Pursuing Terrorists as Reality TV

When American football star O.J. Simpson fled from police after his wife was murdered, the entire nation watched it all on TV. It was the first police pursuit filmed from a helicopter and broadcast for hours by the U.S. media. On Friday in Boston, the world was also watching as police locked down an entire major city to search for a terrorism suspect.

The extent of globalization that occurred in the last 10 years was also evident in the coverage. Just as terrorism can strike anyplace on earth, now nearly everyone on earth can watch with a mixture of fear and sensationalist rubbernecking as a suspected terrorist is pursued through the suburbs of a major American city.

The simultaneous reporting of a letter bomb sent to the German president was all that was needed to complete the illusion of a global terrorist conspiracy for the audience.

But of course the connections are all merely the product of active imaginations. The TV announcers broadcasting hour after hour from Boston indulged in the most reckless guesswork concerning what motivated the perpetrators as well as what their backgrounds included. But that all comes as part and parcel of today’s global media world; the incessant hum of information that, in reality, is not information at all.