Photo: Giuseppe Cacace/AFP via Getty Images

A few weeks ago, as the tide of the coronavirus pandemic began crashing down on Western countries, a provocative news story broke through the clamor and went viral in dozens of outlets. The strange headlines stated that the terrorist group Islamic State had issued a travel warning urging its fighters to avoid going to Europe due to the outbreak of the coronavirus. Citing a “full-page infographic” posted on a newsletter associated with the group, ISIS had allegedly told its members “to put trust in God and seek refuge in Him from illnesses,” prudently advising them to wash their hands and stay out of areas where the disease had spread. Under normal circumstances, even absent a global pandemic, an obscure message published in the foreign-language newsletter of a militant group should be unlikely to gain much traction in a fierce global attention economy. But ISIS has always been catnip for journalists.

If you’re trying to grow a political movement or even just keep it alive, attention is your oxygen.

From Politico to The Independent to the New York Daily News, the odd news about ISIS responding to the coronavirus was picked up and amplified across the world. It would not be hard to imagine that tens of millions of people saw the story — making it an impressive return on investment for an infographic that likely cost nothing to make. If you’re trying to grow a political movement, or even just keep it alive, attention is your oxygen. And, for some time now, the media has been acting as a ventilator: amplifying the most obscure and ridiculous ISIS propaganda in what genuinely seems like an attempt to wish it back into prominence. This hunger for the notoriety the group provided is an advantage that ISIS supporters seem to have learned to capitalize on, producing content to keep its public image alive even as most of its members have been killed and its real-world power mostly destroyed.

Writing in The Atlantic as far back as 2017, Charlie Winter, a senior research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, noted the group’s skill at turning the media’s hunger for infamy into a weapon. “For ISIS, provided it’s on the propagandists’ terms and conveys the group’s purported strength and omnipresence, any coverage is good coverage,” Winter wrote. “In that sense, ISIS terrorism doesn’t end when a bomb detonates. Rather, it continues for hours, days, and weeks after, living on through the media.” During the period when ISIS actually was setting off bombs and carrying out attacks in Western cities, the group was able to win attention for its cause through what other long-ago terrorists and anarchists called “propaganda of the deed.” At its peak, there was genuine newsworthiness in ISIS’s novel use of highly produced visuals to promote themselves. Over the past few years, however, journalists have had to go out of their way to gin up propaganda for the group as its attacks become increasingly pathetic, and its actual organization reduced to an insurgency in the borderlands of Iraq and Syria. As the actual ISIS has gone further into decline, news outlets in search of clicks — usually, but not always, tabloids — have had to dive deeper and deeper into the online dumpster heap to find provocations from the group’s supporters.