Terrorism As Spectacle
This piece was originally published in the first 2018 edition of The Full Bench: Fear Itself. To take a look at the rest of the magazine, please visit https://issuu.com/utslawstudentssociety/docs/tfb_draft_final_bleed_7_single_page
Like most Sydneysiders, I remember exactly where I was when the Lindt café siege began in December 2014. In fact, I remember most of the next 15 hours. It was one of the most surreal days in Sydney’s history. The siege became a live television event, with every news outlet hurriedly trying to be the first to break a new development. Some bolted prematurely, leading to panicked reports of a second gunman, a bomb at the Opera House, and the one-off return of the afternoon edition of The Daily Telegraph to loudly trumpet the siege as an attack on Sydney by Islamic State.
What’s more, cameras were fixed on the entrances to the café, allowing the viewing audience to watch the siege unfold in real time. We watched as a succession of hostages burst through the entrances without warning in desperate bids for freedom. We provided a running commentary on the siege as if it were sport, yelling at the police to go in before it got dark, calling for the floodlights to be switched off around Martin Place, discussing whether the Prime Minister should meet the gunman’s demands to speak with him. Then, we all went off to bed and waited for the result in the morning.
That seems to be the reality of terrorism in today’s times. It is terrorism as spectacle, as an “event” to be watched in real time, analysed and debated before its resolution. In a piece published two days after the end of the siege, academic Dr Adam Henschke said, in conducting the siege as a spectacle, the perpetrator would have likely sought a violent response (either from the state or from our society) which would justify his actions and inspire future perpetrators. Ultimately, the perpetrator got his violent state response. However, a societal counter-response of tolerance and acceptance, exemplified by the #illridewithyou hashtag, was in full swing long before the siege itself had ended. Yet the spectacle of terrorism is not only about how it facilitates the goals of the perpetrators; the influence of the spectacle is also apparent in the responses of ‘our side’.
In the world of terrorism as spectacle, counter-terrorism measures increasingly boil down to visuals. These visuals, like the anti-truck bollards in Martin Place or the new security fence around Federal Parliament, are as much philosophical statements as they are effective preventers of terrorism (I consider it to be exceedingly likely that the bulk of that work continues to be done through the traditional avenues of intelligence-gathering, surveillance, and police raids). Further, it is arguable that measures which approach terrorism as spectacle appeal mainly to our senses and instincts. They focus equally on making us safe as they focus on making us feel safe. We see suspects hauled to police vans in front of a media throng so that justice is not only done, but seen to be done.
None of which is necessarily bad, of course. If something helps to keep us safe, then surely there is no harm in feeling safe either. Yet this is predicated on one vital and, in this author’s view, eminently contestable assumption: that these visible security measures have the effect of making the populace feel safer, rather than the perverse opposite of exaggerating the fear we feel towards a threat which rarely manifests in the daily life of the Australian city-goer. It is an inherent danger whenever policy becomes concerned principally with perception: that the response distorts those perceptions. In the world of terrorism as spectacle, visuals are powerful symbols not only of the strength of “our side”, but of how we perceive the threat of the adversary.
And this, ultimately, is the tension which underlies many of the discussions in this edition: how to effectively balance the need for security from terrorism while remaining rational in our assessment of the scope of the threat. Let us assume that governments, in implementing all of their highly visual security measures, are engaged in genuine attempts to resolve this tension: that they are as much concerned with keeping Australians safe and doing justice as they are about making Australians feel safe and seeing justice be done. Let us then examine the role of the principal mediator of government-citizen relations, the body tasked with processing and reporting delicate information to a nervous public on the day of the Lindt café siege: the media.
In his book positing terrorism as a communications process, American academic Jonathan Matusitz was decidedly cynical about the role of the media in terrorist incidents, describing their coverage as being on a ‘diet of entertainment, with a large quality of fear’ which uses visually stimulating media and evocative control to act as an agent of social control. Even disregarding the hypothesis of terrorism coverage as a social conspiracy, it seems intuitive that entertainment is a vital goal of news media; with greater competition from a wide variety of new media, and journalism increasingly privileging immediacy and currency, providing compelling content to consumers is the key imperative.
Here, it becomes clear that terrorism works best for media as a spectacle. It can capture an audience for hours on end, waiting eagerly for a resolution. It can produce powerful and resonant images that endure long past the event itself. But what happens when an outlet’s competitors are all producing equally around-the-clock coverage? As the Lindt café siege attest, it becomes a contest to augment the visuals with contextual information. Yet here, the craving for immediacy and currency again claimed precedence over accuracy, with the spread of misinformation like the second gunman and bomb threat rumours, as well as a succession of ‘talking heads’ giving their takes on events. These included not only terrorism experts, but also ‘social commentators’; those without special expertise who nevertheless were entrusted with mid-siege commentary.
At the risk of stating the obvious, inaccurate reporting and other inflammatory commentary during an ongoing terrorist incident, particularly a delicate hostage situation, is dangerous. It risks unintentionally leading the public into positions of danger or even provoking a rash response from the perpetrator (who may have access to the media). By contrast, look at the media’s coverage of events since the siege, particularly the inquest. With some sensationalist exceptions, the coverage of the inquest was everything that the siege coverage itself was not: measured, accurate, and insightful. In a world where terrorism is spectacle, media coverage acts as sporting commentary; and the loudest and quickest voices usually win out.
The morning after the Lindt café siege, Sydney woke to hear that two hostages had been killed in the siege’s violent resolution. It was a jarring end to a spectacle which had already proceeded through all of the stages of spectating. The frantic reporting of facts and fictions, the tactical discussions, the edge-of-your-seat thrills of watching live escapes, the grand philosophical declarations that the terrorists will not succeed in dividing our society; all of these had taken place while the siege was ongoing, while lives were still on the line. In a world where terrorist attacks are increasingly becoming events, all sides would do well to remember something that we as a society arguably forgot as we watched the Lindt café siege unfold: there are always real people with real lives existing outside of the spectacle.
