Why are we playing into behavior that only benefits the media and the terrorists?
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Why do the major television networks – CNN, Fox News, and so on – allow themselves to be used as recruiting tools for terror networks?
Why do they permit themselves to carry messages for the worst people on the planet?
Because terror is big bucks for the news media, I suppose.
The reason the terrorists produce videos is because if they kill someone behind closed doors, only a handful of people will be affected.
If they release a video, then the whole world will be watching.
Which essentially creates an alignment of interests between terrorists and TV news producers.
Now the networks are playing chicken with each other, daring one another to air increasingly shocking videos. Call it Terror Porn.
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CNN and MSNBC have terrible ratings these days. For CNN, it’s almost as bad as when the network started, when people scoffed at the idea of 24-hour news and derided Ted Turner’s vision as the Chicken Noodle Network.
Now the networks are playing chicken with each other, daring one another to air increasingly shocking videos.
Call it Terror Porn.
Is it news? Perhaps. Is it giving aid and comfort to the enemy? Absolutely.
What if they had 24 hour news channels at other times in history?
Would we have aired footage from the crematoria in the death camps in Nazi Germany?
Or from the Cambodian holocaust?
Or from the Soviet Gulag?
The idea seems so absurd, so awful and unthinkable.
And yet, here we are, complacent as can be, not complaining for a moment when the news networks beam these horrific images into our homes, our gyms, wherever we – and our children – may be.
Why doesn’t anyone question this?
I’m not saying, don’t report the news. Of course, report it.
But don’t be complicit in it.
Why do you have to sink to the level of the lowest slime on earth by airing their debauched videos?
Why do you have to honor these uncivilized people by broadcasting their faces day and night?
Why do we put up with the use of our broadcast spectrum – a publicly owned entity, incidentally – as a tool for those who would destroy our way of life?
I don’t know much about social media, but I understand that hashtags are a way of attracting attention to a single idea.
What if there were a Twitter campaign based on the hashtag #StopTerrorPorn?
What if there were a groundswell of support for the idea that broadcasting the videos, still photos, and even the faces of our enemies is actually helping their cause?
I understand that terror is the primary tool of the movements that oppose freedom and dignity.
But terror shouldn’t be a tool for driving ratings.
#StopTerrorPorn.
Pass it on.
Originally published on Business Ghost
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Photo: Flickr/Garry Knight
Terror porn. What a great way to describe it. And boy are we addicted to it. I have seen the articles with the clips in them. And I am tempted to click on the videos. But I don’t. I choose not to. I used to watch extreme porn every now and then. Not much because I always felt a bit un-clean afterward. Then a few years ago I looked at my self and asked “Is this who I am? Is this who I want to be?” and I stopped. I drift that way every now and then and I stop,… Read more »
“Terror porn. What a great way to describe it. And boy are we addicted to it. I have seen the articles with the clips in them. And I am tempted to click on the videos. But I don’t. I choose not to…” I don’t think ‘terror porn’ is necessarily a good or accurate way to describe it- It depends on the presumptions and motivations of the person who seeks it, as well as the meaning & significance they take from it: If a person is seeking and taking no higher meaning from such images, sounds, or words other than to… Read more »
“Would we have aired footage from the crematoria in the death camps in Nazi Germany?” If if we had (and I could be wrong on this) I believe some historians have asserted that that would spurred the allies to immediately divert their aerial bombing campaign to include attacking the railways networks that led to the camps, disrupting lines transportation to them, and potentially saving thousands of lives. If we had immediately aired graphic footage of radiation burns of the survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would we have been quite as cavalier about the proliferation of atomic arsenals… Read more »
Not to mention, Holocaust deniers would have a much more difficult stand. General Eisenhower ordered his troups to document what they found in the camps as thouroughly as possible; and in at least one instance he had a village of Germans rounded up and lead through a liberated camp, so that nobody could any more say it did not happen. One of the smartest things he ever did.
Agreed- I like Ike.
Just a small part of the downward spiral that in its current version = reality television.