On October 14, journalists and women’s association members put their heads and pens together to draft a Declaration of Principles on Media Coverage and Journalistic Practices concerning Violence against Women. The same day, Alaa Chebbi is denounced by activists for “violating press laws” and “normalizing violence against women and little girls […] just to make a buzz.”
With war waged against terrorism, questions of ethics and deontology have faded into the background. In the meantime, media treatment of the Bardo Attack is a textbook case of politicization that allows us to measure the ambiguity of relations between media and power. The trigger effect of security discourse has mobilized judiciary and police organs born and bred under a dictatorship that was immune to the threat of terrorism. To what extent can regulations contain this return to normalization?
