Kerry: Media Should Cover Terrorism Less So ‘People Wouldn’t Know What’s Going On’

Secretary of State John Kerry argued in a speech Monday that the media should stop covering terrorism so much and that it would be helpful if people didn’t know what was happened.

“Remember this: No country is immune from terrorism,” he told a press gaggle in Dhaka, Bangladesh. “It’s easy to terrorize. Government and law enforcement have to be correct 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.”

“But if you decide one day you’re going to be a terrorist and you’re willing to kill yourself, you can go out and kill some people. You can make some noise,” Kerry continued. “Perhaps the media would do us all a service if they didn’t cover it quite as much. People wouldn’t know what’s going on.”

Kerry’s boss President Barack Obama made a similar criticism of media coverage of terrorism in a 2015 interview with Vox, during which he said the media “absolutely” overstates the threat of terrorism. “If it bleeds, it leads,” he complained.

Below is a partial transcript of his remarks:

[Image via screengrab]
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