Fighting terrorism through mass media

In our world, we are daily confronted with news of the negative impacts of terrorism. These news items are usually backed with visual images, depicting gory pictures of the dead, maimed victims, collapsed buildings and many more effects of such dastardly acts. Because of the limited knowledge of what constitutes an act of terrorism, some journalists are always quick to brand all types of violent incidents as acts of terrorism, including crimes of opportunities like armed robbery, kidnapping, and murder. In all these, terrorists benefit immensely from free media coverage, which help in propagating their messages.

The defunct League of Nations described terrorism as “all criminal acts directed against a state and intended or calculated to create a state of terror in the minds of particular persons or a group of persons or the general public.” Several countries of the world have witnessed and are still witnessing one form of crisis or the other. The Liberian war, Somalian crisis, Rwanda’s genocide, Sierra Leonean war, Libyan crisis, Bahrain unrest, clampdown in Yemen, the Syrian conflict and Nigeria’s Boko Haram unrest are obvious instances of the above assertion.

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The outcomes of these conflicts, among others, have been devastating and painful. However, the role of the media in counterterrorism strategy cannot be overemphasised since one of the major objectives of terrorist groups is to get maximum publicity for their acts. The mass media especially the broadcast media through television has been an effective tool for terrorists because of the images and pictures they broadcast to the public.

The media must downplay their reportage of the various activities of terrorists. We must continue to remind media chiefs of their roles in nation building.

Salami Sheriff, [email protected].