Treatment of terrorist incidents by news media

The quest for truth in news.

What is happening?

When people in the west see news stories related to war or terrorism, the stories are gentler versions of reality.

Who is doing this?

The who is simple. They are our mothers and grandmothers and grandfathers and fathers and brother and sisters and friends and of the folks around us. At least it is the subsection that make up news organizations. Let us start out by making the assumption that most people in the news organizations are good decent folks. Why is this reasonable reasonable you might ask? They are part of the tapestry of our society and mostly the sort of people we would normally interact with. While we think about this topic we should always keep this as part of the background.

Why does it happen?

Perhaps the thinking of the reporters and editors is that the feelings of gentle souls can be spared.

Perhaps it is a reaction from the days of sensationalist yellow journalism. In order to maintain an appearance of non-sensationalist journalism, they have moved in the opposite direction. Sort of like a politician who must eliminate even the look of impropriety.

Perhaps it is the desire to influence the intellectual part of their readership rather than their emotional part. Reason might be better than emotion.

Perhaps it's political. Even editors, and reporters must be affected by the influences of political structure. An incontinent truth must be hard to publish. The political structure in power will resist it. Also people with agenda, knowledge of the news systems, and the right connections can and will try to influence the news. This is just natural. They are doing what they think is the greatest good for society from their perspective.

Maybe it's systemic. Somehow the system of forces in our system conspires to produce this outcome. One might think this is not possible, however we know from the famous Stanford prison experiment that good people can be made to produce bad outcomes because of the way a system is set-up.

Perhaps it is a combination of all these things.

The one thing that does not help, is blaming any set of well-intentioned, smart and good people who work hard to keep us informed. I also happen to know that in many cases they don't get paid very well and do this because of a true love of their profession.

Result

I want to experiment with possibility that these well intentioned distortions of reality will lead us to the road to hell. Democracy has the ability to correct the mistakes of the elected few people. These elected leaders assume the mantle of power and responsibility and move us forward in the direction they promised. However an uninformed (or worse mis-informed) democracy will not be able to make the right judgments about the direction we should take. A small error in direction if corrected early enough will be far less costly than a much larger correction later in time.

Hope
In the quest for truth, reporter and editors are our warriors and priests. My sincere pleading to the willing members of this noble profession is to please bring us closer to the truth. We need the truth to defend our democracy and freedom.

Give us the unvarnished, unpolished, raw and necessary truth. For only the truth can set us free.