Question: How could the media even cover up a terror-attack, even if they wanted to?

[DetlefK]

There's a terror-attack.
The police knows about this. They issue public statements.
The hospitals and fire-brigade know about this. They talk to people.
There are multiple witnesses. They talk to people.
Nowadays, it's perfectly normal for people to shoot smartphone-videos of the incident and sell the video to the next-best TV-channel.
The traffic gets blocked and rerouted until the scene has been secured, evidence collected, and the scene repaired and brought back to normal and reopened. This is done by officials and they are talking to other people.



Now, how could I as a journalist keep this a secret???
This would take a huge conspiracy to not report on this. The power of not reporting on this is all the media would have.
It would certainly mean that none of the involved media-outlets falls for the lure of exclusively reporting on a shocking and tragic incident while all the other outlets pretend that nothing happened.

But even if they have this conspiracy, how can the media possibly keep the police and the witnesses and the medics and the municipal officials from talking about this?????
What about media-outlets that are content-publishers, not content-providers? Like Facebook, Twitter, Instagramm, Reddit...

How would this cover-up even work???

Media-outlets like Fox News and Russia Today are non-stop pushing a mix of truths, half-truths and outright lies. But the truth gets out anyways because there is always somebody else who reports on this. So how is a cover-up by the media even feasible?

[drm604]

1. They couldn't

It's not possible.

[neeksgeek]

2. The "moon landing hoax" would be child's play

Compared to this. Covering up a public occurrence today is literally impossible. Smart phones are everywhere.

When Our Dear Mendacious Leader made this claim (the media is covering up terrorism), I immediately thought of the cell phone /social media phenomenon.

Q: Where is the amateur footage?

A: There isn't any, because it didn't happen.

[rgbecker]

3. Not to defend Trump or his minions but I present this thought:

The complaint is that the media selects which stories to promote and which to bury in the middle of the ads. There are people, today, in the USA that, because of where they get their news, have never heard of the Bowling Green Massacre or of the fact that the special council to the President of the USA is an idiotic liar.

That said, it would be pretty odd for the MSM to miss an opportunity to report a Terrorist Attack should the opportunity arise.

[spanone]

4. this is distraction. nothing more. everybody knows the media covers terror ad nauseum.

[Dave Starsky]

6. "If it bleeds, it leads."

That's one of the fundamental maxims in journalism.

[Ms. Toad]

5. That's not how I understood his statement -

I believe he was alleging the attacks were so commonplace that the press doesn't even bother to report on them.