Page 202 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

PRESSURE-GROUP POLITICS

agricultural vehicles, as well as traditional marches and rallies in
London.

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 US 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
be 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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