London Terror Attack: I Endorse Simon Jenkins’ Mature and Responsible Assessment of the Media’s Dangerous and Irresponsible Coverage

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London Terror Attack: I Endorse Simon Jenkins’ Mature and Responsible Assessment of the Media’s Dangerous and Irresponsible Coverage

Screenshots of journalist Simon Jenkins criticising the BBC - and by extensions, the whole of the UK mainstream media - for its irresponsible and overblown response to the terrorist attack in central London on March 22.

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Note: This article is largely derived from comments I made on Facebook yesterday — but I realise not everyone who reads my work is necessarily on Facebook, hence my reworked posting here.

In what I intend to be my only comment on Wednesday’s attack in London, which was terrible because people lost their lives or were horribly wounded, I recommend the clip below of Simon Jenkins talking sense on Newsnight about how the media irresponsibly creates frenzies of publicity around incidents of terrorism.

It feeds racism and Islamophobia, it feeds a climate of relentless fear, when there is no justification for such fears, and it gives the terrorists what they want — the oxygen of publicity, the very climate of fear the media stirs up, and, they hope, the disruption of normal, everyday life.

I recall, growing up, when there was a deadly terrorist attack, it was considered inappropriate to indulge in wall-to-wall coverage for days, but now it is the norm, and the more it continues the more I fear subsequently hearing about peaceful, law-abiding Muslims up and down the country being subjected to harassment and abuse as through there is any connection between themselves and the mentally troubled individuals who undertook these kinds of attacks, when no such analogy whatsoever can be legitimately drawn.

The clip of Simon Jenkins is below via YouTube (and it’s here on Facebook):

After I posted my thoughts on Facebook, I also added some additional comments regarding my thoughts on terrorism since 9/11 that I thought were worth mentioning, after a mention that what was particularly worth avoiding was “pretending that soldiers and civilians are terrorists and then torturing and holding them indefinitely without charge or trial, obviously,” as at Guantánamo and elsewhere in the “war on terror.”

The first is not to overreact, because that’s what the terrorists – or those who aspire to terrorism — want, as I make clear here, and as Simon Jenkins does, and the other point, which I didn’t mention but which is also hugely important, is to think about how we could have the moral high ground. Going on about our “freedoms” being under attack really doesn’t work when our hands are soaked in blood, so the only way to get the moral high ground back would be to stop occupying Muslim countries and killing Muslims, and then to shine a light on who’s manipulating and encouraging people to blow other people up or stab them or run them over: people with mental health issues, ex-cons, ex-alcoholics, ex-junkies, manipulated by other people who send them out to kill, but stay safe themselves.

I think these cowards and opportunists — as bad as the warmongering politicians of the west, who make sure poor kids serve in the military, but who also make sure their own children don’t — should be called out and ridiculed and condemned. However, we can’t do that because we sacrificed the moral high ground as soon as we set up rendition and “black sites” and Bagram and Kandahar and Guantánamo.

In addition, Simon Jenkins has an excellent update in the Guardian today, ‘The overhyped coverage of the Westminster attack will only encourage others.’

Here are some key excerpts:

Without a shred of evidence, and no “claimed responsibility”, the airwaves and press were flooded with assumptions that it was “Isis-inspired”. It was squeezed for every conceivable ounce of sensation and emotion.

Even if this was indeed a “terrorist” act and not that of a lone madman – I repeat, even if it was – the way to react is to treat it as a crime. Don’t speculate when you know such speculation will cause alarm. Don’t let Downing Street summon Cobra and drag the home secretary back from foreign parts. Don’t flood central London with hundreds of men with machine guns. Once the initial uncertainty is passed, don’t have the police issue interminable empty statements, as they stand in front of wall-to-wall BBC coverage of London “in total lockdown”.

Don’t fill pages of newspapers and hours of television and radio with words like fear, menace, horror, maniac, monster. Don’t let the mayor rush into print, screaming “don’t panic”. Don’t have the media trawl the world for pundits to speculate on “what Isis wants” and “how hard it is to protect ourselves from attack”. Don’t present London as a horror movie set. Don’t crave a home-grown Osama bin Laden. In other words, don’t pretend you are “carrying on as usual” when you are doing the precise opposite. When the prime minister stands up in parliament to announce, “We are not afraid,” the response is “why then is the entire government machine behaving as if it’s shit-scared?”

And this is Simon Jenkins’ conclusion:

When Tony Blair in 2003 sought an easy headline by sending tanks to Heathrow to “counter terrorism”, it was estimated to have cost millions of pounds in instant tourist cancellations. Goodness knows the money and jobs lost by this week’s reckless coverage. Who knows what liberties the cabinet will eagerly curtail, or what million-pound contracts the security-industrial complex will squeeze from terrorised civil servants and ministers?

The actions of the authorities and the media in response to Wednesday have ramped up the hysteria of terror. This was ostensibly a random act by a lone player without access even to a gun. To over-publicise and exaggerate such crimes is to be an accomplice after the act. London’s response to the Westminster attack is an open invitation to every crazed malcontent to try it again.

The last line is really worth considering at some length. Does the media’s coverage encourage or discourage another unhinged individual to seek glory through a random, ham-fisted terrorist attack? Like Simon Jenkins, I believe it is absolutely the latter. It’s time for our media to truly think about what a mature and proportionate response is to an attack like the one on Wednesday.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).