The debate regarding not so much censorship as caution by the mass media is troubling the Western world. To what extent can the broadcasting of news items favor propaganda actions or even help in spreading coded messages sent out by terrorists?
The Pentagon urges newspapers and television stations to be cautious, and this is natural, since no army at war likes to have its plans, or appeals from the enemy, broadcast. The mass media are now accustomed to absolute freedom and cannot adapt to wartime strictures: in times gone by, anyone spreading news against national security ended up before a firing squad. It’s difficult to unravel this knot. In a communication-dense society that now also has the Internet, there is no confidentiality.
The problem, in any event, is more complex than this. It’s an old story: every act of terrorism is carried out to send a message, a message that itself spreads terror, or at the very least anxiety and instability. It was ever the same, even in those bygone times when terrorists, who now seem like amateurs, limited themselves to killing a single person or planting a bomb on a street corner. If the victim is relatively unknown, the terrorist message brings insecurity even if the impact is minimal. But it brings greater insecurity if the victim is well known and is some kind of symbol.
The qualitative leap can be seen with the Red Brigades when, after the killing of journalists or political advisers who were relatively unknown to the public at large, they moved on to the capture, traumatic detention, and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
Now, what is Osama bin Laden’s purpose in attacking the Twin Towers? To create “the greatest spectacle on earth,” something never imagined in disaster movies, to give the visual impression of striking at the very symbols of Western power, and showing that the greatest sanctums of this power could be violated. Bin Laden wasn’t aiming to cause a particular number of deaths, which, from his point of view, brought added value. He was prepared to make do with half the number of victims provided the towers were hit, and all the better if they collapsed. He wasn’t waging a war that counted the enemy casualties, he was launching a message of terror, and what mattered was the image.
If bin Laden’s aim was to strike at world public opinion with that image, what has happened? The mass media had to broadcast the news, which is obvious. Likewise, they had to report news of the aftermath: the rescues, the excavations, the mutilated Manhattan skyline.
Did they really have to repeat this news every day and for at least a month, with photos, films, endlessly recycled eyewitness accounts, repeatedly bringing the image of that trauma before everyone’s eyes? It’s difficult to say. Newspapers boosted their sales with the photos, television channels boosted their ratings with those repeated film clips, the public itself was demanding to rewatch those horrific scenes, perhaps to fuel their personal indignation, perhaps at times through some unconscious sadistic impulse. Perhaps it was impossible to do otherwise. The emotion of the days following September 11 prevented the world’s television stations and newspapers from reaching some form of agreement to limit coverage. None of them alone could remain silent without losing their position in the ratings.
In this way the mass media have handed bin Laden billions of dollars of free publicity, inasmuch as each day they have shown the pictures that he himself had created, and precisely so that everyone would see them, to stir feelings of disorientation in the West, to stir pride among his fundamentalist followers.
There again, the process continues and bin Laden can still reap advantage at little expense, considering that anthrax attacks are producing a negligible number of victims compared with those of the Twin Towers, but are terrorizing many more, since everyone feels threatened, even those who don’t fly in airplanes and don’t live near symbols of power.
And so the mass media, while they condemn bin Laden, have been his best allies, and in this way he has won the first round.
Yet as consolation for the bewilderment caused by this apparently irresolvable situation, we should remember that when the Red Brigades raised their game with the capture and killing of Aldo Moro, the message was so devastating that it backfired on its own perpetrators: instead of causing political turmoil, it produced an alliance between the parties, popular condemnation, and for the Red Brigades terrorists it marked the beginning of their decline.
Only time will tell whether the spectacle created by bin Laden has unleashed a process that will lead to his ruin, for the very reason that he went too far, beyond what was tolerable. In that case, the media will have won.
2001