Manchester, England is the latest victim of terrorism’s barbarism. A suicide bomber hid outside an Ariana Grande concert and detonated an explosive filled with nails as people were leaving. This horrific account commanded the world’s attention, as any attack on women and children is additionally heinous, let alone one as vicious as this. Naturally, people wanted to know what happened, and many turned to cable news.
News outlets are already replaying footage of the Manchester incident.
Be wary of what that’s doing to your brain: pic.twitter.com/KWX9ns3W9j
— Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) May 23, 2017
Cable news has created a perverse exchange where they will trade us tidbits of information for fealty to the fear they are propagating. When Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel—a drunken loser who spent his life violating every tenet of Islam—drove a truck into a crowd in Nice, France and killed 86 people, cable news ordained him an “Islamic terrorist” and a “lone wolf.” The facts of his sad life and desperation were secondary to the picture of a cunning supervillain being painted by cable news.
Last night we saw a constant rotation of the same horrific images from Manchester. Cable news does this to make sure that we’re scared so we keep watching, but this practice doubles as the greatest recruiting video that groups like ISIS could ask for. It embeds the horror in our collective consciousness and enshrines an image that the globe can never forget. For the “lone wolves” recruited by ISIS, this fame is their salvation. Nearly all these attackers share a similar profile: young, male loners who fill their empty lives with alcohol, drugs and sex. Like many, they find religion at their lowest moment, yet Wahhabism is not a religion, but an ideological super weapon that is best combated by empathy and understanding, not violence—a concept that is completely foreign to our cable news networks.
If you think about cable news as a sitcom and not as news, terrorism is the star of the show. After Donald Trump attacked Syria, Brian Williams of MSNBC provided a perfect example of how titillated our media gets over war, when he said that he is “guided by the beauty of our weapons.” Terrorism is a war on civilians, which makes it exponentially more potent in its appeal to the CNN’s of the world. Not only do they get to wax poetic about conflict and put their Very Serious faces on, but they get to scare the living daylights out of us in the process. This is precisely what groups like ISIS want. Terrorism isn’t primarily about murdering innocent people, but using those horrific images to strike fear into a vastly larger segment of the populace. al-Qaeda and ISIS could not ask for a better outlet to broadcast their jihad than cable news.