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A terrorist act is sure to receive the widest possible attention. There is no need to cry in the wilderness when anyone so inclined can plead his case on national television. Says Atlanta Psychiatrist Alfred Messer: "If someone has a latent wish to commit a criminal act, he can be galvanized by the media. He can act out any grandiose fantasies or make up for a sense of impotence."
Certainly the Hanafis had all the attention they could have asked for. At each of the buildings they seized, an outdoor television studio was created, and newsmen competed for telephone interviews with the gunmen. Dr. Harold Visotsky, chairman of the department of psychiatry at Northwestern University, believes that deranged persons have a passion for keeping up with the news and imitating it. "These crimes are highly contagious," he says. Today in the U.S. they are a virulent social illness.