Page 30 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

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

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION
Pressure group politics, like that of parties and public organisations, are
largely about communication, using the variety of advertising and public
relations techniques now available. Some groups, like Greenpeace and
Friends of the Earth, have proved themselves to be skilled exponents of these
techniques. But because of their non-institutional, more or less marginal
character, they are frequently deprived of the financial and status resources
which accrue to more established political actors, and must therefore devise
less expensive means of communicating their political messages, such as
symbolic forms of protest and ‘spectaculars’ designed to attract the attention
of journalists. Chapter 8 will explore these techniques and assess their
effectiveness in some detail.

Terrorist organisations
The third category of non-party political actor to which we shall refer in
Chapter 8 is the terrorist organisation. Although the term ‘terrorist’ is value-
laden, and may be rejected by groups whose members may prefer to see
themselves as ‘freedom fighters’ in ‘national liberation’ or ‘resistance’
movements, we shall use the term here to refer to groups which use terror
tactics – urban bombing, hi-jacking, assassination, and kidnapping, to list
the most common – to achieve their political objectives. In this sense, many
of the world’s governments, including those of South Africa, Israel, France,
and the US, have at one time or another committed acts of (state) terrorism.
In 2010 Israeli agents assassinated a Palestinian politician in Dubai.
More commonly associated with terrorism, however, are such organ-
isations as the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland (until the 1998
peace agreement ended ‘the war’, at any rate), Hamas and Hezbollah in the
Middle East, ETA in the Spanish Basque country, and the al-Quaida network
which destroyed the World Trade Center in September 2001 and has been
engaged in ‘holy war’ or jihad ever since. All have shared a readiness to work
for their goals outside of the constitutional process, which they regard as
illegitimate, and to use violence as a means of ‘persuasion’. Unlike state-
sponsored terrorists, who seek to avoid identification and publicity, these
organisations actively court media attention, striving to make their ‘target
publics’ aware of their existence and their objectives, often by illegal or
violent means.
As Chapter 8 argues, therefore, even acts of random violence directed
against civilians may be viewed as a form of political communication,
intended to send a message to a particular constituency, and capable of being
decoded as such. Modern terrorist organisations also use the public relations
and media management techniques of more mainstream political actors, such
as news conferences, press releases and leaks.

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