Obama to Vox: Media should stop hyping the threat of terrorism

[Valin]

Hot Air:

Noah Rothman

February 9, 2015

Noah Rothman

February 9, 2015

 

It’s hard to be more tactless in addressing the threat possed by modern Islamist terrorism than by calling attacks like that which occurred on a kosher market in Paris “random” and comparing the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to small town criminals in sore need of a sheriff. That is, however, how President Barack Obama chose to address the issue of terrorism in an expansive interview with the liberal “explanatory journalism” venture Vox.com.

 

When subjected to a line of leading questioning from Vox’s Matthew Yglesias as to whether or not the press “overstates the level of alarm people should have” about terrorism and understates it when it comes to issues like “climate change and epidemic disease” (Ebola, presumably, not included), Obama agreed that the media “absolutely” embellishes the threat posed by Islamist terrorism.

 

“What’s the famous saying about local newscasts, right? If it bleeds, it leads, right?” Obama said. The insinuation here is that the media’s focus on the war on international terrorism precipitated by the September 11th attacks is just ratings-grabbing sensationalism. After insinuating that, Obama went ahead and said it outright.

 

(Snip)

 

“We devote enormous resources to that, and it is right and appropriate for us to be vigilant and aggressive in trying to deal with that — the same way a big city mayor’s got to cut the crime rate down if he wants that city to thrive,” he continued. “But we also have to attend to a lot of other issues, and we’ve got to make sure we’re right-sizing our approach so that what we do isn’t counterproductive.”

 

This is perhaps the most disturbing element from Obama’s interview with Yglesias. Not only does he believe that Islamist attackers select their targets “randomly,” but that he regards his role as primarily to merely contain and manage the aftereffects of those attacks. Like crime, the president seems to concede that fundamentalist Islamist violence will always be a feature of life, and it is his job to ensure that bloody terrorist incidents are relatively infrequent and that the damage wrought by a successful attack is mitigated by a swift and judicious response.

 

(Snip)