How American News Networks Covered the Manchester Attack

It is always hard, in times of great horror, to contextualise terror in spaces that are foreign to you. That's when we rely on the media to paint a picture of the landscape around us: to bring us inside the Bataclan, to show us Belgium from the ground, to take us to Berlin. Sometimes, though, the media is anything but helpful, and is in fact actively misleading. When, for instance, Westminster was brought to a standstill in a terror attack earlier this year, we did not go to the American news channels to see how London was affected and coping.

But these networks still try: in the wake of Monday's horrendous attack on fans leaving the Manchester Arena, American news networks went into overdrive, painting a portrait of a Manchester unfamiliar to most British natives, as well as foisting an Islamic terrorist narrative over the whole attack before anyone this side of the pond knew what was happening. Yesterday, we variously watched feeds from Fox, MSNBC and CNN, and here's what we learned about our second city from that:

The CNN audience, at least, does not immediately know this. That is the only way to explain how Manchester is intro'd, each and every time it's mentioned. "Manchester," they say, the news anchors, "England." This is a key difference between the US and UK. If you say to me the third-largest city in the US – "Chicago", for example – I will know that is in the USA.

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Hours before the bomber's identity was revealed, the US either had the lead on a name for the attacker or had commentators doing lots of "for argument's sake…" about the possibility of the attack being tied to ISIS. From there, it was just a couple of ghoulish baby steps to ruminating on on how Trump's hardline policies were good and how the Muslim ban was actually justified. Nigel Farage, who appeared on Fox News, managed to tie the attack not-even-close-to-seamlessly back to Brexit and immigration ("Well so far in the election we've been talking basically about Brexit and completing Brexit— and actually terror, open-door immigration, they've played relatively low roles in the election campaign so far. Now there are 16 days to go: if it were to turn out that this attack – let's say, for argument's sake, has been taken place by somebody who'd been fighting with ISIS in Syria, and had returned home – that it does clearly have potential to change the way people think"). Meanwhile, Fox guest Rob O'Neil was sure of the religious identity of the attacker, hours before Manchester Police even knew who it was. He suited up to talk about "caliphate clubs" – ISIS fans whose goal it is to "destroy the world".

We now know the attacker was British-born and of Libyan descent.

American news is pretty sure it's figured out how to quell terror before it's even started: CCTV and police surveillance, on every street and at every hour of the day. In an inexplicable 2AM interview with Nigel Farage, the former UKIP leader was quizzed as to whether Manchester was seen as a soft target because it had fewer cameras than London. "Yes," he plummed. "The British security services are aware the threat in this country is more than in the capital city: in 2009, a major al-Qaeda plot was thwarted at a shopping centre in Manchester. So it's been in the crosshairs for a while: jihadis know wherever they attack in the UK will get coverage." Over on MSNBC, a screaming guy called Paul with a military haircut was pulling CCTV data out of his ass. "THE ONLY CITY IN THE UK WITH MORE CCTV COVERAGE THAN MANCHESTER IS LONDON! IT'S BASICALLY NUMBER TWO!"

Geraldo Rivera is a special type of moustache the US news networks wheel out when they need a sensitive subject chaotically commented upon, and also he knows quite a lot about Manchester street tuffs, somehow, despite living and working in New York.

One of Fox News' commentators yesterday said something we, in Britain, were unaware of, which is that we are at war with Islamic extremists. Inevitably, this war was looped back to the need for tougher measures and strengthened borders.

As the day went on, there was ever more desk-thumping about Israel (President Trump took time out of his tour of Jerusalem to release a statement calling the terrorists "losers", which shifted network attention back to him) and a fictional-sounding scheme from the Palestinian government to reward those who succeeded in carrying out terror attacks with monies – a topic that was discussed without any evidence at all, yet increasingly used to justify rhetoric that demanded tighter defences, Muslim screenings and border walls. Fox News invited a representative from right-wing thinktank American Enterprise Institute to run the rule on these so-called findings. He said the solution is to cut off funding to the UN refugee programme. "The way to deal with terrorists is to kill them, not do nation building," the commentator said.

– Manchester does not have enough CCTV;
– The streets are full of extremist street gangs;
– Britain is at war;

Thank you, America.

More on VICE:

We Won't Let the Manchester Attack Break Our Spirits

The Simple Problems with the Right's Response to the Manchester Attack