Introduction: Contra ‘Mass Mediated Terrorism’

There is a veritable industry of quasi-academic research going by the name of ‘Terrorism and the Media’. This is hardly surprising given the contemporary emphasis on security regimes and the infinite ‘war on terror’ proclaimed by George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11, but has been, in fact, developing across several international contexts since the 1970s, when it was pioneered in Italy and the Federal Republic of Germany in response to the proliferation of ‘left wing terrorism’. Many of these studies adopt an explicitly counterterrorist approach: instead of merely adding to the understanding of a situation of conflicting forces, these studies offer remedies, usually concerned with limiting terrorist access to the media, controlling media actors so they cease to be ‘unwitting pawns’ in terrorist strategies, improving preemptive military strategies and response times, and so on.

While some of these studies are simply pure propaganda, on a level with Cold-War studies of communism and how to defeat it in the 1950s, even the more serious articulations of this field tend to be based on the same presuppositions: there is a violent menace threatening civil order, it can be unproblematically labeled terrorist, and it is pointless to attempt to understand its motives or sociopolitical causes at best one can get to know the psychological profiles of its pathological agents, usually considered as criminal and irrational if not evil individuals, rather than collective social agents. At work here is a radical forgetting of history in which few, if any, of these studies cast a backward glance at histories of political violence, colonialism, guerrilla warfare, or even terrorism itself. Furthermore, these studies do not engage with the instability of the concept of terrorism, let alone the complicity between ‘terrorist’ violence, the state, and secretive and clandestine security services.

An example of a relatively intelligent, but still flawed, work in this field that is characterized by these limitations is Brigitte Nacos's Mass Mediated Terrorism. This work gives a mass media-oriented account of terrorism claiming that ‘groups and individuals who commit or simply threaten political violence understand their deeds as a means to win media attention and news coverage for their actions, their grievances, and their political ends’ (Nacos 2002, p. 10).