A modest proposal for denying terrorists the publicity they crave

I have a suggestion for dealing with terrorists and other crazies on the media loosely borrowed from an old science fiction short story whose name and author I simply cannot remember at the moment (please feel free to chime in if you do).

Rather than show us the faces of terrorists and endless footage of the carnage they wreak on the innocent repeatedly, endlessly, ad nauseam, ad infinitum, providing them and their “causes” with free publicity that money can’t buy and encouraging an endless stream of like-minded wingnuts to blaze their own trails to hell for the amusement of a voyeuristic public, I’d like to propose a caricature be developed that places terrorists in an appropriate context–say, a skinny, mangy, rabid dog foaming at the mouth. Whenever an act of terror is perpetrated, place ONLY this image on the screen along with whatever description of the act and brief video clip is relevant. Any time thereafter when a terror suspect or convicted/dead terrorist is named, put their name under the mangy, rabid dog as a stand-in for their picture. Use as many mangy, rabid dogs as needed to represent any number of these morons. We can even differentiate domestic and foreign terrorists by using, say, a mangy, rabid dog for a domestic terrorist and a mangy rabid jackal for a foreign terrorist (or hyena, or some other unattractive lesser animal–I’m nothing if not flexible).

I might even watch an entire newscast again if these standards were adopted without an aching thumb from changing channels on my remote any time a glorified punk is shown on TV again, again, again and yet AGAIN.