What They Want

I agree with Paul Campos, a routine line of thinking — and a right one:

So how should the authorities treat political crimes of this sort? While of course every case is unique, it would be good to keep a few basic principles in mind.

First, giving politically motivated criminals more publicity than necessary is giving them exactly what they want. It’s important to remember that the Tsarnaev brothers were a couple of nobodies, whose only real power came from their ability to use their very limited capacity to engage in acts of public violence to create a level of public terror out of all proportion to any threat they could pose to the public as a whole. (Again, I emphasize that none of this is to deny the horrible suffering they managed to wreak on their victims).

Second, terrorism only “works” to the extent that people are terrorized. Telling 1 million people to cower in their homes for an entire day (as opposed to prudently closing off a particular neighborhood) is giving those people – indeed, all of us – exactly the wrong message.

Sensational news sells; because it sells, news media gravitate toward sensational news. How can we discourage the sensational news?