See how the tentacles of terror reach out from the screen or the printed page. See how fear moves television ratings or sells newspaper copies. And see the slippery slopes where Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen live and breathe poison.
Long ago, when the real terror was nuclear obliteration rather than a suicidal zealot with a bomb, research showed editors just what was happening. Readers consumed large amounts of foreign news avidly because they saw cold war connections. This or that confrontation with the USSR could be another Cuban missile crisis. We might all – mum, dad, the kids – be ashes tomorrow. It was news as local as the street where you live because the seeming threat was in your living room every time you switched on the TV.
But then the Soviet Union collapsed. The supposed end of history. No more cold war, much less fear – and so far fewer readers of foreign news. Overseas news bureaus shut right across America and Europe. Front page coverage shrank. The news became local again, until 9/11 and the advent of a new foe: shadowy Islamic extremism.
Terrorism itself wasn’t new to Britain, of course. We’d had the IRA as a descant to the years of superpower confrontation. But it was basically area-specific, limited by localism. IRA bomb attacks sold extra papers if they hit Birmingham or London, when they wrecked Mrs Thatcher’s hotel or blew up Earl Mountbatten’s yacht. When they took place in Northern Ireland, the impact was less marked. Of course Lockerbie brought shock, awe and sorrow. Of course Carlos the Jackal had his moments of stardom. But terrorism was still a secondary menace.
That perception was changed by 9/11, but it didn’t end the localism. Just look at the last few months of news. Thirty British tourists massacred on a Tunisian beach: obviously a huge, horrifying story – but one that somehow faded with summer, perhaps because it was “over there”, in Sousse, where the victims had chosen to go. Some 224 passengers blasted out of the sky over Sinai: another big story, but they were Russians, weren’t they? Paris, post-Bataclan, is the game changer.
The wall-to-wall TV coverage – presenters flying in from all over the US as well as Broadcasting House – told its own story. So did online readership figures. The Saturday after Friday night’s hours of fear saw the Guardian’s biggest ever online day: 14.45 million visitors (previous record: 9.99 million). Monday and Wednesday broke the previous record, too. Print sales bounded forward. Something had changed.
It’s easy to see what that was: the images of people, ordinary people like us, sitting at a cafe table or in a pop concert and suddenly murdered, no warning, no evident reason. That could be you, where you live. But it’s what comes next that raises problems. Suddenly – pursued by legions of often self-styled “security experts” and quivering politicians – we’ve put the “war against terrorism” into the same sort of box as the old cold war.
There were 26,370 knife offences recorded in the year to March. But one in Leytonstone, amid deranged shouting that “this is for Syria”, suddenly topped news lists last weekend. The chronicle of gun deaths in the US so far this year is wearily formidable: 52 shootings in the first 10 months, an average of two a week in schools and colleges, with some 30 kids killed. Ten students dead in one college alone in October. President Obama shrugs over the prospects for gun control – yet one horrible shooting spree by two resident jihadi gets would-be President Trump seeking to ban all Muslims from entering the country. Killings sanctified by the National Rifle Association don’t count.
Where’s the logic or sense of context here? There isn’t one. In the first few days after Paris, many commentators – including this one – noted the lack of any overall perspective. Forty-three dead and 239 injured in a Beirut massacre barely troubled the scorer as the French story went on and on. But four weeks after the Bataclan slaughter, it seems necessary to widen the focus. Editors don’t necessarily bring cynicism to their choices. Paris was a tremendous story for a vast audience in “there but for the grace of God” mode: a matter of emotions shared with reporters and editors themselves, not emotions contrived.
But from San Bernardino to Leytonstone, the question that follows is discomfiting. This is the kind of “war” that sells newspapers and burgeons online. (And remember that so many millions of the young now choose all their news online.) There is a threat: of course there is a threat. No one who went to a One World Media meeting to ponder the entrails last week could doubt that. Yet we also need to see it whole: one knife among many, one gun outrage amid a flood of others. If Daesh has security experts of its own, they know that fear and hysteria – over Islam, over refugees, over Syria – are their greatest friends. And they hope to see that every day on a screen or in a paper near you. (Bomb Paris or London for headlines!)
It’s a question of reporting whole, of setting a context. It’s also a pressing question of proportionality.
■ Great foaming Dacre! All power to his pumping Mail elbow as he wades into the “insidious conspiracy by a political and bureaucratic elite, paid by us, to cover their backsides and terrified of being held to account” that seeks to nobble the Freedom of Information Act via a dodgy “review”.
One thing I never understand, though, is how the politicians and bureaucrats he excoriates suddenly become heroes of Mail democracy when (after Snowden) they seek to suppress surveillance facts and (in a Guardian basement) watch computer records destroyed. These aren’t different people. They’re former home secretaries – and now FoI reviewers – like Messrs Straw and Howard, and secrecy regulators like Alex Carlile. Part of one world, not two.
