Page 206 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

PRESSURE-GROUP POLITICS

publicity for its own sake is simplistic and ignores their very
significant efforts to direct news coverage, to present their cause in
favourable ways and to disassociate groups from acts that will bring
significant negative response to the cause’ (1989, p. 14).
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 Osama Bin Laden) and the setting up of
websites, 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 Féin press office is widely regarded as the
Saatchi and Saatchi of “terrorist” publicity departments’ (ibid.).
The political communication skills of Adams and the Sinn Féin
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 1990s of Sinn Féin
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 inter-
national diplomatic recognition, was another ‘terrorist’ who skilfully
used the media to project and gain sympathy for the Palestinian
cause (before the suicide bombings of 2001/02 lost it again).
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

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