Has the media played a critical and self reflective role in the war against global terrorism?
Debadatta Dash for BeyondHeadlines
11 September 2013 marked the 12th anniversary of the lethal attacks in the United States on 11th September 2001, Tuesday. On this morning at 8.46am Al-Qaeda hijackers crashed the first aeroplane and the second aeroplane after 17 minutes both on the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York.
These two aeroplanes crashing killed around 3000 people and injured more than 6000 people. The global politics has changed ever since, definitely not for better. 9/11 allegedly marked as a climax of political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s thesis on Clash of Civilizations.
United States launched Global War on Terror (GWOT) and with the support NATO forces invaded Afghanistan to find and nab Osama bin Laden, the then Leader of Al Qaeda. It took more than 10 years to capture and kill Laden and these ten years have seen terrorism growing in alarming speed. Iraq attack in 2003 only strengthened the appeal for Jihad against the west. Young men have been radicalised and bombings in Madrid and London and host of other cities in the West including that of India have shown the threat of home grown radicalisation.
This warrants our attention to two important aspects of terrorism. What role does the State (a political theory term used for the government) play in creating grounds of terrorism and how the media reports it. Is media a willing partner with the state or is it a platform for critical analysis and reflection? It is clear from many researches by critical terrorism scholars that State and its actors can be found indulged in violence there by actively providing a ground for further radicalisation.
Media, especially the mainstream ones have been a willing partner with the governments and in many cases, including in the case of Batla House Encounter, has not asked enough critical questions to the authorities. Then does it mean that the State co-opts media and the media conveniently forgets its focus on objectivity and evidence based reporting? The answer is a resounding yes. As an example we can see reportages of terrorism forgetting to use the term “alleged” rather using terrorist too often and too quickly before even the judicial pronouncements.
What we as citizens have conveniently been guided is to forget to focus on the terrorism practiced by the state actors like the police, intelligence, para-military and military forces and rather focus on terrorism carried out by non-state actors. For this Media has been blamed throughout the world though notable exceptions exist both in India and the West. As a responsible stakeholder in public policy and social change media can play a much more critical and self reflective role than it has done till date.
One positive development since the Mumbai attacks of 26/11 in 2008 has been the decision of broadcast media houses that they unanimously agreed not to telecast live counter-terror operations. One such step to not to call anyone a “Terrorist” even if the person has been suspected and/or arrested in cases of terror attacks will do a better service to the ideals of the media. Social Media platforms like Facebook, Independent Public Media Houses like the BeyondHeadlines have a greater role to play in this regard.
(The author is an intern at BeyondHeadlines and a student of Journalism at Utkal University, Odisha, India. Views are Personal.)
