John Kerry: Media Should Cover Terrorism Less So People Don’t Know What’s Going On-Truth! & Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
Secretary of State John Kerry said the media should cover terrorism less so that people don’t know what’s going on.
The Truth:
John Kerry made these remarks during an August 29th press conference in Bangladesh that touched on the difficulty of fighting terrorism.
Kerry said that terrorists attack both people and culture. He added that it would take a generation or more to solve the problem of terrorism and continued, according to a transcript:
But we have to continue. It’s not just the battlefield; it’s the minds. And if we have too many young people who can’t go to school, or too many young people who are frustrated, or they can’t find a job – if we leave those minds out there for extremists to recruit, then it will continue and none of us would be doing our jobs if we allowed that to happen.
Remember this: No country is immune from terrorism. It’s easy to terrorize. Government and law enforcement have to be correct 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. But if you decide one day you’re going to be a terrorist and you’re willing to kill yourself, you can go out and kill some people. You can make some noise. Perhaps the media would do us all a service if they didn’t cover it quite as much. People wouldn’t know what’s going on.
Kerry’s comments were immediately scrutinized in American media. And, while Kerry seemed to imply that less media coverage of terrorist could help minimize lone-wolf terrorists who carry out attacks on whims, critics have argued that the idea of people not knowing what’s going on with terrorism would not be productive.