Complicit Journaille
Noted: Media outlets often respond to terrorism with fear-mongering rather than education, especially in Italy. Impressions from the summer news front.
Column Media makers often react to terror with scaremongering instead of clarification, especially in Italy. Vacation impressions from the summer news front: I really did treat myself to some time off this time. And for a media person, a news junkie like me, that meant no television for three and a half weeks, very little radio and at most an Italian daily newspaper once or twice a week. It was also easy to give up because German or English-language newspapers hardly ever reach our retreat in Calabria. And because, spoiled by Swiss and German papers, we can only shake our heads at how little the readers of supposedly quality newspapers such as Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica or Il Tempo learn about non-Italian matters. As long as such papers are published in the middle of Europe, we should stop complaining haughtily about the ignorance of the Americans, just because the Des Moines Register or the Wisconsin State Journal also hardly carry any foreign news in the pampas of the Midwest.Wherever I picked up snippets of news - after the attacks in London and Sharm-el-Sheik, there was only one topic in Italy for weeks: the probability of the next terrorist attack by Al Qaeda hitting a target in our own country. Academics like to cite a radio program by Orson Welles as a historical example of strong media effects. It caused a panic in the USA in the 1930s because listeners took the radio play "news" of an alien invasion at face value. It may be that something like this could no longer happen to us hardened media users today.
However, everyday conversations with Italian friends and acquaintances showed that the fear of further terrorist attacks, which the Italian media is almost sadistically stirring up, is deep in everyone's bones. What the Italian media, on the other hand, hardly communicate: On the one hand, how the population, especially in the south, is still terrorized on a daily basis by the Mafia, Camorra and N'Drangheta; and on the other hand, how low the risk is of personally becoming a victim of an Islamic suicide bomber. To put it bluntly, it is not your life that is in danger when you board an airplane, but when you cross a crosswalk in Italy.
What damage has the Al-Qaeda hysteria done to Italian tourism, for example? Anyone who is aware of the widespread fear of flying south of the Alps and has experienced how many people euphorically applaud their Alitalia pilot after a routine landing can appreciate this.
But the Italian media makers - there are still very few of them - have not only acted irresponsibly, but also unimaginatively, even fatuously. Unimaginative, because especially in the summer slump, when the PR machinery is not feeding the media as reliably as usual, a thousand other topics would have been waiting to be "discovered" by journalists. And simple-minded, because in their lack of willingness to self-reflect they obviously don't think about who they are working into the hands of. In the competition for ratings and circulation, journalists become accomplices to terrorism faster than they can imagine. Yet they are actually paid to think quickly and not thoughtlessly.
Incidentally, I am making the above request for mitigation in the event that Werbewoche readers who have consumed Italian media more avidly than I have in the last four weeks have come to a completely different impression. As I said, this time it's more about impressions than an empirically substantiated content analysis due to being on vacation.
> Stephan Russ-Mohl is a professor of journalism at the University of Lugano.
However, everyday conversations with Italian friends and acquaintances showed that the fear of further terrorist attacks, which the Italian media is almost sadistically stirring up, is deep in everyone's bones. What the Italian media, on the other hand, hardly communicate: On the one hand, how the population, especially in the south, is still terrorized on a daily basis by the Mafia, Camorra and N'Drangheta; and on the other hand, how low the risk is of personally becoming a victim of an Islamic suicide bomber. To put it bluntly, it is not your life that is in danger when you board an airplane, but when you cross a crosswalk in Italy.
What damage has the Al-Qaeda hysteria done to Italian tourism, for example? Anyone who is aware of the widespread fear of flying south of the Alps and has experienced how many people euphorically applaud their Alitalia pilot after a routine landing can appreciate this.
But the Italian media makers - there are still very few of them - have not only acted irresponsibly, but also unimaginatively, even fatuously. Unimaginative, because especially in the summer slump, when the PR machinery is not feeding the media as reliably as usual, a thousand other topics would have been waiting to be "discovered" by journalists. And simple-minded, because in their lack of willingness to self-reflect they obviously don't think about who they are working into the hands of. In the competition for ratings and circulation, journalists become accomplices to terrorism faster than they can imagine. Yet they are actually paid to think quickly and not thoughtlessly.
Incidentally, I am making the above request for mitigation in the event that Werbewoche readers who have consumed Italian media more avidly than I have in the last four weeks have come to a completely different impression. As I said, this time it's more about impressions than an empirically substantiated content analysis due to being on vacation.
> Stephan Russ-Mohl is a professor of journalism at the University of Lugano.
