THEIR FACES SHOULD BE RED:

What's Black and White and Red All Over? (Richard Morin, Washington Post, June 15)

More ink equals more blood, claim two economists who say that newspaper coverage of terrorist incidents leads directly to more attacks....

"Both the media and terrorists benefit from terrorist incidents," [the] study [by Bruno S. Frey of the University of Zurich and Dominic Rohner of Cambridge University] contends. Terrorists get free publicity for themselves and their cause. The media, meanwhile, make money "as reports of terror attacks increase newspaper sales and the number of television viewers."

The researchers counted direct references to terrorism between 1998 and 2005 in the New York Times and Neue Zuercher Zeitung, a respected Swiss newspaper. They also collected data on terrorist attacks around the world during that period. Using a statistical procedure called the Granger Causality Test, they attempted to determine whether more coverage directly led to more attacks.

The results, they said, were unequivocal: Coverage caused more attacks ...

I doubt Drs. Frey and Rohner have evidence for their assertion that media make more money through terrorism coverage. US media have had declining sales throughout this period of increasing terrorism coverage.

But their study strongly supports the idea that media coverage inspires the terrorists to further attacks. As penance for its last 7 years of terrorism-promoting publicity, I suggest that the publisher and editors of the New York Times let us test another proposition for the next 7 years: that publicizing heroism by the U.S. military, and death and destruction among terrorists, will decrease terrorism.

It's all in the cause of science!

Posted by pjaminet at June 15, 2006 5:01 PM