A week ago, I tried to steer y’all toward this insightful essay by Vodkapundit‘s Stephen Green on the decisive role the media will play in maintaining or defeating our efforts against expansionsionist radical Islam. I still heartily recommend the piece, though I cannot say it leaves one exacty in the whistling-cheerful-tunes mode.
Steven Den Beste, formerly of USS Clueless and one of my inspirations to begin blogging, has posted a follow-on piece to Mr. Green’s essay over at Red State.org. In it, he agrees that the decisive arm of our global battle is the media, but that is also a double-edged sword for the terrorists.
But for the terrorists and Islamists, there’s a distinct drawback in this kind of war: headline fatigue. Even given that the western press tends to be more sympathetic to the terrorists than to western governments in the war, an ongoing campaign of car bombings in Iraq eventually becomes boring and gets consigned to the rear pages of the newspaper.
That means that the terrorists have to come up with increasingly spectacular escapades in order to maintain the attention of the western press. A couple of years ago the new innovation was video decapitations, but eventually the novelty wore off.
But the other side of the coin of headline fatigue is revulsion. Increasingly spectacular escapades become increasingly vile atrocities. They get the headlines, alright, but repel more people than they attract.
Go. Read. It’s a bit tighter in scope than the Martini Guy’s, and a bit more hopeful as well, but all in all an essential companion piece. Together, they make a solid one-two combination from two of the best in the blogging business.