Does rolling news promote terrorism?

I'd quite like to leave it at that question for now and see where the discussion goes. I guess 24 hour news though serves two purposes - reporting news and delivering information.

So having scrolled through the news channels this evening to see live pictures of a few parked cars on a road in Munich, with little information available, I did wonder whether continuous reporting on events, especially abroad, in such detail when so little detail is available is actually providing a public service or is it just playing into the terrorists hands? Am I even playing into the terrorists hands by just asking that question?

I'm not asking whether such stories should be censored completely - personally I think they should be reported on in the traditional sense and live coverage of the aftermath can often show the best of humanity. I just question whether it is in the public interest to report on unfolding events before the bigger picture becomes clear.

We live in an always-on world. If somebody wants to follow a story and Sky and the BBC aren't covering it, they'll just jump online and find information out that way or a live stream from wherever.

Of course live rolling news isn't new and happened previously long before Sky News came along - an example would be the Brighton Bombing in 1984 that was covered by the BBC and (embarrassingly) by TV-AM. Another example would be the great storm of 1987 was covered extensively again on the breakfast networks, the infamous broadcasting from the Broom Cupboard on the BBC and TV-AM having to relocate to Thames to get on the air.

As to whether rolling news promotes terrorism - while it may be true that drawing attention to the issues is primarily what these people want and feed off, it never stopped them before when their activities were reduced to a ten minute piece of VT on the Nine O'Clock news.

That being said, rolling news will usually blow the sequence of events out of proportion and make it look far worse than it actually is. However as I said in the opening - these days if you want details, you can quite often go and get them yourself without waiting to see how Sky and the BBC are covering something.

Well it is a matter of debate, one of Charlie Brooker's Wipes had a segment devoted to this theory...


Basically, when it comes to stories like mass shootings or terror incidents the news media has to tread a fine line between sensationalising a story and giving the facts. Many experts would say that the media should report the facts, shouldn't speculate and shouldn't dwell too much on who carried out the attack - any story should be about victims not ideology or perpetrators as it can inadvertently promote the two especially given the often simplification of them by the media. Essentially the story should be facts, boring, tragedy rather than speculation, excitement and like an action movie.

Is this solely rolling news fault - well actually they're probably the least to blame. The BBC News coverage on Munich I was watching was incredibly averse to speculation and any real dramatisation. Though interestingly the BBC were reporting only 1 dead when Sky were reporting 15 dead. Rolling news, for all its faults, is actually very factual, very dry and not really appealing - and in such situations the BBC is even more so than Sky - as, for instance, the latter's 'LIVE' wipes are a tad over dramatic.

The real problem does come when its time to distill the story into the headlines and packages for the network bulletins. This often involves major simplifications and over-dramatisation - and regardless of what experts say, the networks often do do the things that the speaker on Newswipe was warning against (Though such contempt for experts will surely delight Gove). But again the broadcast media are not the sensationalists, even if some are more tabloidy than others, the papers are by far the worst offenders on every one of Dr Deitz's criticisms.

Saturday Morning's Papers are an example of this - 'Munich Massacre' (Star); 'Mall Gun Rampage' (Sun); '16 Gunned Down in Shopping Centre Horror' (Express); 'The Munich Massacre' (Mirror); 'Terror at the Mall (i). The death toll is a regular across the papers and if we knew who the killer was - they'd be on the front of every paper. Terms like 'rampage' and particularly 'massacre' imply a scale to the attack which hasn't yet been evidenced in death toll and vastly dramatises the situation. No doubt if we discover it is an Islamist attack - we'll see borderline Islamophobic editorials over the coming days and if it is a far-right attack the tabs will find a mental illness to pin the attack on.

So to answer your question - Rolling News possibly does, but to a lesser extent than network bulletins and significantly less than the red-top and black-top tabloids which always sensationalise, simplify and exaggerate the story and focus far too much on the killer and their ideology/religion/mental illness (which they delete as appropriate - and will vastly oversimplify). On rolling news you are likely to find a terrorism expert or specialist who will concentrate on the facts - in print you will likely encounter an opinion column filled with the wisdom of such experts as Melanie Phillips, Katie Hopkins, Richard Littlejohn or Kelvin McKenzie who'll pin the blame on Islam if they are Muslim or a mental illness if they are on the far right - because hey - none of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims have mental illnesses, they're all just part of an 'evil' religion that until the West stirred sh*t up in the early 20th Century, was relatively peaceful when compared to the Christian West who only invaded and subjugated most of the planet. (Just to avoid confusion that last sentence contains elements of sarcasm and irony)

I don't think so. News channels have a job to inform the public and if they go into other news people will go elsewhere. I think years ago it may be a minor factor in spreading their "message" but now a days the media seems to no longer focus on who committed the act. News organizations seem to maybe do a package or two on who did it but they to no longer obsess over it - where they repeatedly bring the person up. Now it seems like they focus on what happened, the victims and the response.

Very interesting question Brekkie.

The reason terrorists commit these acts is to get their message across to the world. I can understand how rolling news may play into their hands as after all if we didn't have it we wouldn't know half as much as we do about ISIS.

The arguement on the other side is that the whole purpose of a rolling news channel is to inform responsible adults about the happenings of the world and allow them to decide where they sit on it and maybe do some research into it if it interests them. If we weren't given this information we wouldn't be as able to form opinions. Of course if it got out that broadcasters were keeping this news from us that would be a whole new controversy.

At the end of the day terrorist groups do become more known due to rolling news but if you're looking at the word "promote", all news channels and publications have a slight bias and (as far as I know) all of them are painting a negative image of these groups.