Basic TV Reporting, 2nd Edition

The Oxygen of Publicity

A moral problem for television journalists in a society beset by terrorism and violence is how to report responsibly without appearing to encourage the perpetrators. In 1985 after hijackers used the capture of an airliner to exploit the passengers and crew politically by making them appear at ‘news conferences’, the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, suggested that the media, and television in particular, should not provide terrorists with what she called ‘the oxygen of publicity’. She believed that restricted coverage of such acts might reduce them. Journalists should not write this off–a lot of people agree with that. Three years later the running sore of terrorism in Northern Ireland and Britain led to the ...