamental norms and values of journalism.
A critical subject
In recent years, we’ve seen widely-covered attacks from New York to Moscow, Paris to Istanbul, Buenos Aries to Mumbai. Yet these high-profile events do not provide a full picture of global terrorism. In northern Nigeria, in Cameroon, in regions under the control of drug cartels in Latin America – communities are also terrorised, reduced to silence and fear. On the seas, the threat of maritime terrorism persists, particularly off the coasts of Somalia and Yemen or in the Gulf of Guinea. From Syria to the Philippines, kidnappings and hostage-taking have proliferated in recent years, converting some areas of the planet into prohibited territories. And this violence has spread to the Internet, targeted by cyber attacks that spread beyond the virtual realm.
The most widely-covered violence is that with purportedly religious claims, but the scourge is also motivated by extreme right-wing nationalism or supremacism, such as the Oslo bombing and the Utøya massacre perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik in 2011 in Norway, the shooting of African Americans at the Baptist Church in Charleston, United States in June 2015 and the assassination of British Labor MP Jo Cox in June 2016.
The media are no doubt at the heart of this issue, often referred to as the “oxygen of terrorism”, in the famous words of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. “Terrorist attacks,” wrote Brian Jenkins back in 1995, “are often carefully choreographed to attract the attention of the electronic media and the international press. Terrorism is aimed at the people watching, not at the actual victims.”
This characterisation of the media does not imply actual sympathy felt or displayed for terrorist groups, but rather refers to the publicity that they provide them and consequently the power of nuisance that they grant them. The media economy, largely based on a competitive race to attract audiences, incentivises this symbiotic relationship between terrorists and the press.
Terrorists rely upon conventional journalistic codes of drama, violence and surprise, especially for television. But with the exponential development of the Internet and social networks, the battle of images and words has taken on an unprecedented scale. As highlighted in a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, terrorist groups are using the legal web, especially social networks such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, but also the Deep Web and the Dark Web as a means of propaganda, networking, recruitment and funding. “For the first time, terrorists no longer have to depend upon other people to spread their message,” writes Shyam Tekwani, a researcher from the Singapore Internet Research Centre, regarding Asia. “In addition to creating their own websites, groups such as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front or the Abu Sayyaf group are using technologies such as electronic mail, mobile phones, SMS and radio and video technologies to communicate with each other and to disseminate their messages to the general public.” This allows them, he adds, “to frame their actions and ideology however they want, getting around government or media censorship.” This shift in the ‘oxygen of terrorism’ towards the online space has driven some organizations, including governments, to fight back against violent extremist websites and to demand that major web platforms closely monitor and “clean up” the Internet.
The emergence of the Islamic State group has exacerbated this phenomenon, in that the group has implemented a much more sophisticated system of global strategic propaganda than Al-Qaida. Its messages exploit both psychological and religious well-springs and bypass in part (but only in part) the traditional media. The media effect of attacks on the target population, designed to generate fear, is also a kind of ‘staging’ aimed at seducing new supporters. The Islamic State group has mastered communication techniques and social networks and, above all, it proposes an alluring “narrative” of heroism and virility, sometimes relayed unwisely by traditional media.
In spite of these new online battlefields, traditional media remain crucial stakeholders, as the information and analysis they provide remains in most countries the foundation for a large proportion of public opinion – the very public opinion that terrorism seeks to influence. Traditional media have not always taken the measure of their responsibility in this great propaganda game, and enter into the macabre dance of terror through the theatricalisation of information that hands terrorists the wand of murderous choreography. Repetitive broadcasting of videos depicting columns of soldiers parading in Raqqa or the warlike bravado of ecstatic “foreign fighters” driving around in 4X4s enters into the realm of “heroisation” of the group, warns media sociologist Hasna Hussein.
“In some respects,” notes Michelle Ward Ghetti, Professor of Law At Southern University (United States), “the modern terrorist is created by the media. The latter broaden and enlarge the terrorist and his powers far beyond his true dimension. Television puts everyone at the scene of a crime, helpless to do anything, engendering feelings of anxiety and fear, the terrorist’s instrument of coercion. The public anxiety enhances the perceived power of the terrorist in his own eyes as well as the eyes of the peer groups and others. This enhanced power often leads to imitation and the cycle repeats itself.”
This equation between terrorism and the media, however, is not unequivocal. First, a large number of attacks, as Brigitte Nacos (Columbia University, New York) argues, have no “media intent” and are “self-sufficient”. The cascade of attacks perpetrated in Iraq falls into this “non-media” category. There is also no evidence that silence on terrorist actions would suffice to remove the “oxygen” from them. On the contrary, some say, “radio silence” could cause terrorist groups to escalate their attacks and commit more and more violence so that nobody can ignore them. Finally, the study of terrorist incidents tends to show that the media can to some extent be the “stifler” of terrorism and not its oxygen. Recalling the attacks on the team of Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972, the researcher at CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research, France) Jacques Tarnero concluded that “the Palestinian cause will long have the hooded face of a killer. The political effect of sympathy sought has turned into the very opposite.” Others argue, however, that for groups such as the Islamic State, the desire for respectability, the ultimate goal of a power struggle, is less decisive than the will to intimidate and the narcissism of power, largely conveyed through media coverage.
Although seemingly paradoxical, States targeted by terrorism are often reinforced by these traumatic events. It is indisputable that, as a first step, before questions and recriminations about causes and responsibilities arise, terrorism unites the nation or society it strikes, and that during this “national union” period the media generally plays along. “As in other internal crises,” writes Doris Graber, a professor at the University of Illinois (United States), “the media and journalists behave like team members, joining the authorities to try to restore public order, security and tranquillity.” The media play an essential public interest role in the early stages of an attack. The public, worried and frightened, expects precise information, safety advice and analysis. Contrary to the cliché, sometimes politically malicious, about “the irresponsibility of the media,” they have, at many moments in the tormented history of recent years, taken this task very seriously. It is not as if there have only been abuses, gaffes and excesses on TV screens, websites and social networks.
The coverage of terrorism by the media is not limited, however, to these dramatic moments that rupture normality. The quality of journalism and its usefulness to society depend on other factors, particularly its questions about the phenomenon itself, its origins and consequences. Beyond emergencies and newsflashes, the coverage of terrorism requires special investigative and analytical capacities on topics of great complexity affecting international politics, internal political power relations, religion and transnational crime.
Attacks can be revelatory for the media, their mode of operation, their reflexes and routines, but also their principles and values. “Terrorism is probably one of the areas where professional competence is most needed,” note Michel Wieviorka and Dominique Wolton in Front Page Terrorism. “Journalists are very often attracted to terrorism, for three factors of which they should be careful: the event, a trap that attracts the press in the most stereotyped behaviors of the trade; the actors mobilised by the terrorist act (which create fascination); and power (from which the right distance is neither easy to determine nor free of contradiction).”
These questions are of an ethical nature and particularly relate to media representations of violence. But they are also political. Attacks are not fixed in the classic cycle of news, in which one news item quickly follows another. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, journalists sensed that these attacks had opened a new chapter in history. Katherine E. Finkelstein, who had covered the events for the New York Times, concluded her testimony in the American Journalism Review with six auspicious words: “The terrible story had just begun.” Echoing this sentence, “there was a feeling that the dying had only begun”was the last line of an article of the columnist Pete Hamill published in the New York Daily News in the aftermath of the attacks.
Terrorism aims not only to frighten, but also to exacerbate and polarise. In this regard, the Islamic State group speaks of the “gray zone”, “where there is diversity, tolerance, understanding, discussion and debate. It is where there is exchange and enquiry and curiosity,” wrote the journalist from British daily The Guardian, Jason Burke, in The New Threat. In an article in its Dabiq magazine in early 2015, the terrorist organization advocated eliminating this gray zone so that there would be only two groups face to face: “the Caliphate and the Crusaders”. The stakes are therefore considerable: it is a question of avoiding contributing to this fatal polarisation by shortcuts, imprudent phrases, stigmatisations and generalisations. The mission of the media, as the Czech writer Milan Kundera said, is “to shed light on the complexity of the real,” and not to simplify it to the point where it no longer represents reality.
Terrorism also tests the freedom and independence of the media -- it could be said that, to a certain extent, it takes these values hostage. After mass attacks, the media, by patriotism, by calculation or under duress, generally choose to follow the injunctions of their governments or the emotions of public opinion, at the risk of excessive self-censorship and turning themselves into megaphones of state power. National security, geopolitical stakes or the demands of living together all legitimately lead to calls for restraint, but also more problematically for censorship too.
Too often, some states have used the “terrorism” argument to silence the media and bring disruptive journalists under control. They have also abused the term to incriminate and criminalise legitimate opinions or actions. The public has also acted as a censor, criticising the media that appeared to them to deviate too far from the official line or to be too “understanding” with respect to the “opposing camp”. Reflecting on the behaviour of the media after September 11, 2001, Kim Campbell wondered in the Christian Science Monitor whether “journalism can rhyme with patriotism,” whether the omnipresence of American flags on screens or ribbons sported by television presenters “would not interfere with the (journalistic) mission of asking difficult questions to politicians.” There are other views to this question that see no issue at stake.
Despite its violence, terrorism, however, can not stifle the media. On the contrary. In these moments of tension and anxiety, free and pluralistic information is more essential than ever to illuminate the judgment of the public. When the security of the population is directly targeted, the media must protect both the population and democracy by exercising their right and duty to inform. For the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, “terrorism should not affect freedom of expression and information in the media as one of the essential foundations of any democratic society. This freedom includes the right to be informed of matters of general interest, including terrorist acts and threats, and the replies thereto by the State and international organizations.” This is an approach echoed by the former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Jan Eliasson: “Freedom of the media is a defense against terrorist discourse,” he told a Security Council session on the stories and ideologies of terrorism on May 11, 2016 in New York.
The suppression of information has its dangers. “It can undermine the credibility of the media (“what other information does it hide?”), give free rein to the craziest rumors and disrupt our sense of information,” notes American TV channel CBS in its code of conduct. More fundamentally, democracy must learn to live with risk and manage it without undermining the foundations and values that underpin it. “If we can not tolerate the exaggerated horror flashed on the evening news or the random bomb without recourse to the tyrants manual,” said New York-based historian of terrorism John Bowyer Bell, “then we do not deserve to be free.”
The challenge to the media is broad. Terrorism is a subject that involves a cascade of concrete and often very cumbersome decisions, including the life of hostages, the ability of the security forces to intervene, the legitimacy of a government, and even the survival of the political system. While the classic rules of journalistic practice can still be imposed, they take on a more serious dimension because of the violence involved and the stakes for journalistic ethics.
These decisions are also complicated by the massive intrusion of social networks that have changed the way information is handled. Terrorist groups are producing their own videos and managing their own narratives by speaking directly to the public, without the filtering or mediation of journalists. In addition, millions of citizens are actively participating in the making and dissemination of information without being held to the rules of journalistic ethics. These new media impose new demands on the existing media. “We face danger whenever information growth outpaces our understanding of how to process it,” statistical journalist Nate Silver (United States) warns in his bestseller The Signal and The Noise. More than ever, the ethical and professional standards of information processing are essential: to validate facts, contextualise and make sense, to navigate the chaos, confusion and fear created by terrorist violence. “Publicity may be the oxygen of terrorists,” noted Katharine Graham, the director of the Washington Post during the Watergate and Pentagon Records scandals, but “news is the lifeblood of liberty.”
Find the full handbook in French here, and click here for the English version
