How CNN helps the terrorists: exciting threats and hysteria feeds the fear

Terror operations work on the principle of targetted violence backed up by propaganda; that small violent act gets lucky sooner or later against a small number of targets; which then gets amplified by the spread of fear in the form of propaganda.  That leads to an over-reaction by the larger, numerically-superior force that spends inordinate resources and effort to placate the population. That drives the larger force to play the terrorists' game without defeating them.

It's like fuel, oxygen, and heat cause fire. The oxydation chain reaction needs a perpetual  presence of all three elements to succeed. Cut one off and the fire dies.

With terrorism, you need violent acts, the spread of propaganda, and then an over-reaction in a chain reaction over and over again.

But how can you do that when the terror attacks are 10 months apart? People lose interest and go back to their lives. They forget to be terrorized. They stop feeding into hysteria. If you let it recede and people move on and the terror objective fails. So how does it succeed? Simple: CNN helps the terrorists.



How does CNN fit in?  Unwittingly, or perhaps ignoring that reality for personal gain, CNN and other media continue to pass on unfiltered, unrealistic, and unhelpful information over and over from the terror group into the mainstream communication stream into the minds of the larger force. They take unrealistic information at face-value without doing the homework to measure it's actual value.  They feed sensationalism because it gets eyeballs for viewership and TV ratings. Not for public good. For advertising dollars. That's the most cynical reason to perpetuate terror propaganda. I wouldn't go so far as to say they are two sides of a conspiracy but they feed one into another in a way that is not helpful to defeat the objective of terrorism.

When CNN doesn't measure one terrorist amongst 2 million Syrian refugees as a largely successful operation that's tainting reality. When CNN passes on threats against Washington without any measure, do they realize the terrorists would find it easier to attack Boston or New York now that the government is fixating on the political action rather than considering threats rationally?

When CNN pumps propaganda, it harms the real process. Governments are forced to waste effort countering threats that may not be realistic but are bolstered by inaccurate and uncritically vetted journalism that regurgitate the fear and mass produce it unto hysteria. The more they spew sensational fear, the worse it gets for the people planning to guard against terror. Can we blame politicians for knee-jerk political posturing based on civilian fear?

But does the media consider this factor of liability as much as they do lawsuits from companies for slander? For product defect reports? Should they be this cavalier with human lives by obfuscating security forces from the real purpose?

#Obama admits failure in Iraq and Afghanistan

#Obama's success metric when judging Putin propping up Syria's al-Assad:

"One of those players, Kroft points out, is Russia, which recently stepped up airstrikes and naval bombardments in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. President Putin "is challenging your leadership, Mr. President," Kroft says.

#Obama disagrees. "Steve, I've got to tell you, if you think that running your economy into the ground and having to send troops in in order to prop up your only ally, is leadership, then we've got a different definition of leadership," he says."

So by his own metrics: Afghanistan and Iraq are failed expeditions. For those that didn't catch his subtle flaw; let me elaborate.

He's propping up this president in Afghanistan. And before him it was Karzai.

And #Obama is propping up this president in Iraq.  And before him it was al-Maliki.

So by Obama's own standards, these are failures too. It was only when Steve Kroft pushed Obama that this truth came out.