How Do You Report Terrorism?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 June 2017
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When violent jihadis struck London last Saturday, the rolling news networks kicked quickly into action. The story became front-page news around the world and dominated the UK's news media for days, with ever more information on the attack, the victims and the perpetrators. It was shocking, horrific - and perhaps also exactly what the terrorists wanted.
Terrorists rely on the world's media to spread their message of fear and their ideology. Maybe if there was less media coverage of such attacks, it would frustrate the people behind them. We look at four democratic countries where attempts have been made to limit the media impact of terrorism. Drawing on the lessons learnt, how do you report terrorism?
Presenter: Ruth Alexander Producer: Simon Maybin and Phoebe Keane
(Photo: Various newspapers spread out headlining the London Terror attacks)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds As I was about to turn the TV off on Saturday night, the first reports came in of a terrorism attack underway in London. |
| 0:49.0 | I stayed on the sofa, watching the eyewitness reports. I went online looking at social media and news |
| 0:55.2 | websites trying to find more information, horrified. And also uncomfortable that I and the media were doing exactly what the terrorists would want. |
| 1:07.0 | The journalists and people on social media reporting every dreadful detail. |
| 1:12.0 | Me, the viewer, and millions like me taking it all in. |
| 1:17.0 | Because terrorists rely on the world's cameras and microphones to spread their message of fear and their ideology. |
| 1:26.2 | It's a huge tension at the heart of the current struggle to contain today's terrorists, |
| 1:31.6 | that those who seek to curtail people's freedoms use one of the |
| 1:35.2 | fundamental tenets of a free society, freedom of speech, to do so. And that puts journalists in a particularly awkward position. |
| 1:47.0 | It's natural that the media would want to report an atrocity, not least to tell people to |
| 1:52.0 | stay away from danger, but there's a real and fraught question |
| 1:56.5 | about how far you take that coverage. |
| 2:00.8 | I'm Ruth Alexander and this is the inquiry on the BBC World Service. |
| 2:07.8 | This week we're asking how do you report terrorism? We'll look at the experience of four societies which broadly |
| 2:18.0 | believe in free speech and where it was felt that that freedom was being exploited by terrorists. |
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