The Oxygen of Publicity

I have been drawn to the relationship between terrorism and the media since I studied it at postgraduate level, and recent events have brought it sharply back into focus.

Margaret Thatcher called it the oxygen of publicity. The idea was simple, terrorists needed media attention the way a fire needs air, and denying them that attention was itself a form of counterterrorism. She said it in 1985, and the phrase has outlasted every government since, because the question underneath it has never been settled. Does covering acts of terror and violence feed the threat, or does the public’s right to know outweigh that risk? Academics have wrestled with this tension for half a century. Recent events in the United Kingdom have made it more urgent, and considerably more complicated, than it has ever been.

The relationship between violence and the media has always been a difficult one to characterise, because both sides arguably benefit from it. The scholar Brigitte Nacos described it as symbiotic, with those committing acts of terror relying on the media to amplify their message and induce fear, while media organisations benefit from the attention that covering attacks generates1. Brian Jenkins put it more bluntly when he wrote that terrorism is theatre2. Some academic definitions build publicity directly into the concept itself, describing terrorism as politically motivated violence in which the pursuit of publicity plays a significant role3. In that reading the violence is not the objective, instead, the audience is.

For most of modern history the oxygen Thatcher described flowed through a narrow pipe. Editors decided what was broadcast and journalists decided what was written, which at least created the possibility of restraint. That changed on 11 September 2001, when the attacks on the United States were covered globally with images broadcast on a loop, and scholars marked the moment as a turning point in the relationship between terrorism and the media4 . What followed removed the gatekeeper almost entirely. ISIS understood the emerging landscape better than any group before it, building a social media operation that flooded platforms with propaganda and turned graphic execution videos into a globally recognised brand5. When the British media nicknamed Mohammed Emwazi “Jihadi John” and grouped him with other British fighters under the pop-culture label of ‘The Beatles’, it raised an uncomfortable question about whether vivid headlines had handed a propaganda victory to the very people they were reporting on.

The relationship cuts both ways, and the evidence supports both halves of it, which is what makes this genuinely difficult rather than a question with an obvious answer.

On one side, there is a serious case that coverage feeds the threat. Frank Furedi has argued that outlets prioritise sensationalism over accuracy, presenting attacks as more frequent and more dangerous than they actually are6. The rolling news cycle, with its witness interviews and live updates, can make a situation feel more threatening than it is, which serves the attacker’s central aim of spreading fear out of proportion to the actual risk. David Altheide reached a similar conclusion, finding that the vivid imagery and dramatic narratives accompanying coverage contribute directly to public fear and unrest7. More recent work has put hard evidence under what these scholars argued in principle. A 2024 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that ranking systems built to reward engagement measurably amplify extremism and polarisation, not as a side effect but as a direct consequence of how the systems are designed to work8.

That fear carries consequences. Analysis by the London School of Economics found that coverage in the aftermath of attacks measurably amplified Islamophobic hate crime, with Muslim communities facing what the researchers called a media-magnified likelihood of victimisation9. Hostility toward those communities then feeds the radicalisation narrative that extremist groups rely on, which offers a grievance and a supposed response to those who feel targeted10. The cycle becomes self-sustaining, and the coverage becomes part of the machinery it is describing.

On the other side, the case for coverage is just as serious, and rests on more than the abstract principle of press freedom. Denis McQuail argued that the public’s right to know about events that affect them is fundamental to a functioning democracy, and that suppressing coverage is a form of censorship11. That is not only a democratic nicety. As the Southport case will show, the absence of credible information does not produce calm. It produces a vacuum that something less reliable rushes to fill, which means restraint and silence carry their own measurable risks rather than being a neutral safe option. The media’s role as the Fourth Estate depends on its willingness to report difficult and consequential events rather than only comfortable ones. The Manchester Arena bombing in May 2017 illustrated this clearly. The coverage of the attack and the inquiry that followed did not simply describe what had happened, it exposed the specific failings of the organisations responsible for safety that night and held them publicly accountable. That accountability had a tangible legislative result. The campaign for Martyn’s Law, named for victim Martyn Hett, drew on the public pressure generated by that coverage, and the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 received Royal Assent in April this year, requiring venues across the country to prepare formally for the possibility of attack12. The coverage that some argued amplified the terror also forced the change designed to prevent the next one.

The same coverage that amplifies the threat can also force the change designed to prevent the next one.

The ethical frameworks that have long governed journalism’s approach to this subject were built for a world that no longer exists. Verify before publishing, minimise harm, avoid amplifying the message, and avoid stigmatising communities. These are sound principles, but they were written for professionals working inside institutions that could be held to them.

That gatekeeping structure is precisely what has come apart, and the academic literature has begun to document the shift. A 2025 systematic review in Frontiers found that gatekeeping power has moved away from human editorial judgement toward algorithmic recommender systems, with newsrooms increasingly shaped by metric-driven visibility rather than editorial norms 13. The gatekeeper has not been replaced by another gatekeeper. It has been replaced by a system that promotes whatever generates engagement, served by millions of people who became publishers without ever being asked to think like one. The cases that demonstrate this shift in the United Kingdom are recent and specific, and their consequences were visible on the streets.

Southport is the clearest example. On 29 July 2024, Axel Rudakubana attacked a children’s dance class, murdering Bebe King, who was six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, who was seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, who was nine, and attempting to murder ten others14. Within hours a false name for the attacker was circulating online, alongside the claim that he was a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived by small boat. Rudakubana had in fact been born in Cardiff., the false claims spread regardless. Amnesty International’s analysis of X found that posts falsely describing the attacker as a Muslim, a refugee or a migrant reached an estimated 27 million views within 24 hours, and that posts by a single prominent far-right figure received over 580 million views in the fortnight that followed15. Mosques were attacked, riots spread across England and Northern Ireland. A parliamentary inquiry later concluded that social media business models had incentivised the spread of the misinformation16.

Alongside the false name, a second narrative accelerated across the same platforms: the accusation of two-tier policing, the claim that authorities apply different standards to different communities. Whether that accusation holds is a contested political question beyond the scope of this piece. What is not contested is that the perception spread at the same speed as the misinformation and became part of the same charged environment. Police debunked the false name within a day, but it made little difference, because a correction rarely travels as far as the claim it is correcting, and the algorithm has no preference for which one is true.

Here is the part of the Southport story that received the least attention while the disorder was unfolding. The misinformation did not defeat the truth in a fair contest, it moved into a space the truth was not permitted to enter.

Rudakubana was seventeen, which meant reporting restrictions prevented the media from naming him, and active criminal proceedings limited what the police could release. Merseyside Police confirmed quickly that the circulating name was false and that the suspect had been born in Cardiff, but they could not put a fuller account into the public domain. The false version had a name, a religion, a boat and a story. The accurate version, constrained by laws that exist to protect the fairness of a trial, had very little. The gap filled with everything else, and when it later emerged that Rudakubana had been charged with producing the biological toxin ricin and possessing an Al-Qaeda training manual, the delay in that information reaching the public fed a further wave of suspicion that the truth was being concealed.

There is a second difficult layer to this case - Rudakubana was never classified as a terrorist. Despite the ricin, the manual and a documented obsession with massacres ranging from school shootings to the Manchester Arena attack, which he had described as a good thing, he ‘held no fixed ideology’, instead he appeared fixated on violence itself. Set against the academic definition of terrorism as politically motivated violence in pursuit of publicity, he sits awkwardly on the line, a young man immersed in the methods and imagery of terror but without a cause. The law had no clear category for him. When the public was told that the worst attack on children in modern British history was not legally terrorism, many drew their own conclusions in an information environment already primed to distrust official accounts.

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The aftermath moved in two directions at once, and both are relevant.

The first was legal. More than a thousand arrests followed the disorder, with courts fast-tracking cases, and among those convicted were people whose only involvement had been online. Prison sentences were handed down for social media posts that incited violence17. Whatever one makes of the individual cases, the principle they established is significant, because the state effectively treated ordinary people with social media accounts as publishers carrying a publisher’s legal liability. The justice system reached a conclusion the wider culture has not yet absorbed, which is that the responsibilities of publication now extend to almost everyone.

The second reckoning fell on the institutions, and it vindicates the accountability argument that journalism has always made for itself. A Prevent Learning Review found that Rudakubana had been referred to the programme three times between December 2019 and April 2021, when he was thirteen and fourteen, by his own schools, for an interest in school shootings, the London Bridge attack and the IRA, and that each case was closed because too much weight was placed on his lack of a clear ideology18. The head of Prevent later left his post. The public inquiry chaired by Sir Adrian Fulford published its first report in April this year, running to 763 pages, and concluded that the attack could and should have been prevented, describing a fundamental failure by any agency to take ownership of the risk he posed and a repeated tendency to excuse his behaviour19. Referrals to Prevent have since risen to a record 8,778 in a single year, the majority now flagging individuals with no identified ideology at all, and the second phase of the inquiry is examining how young people are drawn toward extreme violence20.

None of that scrutiny happens without sustained coverage. The same information environment that spread the false name also kept the failures of Prevent, the police, social services and the family in public view long enough to force an inquiry, a resignation and a structural rethink of how the country identifies dangerous young people who fit no established category. Manchester produced Martyn’s Law. Southport is reshaping Prevent. The coverage that inflamed the streets is also the coverage that is changing the system.

Two more recent events show both sides of this in close succession.

In Southampton, bodycam footage from the scene of Henry Nowak’s killing forced national scrutiny of how police treated a dying young man. Nowak, an eighteen-year-old student, was stabbed five times by Vickrum Digwa in December 2025. When officers arrived, Digwa falsely claimed he had been the victim of a racist assault, and the footage, released later with the family’s permission, showed officers handcuffing Nowak as he told them repeatedly that he had been stabbed and could not breathe21. A jury rejected Digwa’s account and convicted him of murder, and he was sentenced to life with a minimum of 21 years. The footage prompted an Independent Office for Police Conduct investigation, protests in Southampton, and again, prominent political claims of two-tier policing. The release of that footage is the reason any of it reached public attention at all.

In Belfast, a man was seriously injured in a knife attack in the north of the city in June 2026, losing the sight in one eye, and a Sudanese man was charged with attempted murder, possession of a knife and making threats to kill. Police stated the attack was not being treated as terrorism, and initially and incorrectly identified the suspect as Somali, an error that itself circulated online. A graphic video of the attack spread within hours and was amplified by high-profile accounts calling for protest. Disorder followed the next night - the fire service handled 256 calls and attended 62 incidents in a single evening, homes and vehicles were set alight, and families were forced to flee properties in neighbourhoods with large immigrant populations22. The contrast is not accidental. Research published in Science in 2025 found that the level of hostility people encounter in a feed shifts when the ranking behind it is changed, a reminder that the same mechanism can be tuned toward very different outcomes, and that what it produces is a matter of design rather than fate23.

The mechanism in both cases is the same. Footage travels, millions see it, and events follow at the speed of the footage. In Southampton the result was accountability for a grave institutional failure, whereas Belfast the result was disorder and families fleeing burning homes.

The oxygen of publicity is neither good nor bad. It is indifferent, and what it feeds depends on what is already alight.

The ethical questions that once belonged to editors now belong to anyone holding a phone in the aftermath of a violent event, and as the post-Southport sentencing established, they carry a measure of legal responsibility for the answers whether they realise it or not.

Is this verified, or am I about to pass on something because it made me feel something? Whose dignity is in the frame, and would I want it shared if the person were someone I loved? And perhaps the hardest one, the question Southport should have taught everyone watching: am I certain, or am I simply early?

None of this argues for silence. The public’s right to know still matters, and the accountability that coverage forces is real, valuable and currently reshaping how this country approaches violence from people who fit no familiar category. What it argues for is the one thing the information environment is built to discourage, which is a pause between the feeling and the share.

Thatcher’s warning was aimed at broadcasters and editors, and it still stands. It simply applies now to a great many more people than it did in 1985. The harder question is the one we have not yet answered as a society.

When everyone holds the oxygen, who is responsible for the fire?

Safety and Security. From someone hired to protect.