Expert panelists emphasized the media’s role as an active member in the Sept. 11 narrative at a discussion hosted by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Science on Monday.
Titled “The Role of The Media in Preventing Another Sept. 11,” the event commemorated the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“Currently, the media is not simply telling the story, the media is part of the story,” said Kathleen Brosnan, the Associate Dean for College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.
Panelists at the event included Garth Jowett, a UH communications professor, Ryan Kennedy, an assistant professor of political science, Don Clark, who served in the FBI for 25 years and Abdülhamit Bilici, a columnist for Zaman newspapers.
“The 9/11 attacks were an event of major global importance. It emphasized the fractures in the ideological/religious world that has become a feature of post-Cold War international relations,” Jowett said. “As such, international relationships have become much more contentious and difficult to reconcile. Rather than bringing the world together, it has increased suspicions and hostilities.”
Jowett also argued that the media has played a role in making immigration laws more strict.
“Clearly the visa restrictions have made it difficult for many travelers to visit the US, discouraged foreign students and increased international hostility toward the US,” Jowett said.
According to Immigration Bureau statistics, three of the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks were here illegally on expired visas, and two were able to obtain valid visas despite being on US intelligence agency watch lists. “It is mainly the responsibility of law and enforcement like FBI to prevent terrorism. Media’s role should be centralized to passing out information to the public,” Clark said.
Kennedy argued with Samuel P. Huntington’s famous statement that modern societies are becoming more complex and disordered.
“Perhaps the biggest change has been in the methods for recruitment of terrorist actors and in the information available to those actors. Today through the Internet a person can be recruited into a terrorist cause and learn how to carry out an attack, all without ever actually joining the group or even having personal contact with a larger organization,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy also expressed his expectations of future generations.
“College students should be critical consumers of media. In the aftermath of 9/11, many of us were told by self-styled terrorism experts that the US faced an existential threat to its security,” Kennedy said.
“Today we realize that the US is much stronger than that. If the goal of terrorism is terror, we should be suspicious of those who, in the aftermath of an attack, ask us to embrace fear and react by emotional reflex.”
