The Media and Terror

One of the basic discoveries we make in analyzing the War on Terror using Sun Tzu's principles is that the real battleground for this war is not the physical ground in the Middle East, but the conceptual battleground of the media. According to Sun Tzu's principles, the ground is what finances the competitive organization. Acts of terror generate revenue for the terrorists only through the free advertising they generate in the media. That advertising creates donations, recruits and credibility for the terrorists.

A recent example of the tilt in the media toward the terrorists was in the release of Noor Khan's name to the press. This hampered on-going convert operations against the terrorists, but why did it happen? Because the media was accusing the administration of using the terror alerts for political purposes. Though working for its own purposes (generating news stories and increasing press power), the press unwittingly (uncaringly?) actively works as an agent for terrorists because it never questions itself about the strategic consequences of the way it reports the news. Dick Morris, a good political strategist, blames the 33% of the American public who believe that terror warnings are manipulated for political purposes. I blame the press who are the ones feeding them this information.

A great example was the press's story about terror information being years old. The press in reporting the story this way intentionally tried to make it sound like this information was outdated. However, a much more accurate way to report this story would have been to say that these terror strikes had been planned for years. After all, much of the information that has been collected, such as schematics of the target buildings, can't really be outdated, can it? I leave it to the reader to decide which is the most accurate representation of the facts.