Reporting on terror
The ISIS beat
Ordinarily, the American security apparatus needs to work hard to explain to us who we’re supposed to fear and why. In 2014, an Islamic militant organization gained power throughout Syria and Iraq that was so cruel and so shockingly violent that the U.S. found its familiar task of threat construction simplified. “Western prisoners in orange Guantanamo-style jumpsuits, surrounded by rifle-wielding men in black,” became the “indelible” image of ISIS, wrote Rozina Ali in her 2021 Drift essay “The ISIS Beat.” The phenomenon quickly led to a media frenzy. Commentators speculated freely about ISIS’s plans, and stoked fears about the spread of “radicalization.” Ali described how one French journalist posed as “a Muslim convert interested in marrying an ISIS fighter” in order to write an exposé on the group, adapting sting tactics used by the FBI. The New York Times was forced to retract core claims made on its “Caliphate” podcast, which sought to explain ISIS as an ideological force. Things got out of hand, to say the least.
Just when ISIS seemed to be fading from our collective memory, a 42-year-old Army veteran killed fourteen people on New Year’s Day in New Orleans by driving his truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street. The attacker’s black-and-white ISIS flag quickly made headlines. Once again, the media switched into overdrive theorizing about how “radicalism” spreads domestically. Bruce Hoffman, senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations, told NPR that the attack highlighted the appeal of ISIS “to people susceptible or amenable to radicalization and recruitment.” On ABC, Congressman Michael McCaul urged Trump administration officials to “pay attention to social media and connect the dots before these events happen,” and JP Morrell, now New Orleans’ City Council president, went on PBS to plead with tech companies to develop systems to flag “if someone says, ‘I’ve been radicalized by ISIS.’”
The media’s drive to slot bewildering violence into a neat narrative gives rise to sloppily reported stories. Years after the “Caliphate” scandal, journalists and critics have challenged the veracity of the Times’s report on sexual violence allegedly committed by Hamas on October 7. Anat Schwartz, one of three bylines on the story, admitted that she had struggled to find direct evidence of sexual violence during her research. The Intercept reported that Schwartz, who had no prior investigative experience, had liked a post on X that advocated for the establishment of “a narrative according to which Hamas is ISIS,” because this is “a familiar, contemporary sentiment that scares Westerners.”
The legacy of the “ISIS beat” can be seen in negligent and paranoid reporting that ignores the local contexts of militant groups, failing to interrogate why extreme ideologies might resonate with people who have been subjected to brutal dictators and oppressive imperial rule. It helps fuel forever wars abroad, as Ali acutely described in her Drift essay, and it also actively manufactures consent for domestic surveillance. On Inauguration Day, Trump signed an executive order directing officials to identify nations with “deficient” screening processes and then collect “relevant” information on citizens from these countries already residing in the U.S. — monitoring them for “hostile attitudes” and support of designated “foreign terrorist organizations” (which include ISIS, Hamas, and Hezbollah without distinction).
On March 8, federal immigration agents detained Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, despite his legal status. A wave of other detentions and deportations, justified in many cases by baseless allegations of support for “terrorism,” has followed. “My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza,” Khalil wrote from a detention facility in Louisiana. The war on terror has long had civil liberties in its sights, but now that it has metastasized into a full-scale war on dissent, the time has come to reassess the terrorism beat and the media’s role in creating the environment of fear that the Trump administration is currently exploiting.
Sincerely,
Saliha Bayrak
Associate Editor
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