Page 31 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

exponents of these techniques. But because of their non-institutional,
more or less marginal character, they are frequently deprived of the
financial and status resources which accrue to more established
political actors, and must therefore devise less expensive means of
communicating their political messages, such as symbolic forms
of protest and demonstration designed to attract the attention of
journalists. Chapter 8 will explore these techniques and assess their
effectiveness in some detail.

Terrorist organisations
The third category of non-party political actor to which we shall
refer in Chapter 8 is the terrorist organisation. Although the term
‘terrorist’ is value-laden, and may be rejected by groups whose
members may prefer to see themselves as ‘freedom fighters’ in
‘national liberation’ or ‘resistance’ movements, we shall use the
term here to refer to groups which use terror tactics – urban
bombing, hi-jacking, assassination, and kidnapping, to list the most
common – to achieve their political objectives. In this sense, many
of the world’s governments, including those of South Africa, Israel,
France, and the US, have at one time or another committed acts of
(state) terrorism.
More commonly associated with terrorism, however, are such
organisations as the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland
(until the 1998 peace agreement ended ‘the war’, at any rate),
Hamas and Hezbollah in the Middle East, ETA in the Spanish
Basque country, and the al-Quaida network which destroyed the
World Trade Centre in September 2001. All share a readiness to
work for their goals outside of the constitutional process, which
they regard as illegitimate, and to use violence as a means of
‘persuasion’. Unlike state-sponsored terrorists, who seek to avoid
identification and publicity, these organisations actively court
media attention, striving to make their ‘target publics’ aware of
their existence and their objectives, often by illegal or violent
means.
As Chapter 8 argues, therefore, even acts of random violence
directed against civilians may be viewed as a form of political
communication, intended to send a message to a particular con-
stituency, and capable of being decoded as such. Modern terrorist
organisations also use the public relations and media management
techniques of more mainstream political actors, such as news
conferences, press releases and leaks.

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