by Jeffrey D. Simon

About the author: Currently a foreign policy consultant, Jeffrey D. Simon spent six years with the Rand Corporation as a specialist on terrorism and political violence.

“The terrorists are manipulating the media and getting great kicks,” said Daniel Schorr, former CBS and CNN News correspondent and currently senior news analyst for National Public Radio. “And it’s this mindless competition [among news organizations] which causes them to do it. There really ought to be a kind of voluntary code in which they say, ‘We report the news, we don’t dramatize it more than it is already demanding. [And] we don’t do live interviews.’ ” Schorr’s views reflect a widely shared perception among the public, government officials, and some newspeople themselves that...