duke_aldhein ([info]duke_aldhein) wrote,
@ 2006-08-11 12:49:00
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Some sanity from the editorial column of today's FT:
...no system is perfectly secure, and even if the world's aircraft could be made secure at a reasonable cost in time and money, terrorists will always have other options as simple as truck bombs or explosives on trains and buses. There will be more attacks, perhaps deadly and dramatic ones.

The first response must be to adopt a foreign policy that saps terrorists of support without pandering to their demands. It should not be necessary to remind either the US or the British government that it is not possible simply to kill or catch all the terrorists until there are none left - a pointless strategy based on what one might call the "lump of terror" fallacy.

The second response must be a sense of proportion. More than 3,000 people died last year on our roads, but the roads stay open. Even the worst acts of terrorism reap their largest toll in hysterical responses. Scotland Yard's statement that they had disrupted a plot to cause "mass murder on an unimaginable scale" was alarmist even if it is true. Journalists - and terrorists - are perfectly capable of spreading hyperbole without any help from the police. The most powerful answer to terrorism is not to be terrified.

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[info]electrokin
2006-08-11 11:58 am UTC (link)
Thankyou dear boy.
I needed to know there was any sanity out there, I have to sit next to Radio 1.

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[info]duke_aldhein
2006-08-11 12:22 pm UTC (link)
At risk of sounding like the nutters on Medialens, this kind of story does really expose the limits of the mainstream media. Because of the way we operate as journalists, it's very difficult to maintain a sceptical distance from what the police or the government are saying, or even to offer a different perspective - they are treated as privileged sources whose statements are repeated as fact, however sensational their tone, with no need for evidence to substantiate them. It's not easy to do otherwise, because the alternative to trusting the state is to accept that the world is a lot more anarchic than is usually admitted...

Anyway, I admire the perspective of the FT leader writer.

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[info]aurorra
2006-08-11 05:29 pm UTC (link)
Haha, I said something like this after 7th july and someone posted lots of anonymous hate comments against me.

I don't think as a lowly jnr journo it's my place to put a message accross as frank as that..... I think only editorial and Presonality collumns can get away with that.

I just have to put the facts as they come to me and we did only put "unimaginable scale" as "according to the met" every time.

At the end of the day when IRN sends down stuff as close to the hour as it does I don't always have time to change their drivvel.

But having said that I did stop short of putting out this top line they sent

"It's claimed next Wednesday - the sixteenth of August - could've been the date carnage was unleashed in the skies."


x

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[info]duke_aldhein
2006-08-11 05:39 pm UTC (link)
I think only the FT can be that frank, because business people are the most ruthlessly pragmatic and least interested in rhetoric that flatters their worldview. (Obviously there are some serious limits to that - areas in which the financial world is very much shaped by rhetoric - but within those limits, it holds true...) Today's Guardian editorial was full of platitudes, by contrast.

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[info]methodius
2006-08-12 07:42 am UTC (link)
We had the TV on Sky News on Thursday and my son said that the coverage reminded him of a movie called "V for Vendetta".

It reminded me of the "hate weeks" in 1984.

Planting bopmbs on aeroplanes is not nice, but it is quite imaginable. And Israel has been practising mass murder in reality, and not just in the imagination, for the last 6 weeks, and the failure of the British government to do anything to stop it is a very probably cause of the plan to blow up aircraft.

Is no one willing to stand up to the Bush-Blair Axis of Evil?

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