Page 193 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 172

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
an audience but it will not let him transmit his message. By sapping terrorism
of its political content, the media turn the crusader into a psychopath’ (1984,
p. 287). For these reasons, much media coverage of terrorism may be viewed
as ultimately self-defeating.
As noted above, one goal of terrorist activity may be to provoke state
repression or to demoralise a population and force a change in policy. Media
coverage can provide success in these terms, as the Provisional IRA and others
have shown. Kelly and Mitchell are correct, however, to assert that no media
system will provide terrorism against its own state with legitimation. For
some governments, moreover, even publicity is frowned upon. When in 1985
the British Home Secretary warned journalists against providing Irish
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Republican terrorists with the ‘oxygen of publicity’ he was implying that any
coverage of such activities – negative or otherwise – was harmful to the
mainstream political process. In so far as coverage of spectacular terrorist acts
assists the groups responsible to shape the political agenda, he was probably
correct. Media organisations, however, have been reluctant to censor
themselves on these grounds, arguing that denial or avoidance of the issues
which generate terrorism is – apart from being an unacceptable restriction of
the media’s fourth estate role – ultimately counter-productive to the resolution
of those issues. Thus despite pressure from some official quarters for them not
to do so, media organisations in both the US and the UK have broadcast, at
least in part, video footage of beheadings, as well as propaganda videos
prepared by senior al-Quaida leaders and suicide bombers such as those who
carried out the London underground bombings of July 2005.
In the latter part of the decade al-Quaida continued to use the internet to
disseminate audio and video propaganda messages, though with less
frequency and impact on public opinion than had been the case in the
immediate post-9/11 period. Western security agencies were successful in
closing down many jihadist websites, and constraining terrorist use of the
internet for either organisational or communication purposes. More promi-
nent in recent years has been the use of the net to make publicly available
classified military documents and other materials such as footage of the May
2010 peace flotilla off Gaza. These have not been produced by terrorist
organisations but by pressure groups, although the material becoming
available has impacted on the broader global debate about the issues around
jihad, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.

Further reading
Andrew Chadwick’s Internet Politics (2004) examines the role of
digital media in pressure group politics.

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