Violence in the modern world poses two challenges. The first, which everyone talks about, is: What should we do about it? The second is a point almost never discussed: How much attention should we give it?
Modern technology has revolutionized communication on the subject of violence. At the dawn of history, human beings could learn about bloody tragedies only by directly speaking with each other. When many thousands were brutally slain in one place, those living elsewhere would have no inkling of it. Then came clay tablets, papyrus, sheepskin, and the Gutenberg press, and it became possible to learn about acts of violence at a distance. Still, communication was slow. You could read about a civil war in China or a massacre in Italy only months or years after it happened — after it had become history. Furthermore, the deed was conveyed indirectly, through written words. This indirect and delayed reporting system enabled everyone to keep the violence in perspective.
Recent advances in technology have enabled the media to communicate distant acts of violence ever more rapidly and in ever more graphic detail. Because human beings have a fascination with bloodshed, this graphic, immediate coverage is profitable for the purveyors. However, it’s time to begin asking whether this surge in the coverage of bloody deeds is healthy. There are at least four ways in which excessive, dramatic coverage of violence can do harm.
1It can promote irrational military overreaction abroad. The coverage generates an emotional mood that can deflect policy makers from thoughtful, balanced decisions that serve the nation’s long-term interests. One can argue, for example, that the incessant replaying of the graphic violence of 9/11 gave rise to a mood of anger, a demand to “do something’’ that fueled the invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the attack.
2It can promote irrational overreaction in domestic security policies. Decisions about curtailing civil liberties and privacy in the name of safety involve a delicate balance. Media-generated hysteria about violence can easily undermine thoughtful judgment on these questions. The same point applies to decisions about the size and character of domestic security forces. One wonders, for example, how much of the militarization of local police forces is the result of thoughtful cost-benefit analysis, and how much is an emotional overreaction brought on by excessive media coverage of violent events.
3It may prompt violent behavior on the part of suicidal individuals. For a deranged individual with low self-esteem, going down in history can be part of the motive for a mass killing. Perpetrators themselves sometimes note this motivation. For example, the shooter who killed nine people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon in October said in a posting prior to the deed, “Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight,’’ and noted, “This is the only time I’ll ever be in the news I’m so insignificant.’’
4 It can fuel terrorist violence. Most terrorism is media-oriented violence. It is undertaken by perpetrators who believe that publicity of their violent deeds will further their cause. It may come as a surprise, but publicity-seeking terrorism is rather modern. In the pre-media age, there was plenty of vicious violence, the perpetrators including criminal secret societies, assassins, guerrilla bands, and saboteurs. But these evildoers sought to evade public attention — or at least they were indifferent to it. The emergence of the mass media gave rise to a new breed of perpetrator, actors with political goals who sought public attention for their deeds.
Terrorism as we know it had its beginning in the late 19th century, mainly as the result of two developments: the telegraph, which enabled information to be transmitted over long distances quickly, and the rotary printing press, which gave rise to mass-circulation daily papers. For the first time in history, a violent deed committed today could be made to echo in the minds of large numbers of people tomorrow morning. Among the first to exploit this quantum leap in communication was the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), a Russian revolutionary group active in 1878-1881. This group began a campaign of assassinating high government officials (including Czar Alexander II, in 1881) in the expectation that these highly publicized murders would rouse the masses to revolt. They called their killings “propaganda of the deed,’’ a choice of words that reflected their focus on media coverage.
Since that time, many other terrorist groups have come and gone. The spread of television in the late 1950s gave a literal reality to the chant “The whole world is watching,’’ and thus boosted the attention-getting impact of violent deeds. This new electronic medium gave rise to scores of terrorist units in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, most of which were oriented toward Marxist-Leninism. The collapse of communism as a credible ideal undercut these groups, and they mostly disappeared by the 1990s. Now the major remaining creeds of terrorism are violent versions of a purely implemented Islam.
Publicity is to terrorism what air is to fire. Highly publicizing terrorist deeds furthers the terrorists’ aims and encourages more such violence in the future.
We need a national discussion on toning down the media coverage of violence. This is not something government could or should handle. It will be a broad-based cultural shift involving everyone: the TV producer who decides not to send a crew a second time to the scene of horrific violence, the newspaper editor who places the violence story on page two instead of page one, the consumer who cancels subscriptions to violence-laden outlets. Over time, by developing habits of restraint in publicizing violence, we can play a positive role in reducing the tragic bloodshed in our world.
James L. Payne has taught political science at Yale, Wesleyan, Johns Hopkins, and Texas A & M. His books on force and military policy include “Why Nations Arm’’ and “A History of Force.’’
