making the best of the worst: how terrorism can be an 'explosive' plus from the media's perspective

Now I hate to reference myself but for the sake of keeping somewhat closer to the word limit...

As mentioned in a previous post, as society's "fourth estate", the media has a 'watchdog position' to fulfill. Some news outlets however (yes the decision of the outlet, not the individual journalists), have xa deluded sense of this role and being the commercialised industries that they are, attempt to exploit this position of trust entrusted upon them by the public to increase their profits.

Because advertisers within the online news market pay for increased coverage (and therefore work on a pay-per-view basis), any story that can captivate more interest is of great value to such a news outlet. In addition to this is the reality that the broader a target audience appears to be, the more likely an advertisement will buy the associated space corresponding to that particular article.
What is most interesting about this phenomena is the psychological reasoning amongst which they write the articles; using the [where they make something appear as though it appeals to everyone] principal, allow for the article to be read in a way that is a threat to the reader, regardless of their age, race, gender or creed. These menacing articles make out that “we” are constantly being threatened by things such as Burqas, or even their banning and that such actions are “Un-Australian”, an emotive call for everyone to create a fuss, and blindly oppose what is being discussed. This “us vs them” mentality is known as “scaremongering” and is commonly used by the media to ensure ongoing readership as throughout an ongoing ordeal or saga, or even to satisfy political interests with a particularly positive tainting of a certain politician or party.

The news that generally has the most widespread and universal appeal is that of terrorist attacks or terrorism-related offenses (such as attempting to procure the weapons necessary to achieve terrorist attacks). This is because an illusion is created by the media that the possibility of one of these terrorist attacks occurring is abundantly high at any time and that they could affect dozens of people that you (the reader) know and love. News outlets generally capitalise on these stories by stretching out facts and details over a plethora of ongoing coverage and "exclusive reports"; a recent example of this was the trial of the group of men that were allegedly plotting to attack the Holsworthy Army Base.
This case was dragged over many articles as the details were slowly released to the trial, however almost every article that regarded this case was used as the Cover page article of the Daily Telegraph [demonstrating its ability to generate interest and sell.

Conversely, such scaremongering by the media can aid political movements; one such instance was that of the "children overboard" scandal which occurred in the lead up to the 2001 Australian federal election, and is thought to have played a large part in having the conservative party re-elected./main/images/articles/aus8_manning-phiddian_2.jpg">