Page 192 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

PRESSURE GROUP POLITICS

Terrorist groups, like other political actors, have developed media
management systems, and gradually come to use ‘most of the
techniques normally employed by public relations professionals’
(Ibid.) including the issuing of press statements, videos (a practice
adopted frequently by the hostage-takers in Lebanon), news
conferences, and the production of newspapers (such as the IRA’s
An Phoblacht). One observer notes that ‘the PR skills of such as
Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison are so highly reputed that the
Sinn Fein press office is widely regarded as the Saatchi and Saatchi
of “terrorist” publicity departments’ (Ibid.). The political
communication skills of Adams and the Sinn Fein leadership were
such as to have led, by the time of the Good Friday agreement in
April 1998, to handshakes with President Clinton in the White House,
meetings with the British prime minister at 10 Downing Street, and
the slow emergence in the late 1990s of Sinn Fein as a legitimate
(from the British state’s point of view) political force. Poor political
communication by the loyalists, on the other hand, exemplified by
the Orange Order’s ‘siege of Drumcree’ and their response to the
sectarian murder of three children in July 1998, steadily lowered
their prestige and credibility in the eyes of the British people and the
world as a whole, to the significant (if as yet unquantifiable) long-
term advantage of their republican opponents.
Yasser Arafat, in the decades before the PLO achieved international
diplomatic recognition, was another ‘terrorist’ who skilfully used
the media to project and gain sympathy for the Palestinian cause.
In the vast majority of examples, however, terrorist ‘public
relations’—or political communication—has failed to achieve success
in the pursuit of the cause. While terrorism generates publicity,
because it meets many of the requirements of modern news
production, it rarely bestows the groups responsible with legitimacy,
far less media support. As Schmid and de Graaf point out, ‘the
insurgent terrorist news promoter, as source of news, has at times
considerable influence on the way the media report his actions. Yet
his opponents, the government and its security forces, are in fact the
main sources for the media’ (1982, p.98).
We have noted elsewhere in this book that news tends to eschew
explanations and analyses of the events reported, a generalisation
which is no less true of terrorism. The audience sees the bomb
exploding or the hijacker waving his gun from the cockpit of an
aircraft, but will not very often be provided with the historical
background or political context to the events taking place, and their
justification (if any). Kelly and Mitchell acknowledge that ‘the media

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