Page 189 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

which, if it was less than some activitists wanted, was more than
would have been achieved without skilful use of the media as a
platform for articulation of the gay rights case.

TERRORISM AND THE OXYGEN OF
PUBLICITY

We turn, finally, to that category of political organisation which
pursues its objectives by illegal, often violent means. As was
acknowledged in Chapter 1, the word ‘terrorist’ is a loaded term,
used to describe organisations whose own members may prefer to
think of themselves as ‘freedom fighters’, ‘guerrilla soldiers’, or
‘revolutionaries’. Noam Chomsky and others have developed the
concept of ‘state terrorism’ to describe the violence which has been
used by the United States and other countries against civilians. We
will use it here, however, to refer to those non-state groups which
pursue ‘terror’ tactics against governments, soldiers and civilians of
their own or other countries. ‘Terror’, in this context, includes
bombings, assassination, kidnappings, and hostage-taking—actions
which will in most cases be of minor military value, being designed
rather to communicate messages of various kinds. Terror, in this sense,
is a form of political communication, pursued outside the realm of
constitutional procedures. In the words of Thomas Thornton, the
terrorist act is ‘symbolic…designed to influence political behaviour
by extranormal means, entailing the use or threat of violence’ (quoted
in Kelly and Mitchell, 1984, p.283). Baudrillard describes terrorism
as a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ which ‘aims at the masses in their silence’ a
political message—‘in the purest symbolic form’—of challenge (1983,
p.31). For Schmid and de Graaf, terrorism is a media management
strategy adopted by groups whose members feel otherwise excluded
from political discourse.

We see the genesis of contemporary insurgent terrorism,
as it has manifested itself in the Western World since the
late 1960s, primarily as the outgrowth of minority
strategies to get into the news. Since the Western media
grant access to news-making to events that are abnormal,
unusual, dangerous, new, disruptive and violent, groups
without habitual access to news-making use these
characteristics of the news value system to obtain access.
(1982, p.217)

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