Managing Fear. Contrasting Real and Media Represented Terrorism: Toward A Training Project To Prepare Police and Journalists

The phenomenon of terrorism is no longer limited to covert actions and intelligence, but indeed part of broader social reality. This implies the need for a trans-disciplinary semantic map related to contrasting terrorism and an analysis of those media mechanisms which generate insecurity among the general public. A few of the disciplines having dealt with the complexity of recent terrorist events are strategic studies such as international law, social science, political science, and psychological approaches (Spaaij, 2012). For example, almost 15 years after the attack on the Twin Towers, the most "spectacular" terrorist attack in the history of the West, precisely because it was carried out with the means of Western society itself, we can say that we find ourselves faced with a situation of exasperation (Morcellini, 2003; Chomsky, 2011). From the twin towers event, up to the Paris attacks of November 13, 2015, terror strategies seem refined and even more subtle in the use of the dynamics and the language of the contemporary media. The ambition to control the West is carried out through media propaganda, exploited in all its potential, to ensnare the dreams of progress and the democracies, whether European or not, in a veritable cage of fear. This situation of communication control was already anticipated in the early eighties in the McBride report on the problems of global communication. In the introduction to the report, the then Director General of UNESCO Amadou-Mathar M'Bow, addressing the complexity of communication processes, stated "these, however, are only some of the prospects offered by an age which is equally capable of producing the best for the future, or the worst. They will be realised only if the temptation to enlist the mass media on the service of narrow sectarian interests and to turn them into new instruments of power, justifying assaults on human dignity and aggravating the inequalities already existing between nations and within individual nations themselves is resisted” (Amadou-Mathar M'Bow, 1980, p. XiV). In the current context, what seems clear is that the democratic conventionalism of the media and its inability to narrate the changing world and fully understand its power and social function, tends to set up a kind of "public limited company": a result of the association between the media and terrorism/organized crime. Going even deeper, we can clearly outline some very serious consequences of this in social, communicative, and even educational terms. With regard to the effect on the quality of social life, the first obvious consequence is related to the glorification of the individualistic dimension, already the subject of much sociological literature, which creates an unnatural annihilation of man's social nature. Yet, even more than individualism, the fear of unforeseen terrorist threats generates immobility and translates into isolationism: what is lost is the security of “being together” that comes from trust as platform of solidarity and happiness in a society (Gavrila, 2014, p. 40). Not surprisingly, one of the key categories to understanding and interpreting the degree of happiness of a social group or nation is the need for security, a point confirmed by World Happiness Report 2013 (Helliwell, Layard, Sachs 2014). Moreover, already at the end of the nineties, Amartya Sen had convincingly argued that recognition of the complexity of human nature and the diversity of the physical environment and human surroundings cannot one-dimensionally identify human well-being from a utilitarian point of view, but rather, as a number of vital functions, actions and conditions that people consider important in the course of their lives. These functions range from the basics, such as being properly fed, or free of diseases, to activities or complex conditions such as political freedom, job security, social opportunities, access to education and information, and the guarantee of protection and security (Sen 1997 and 1999).