Page 205 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

To achieve these goals, terrorists must gain access to the media,
and in this they are assisted by the inherent newsworthiness of their
activities. Such acts are normally spectacular, providing journalists
with dramatic visual material. They are explosive (literally) and
often incorporate elements of great drama. The 1978 siege of
the Iranian embassy in London and the holding of an American
airliner at Beirut airport in 1985 are examples of unfolding dramas
which commanded headline news throughout their duration. The
destruction of the World Trade Center was the most dramatic
demonstration of this quality of terrorism yet seen. On that day,
thanks to the presence of television, video and still cameras, the
entire world felt compelled to watch the deaths of nearly 3,000
people.
The grammar of television news, then, means that terrorism has
news value, and can be used as a means of attracting media and thus
public attention to a political cause. In itself, however, publicity may
not further a political objective and may, for obvious reasons in the
case of terrorism, present an obstacle to it. Atrocities such as
occurred on September 11 2001, the Real IRA’s murder of 29
people in the Irish town of Omagh in 1999 or ETA’s killing of a
six-year-old child in August 2002, may temporarily command the
news agenda, but are likely to bring revulsion, isolation and, in the
case of al-Quaida and the Taliban who harboured it, eventual
destruction to the terrorist organisation. For all that September 11
was an audacious and professionally executed act of political
communication it seemed likely, as this book went to press, to result
only in awakening Western public opinion to the dangers posed by
what journalist Christopher Hitchens has called ‘Islamic fascism’
and to hasten the end of regimes such as Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq.
While the provocation of a ‘war of civilisations’ between the
secular Western world and the quasi-medieval Muslim countries
which harboured al-Quaida was one of the stated objectives of
Osama Bin Laden’s terrorism, it was difficult to see, at present, how
such a war could possibly go in the latter’s favour. The use of
terrorism in New York and Washington, as in Omagh and other
places, is likely to result only in a tightening of anti-terrorist
activity by democratic governments and the erosion of whatever
public support for the terrorists’ cause may have existed.
This fact requires terrorist organisations, like other political
actors, to engage in more sophisticated strategies of news manage-
ment than merely setting up spectacular acts of violence. Pickard
argues that ‘labelling perpetrators of terrorism as seekers of

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