Terrorism and the Media
www.MickMaurer.com
The basic aim of the terrorist is to gain worldwide
recognition, and this is facilitated by the symbiotic
relationship shared by the media and the terrorist,
such that some experts are convinced that
international media coverage of terrorism tends to
increase international terrorism.
Terrorists are dependent on the publicity they receive, and
the media acquire from the terrorist their staple in news
reporting: an event newsworthy, unexpected, and violent,
which the public is drawn to hear, see, and read about.
There is evidence that terrorists choreograph dramatic
incidents to maximize their propaganda impact. Terrorism
only works because a handful of persons inflicting violence
directly on a relatively small number of people receives
worldwide publicity for a terrorist group and its demands and
ideology.

In June 1978, an International Congress on Terrorism and
the Media convened in Florence, Italy. Some government
representatives appealed to journalists to stop using the
propaganda language of terrorists, and news organizations
from the United States, Britain, Japan, and West Germany
said they should exercise voluntary self-restraint and
cooperate with security authorities when reporting political
acts of violence. Anything more radical than voluntary
self-restraint in reporting terrorist activity would be a threat
to the democratic principles of freedom of the press and
speech. The media's awareness of the efforts of terrorists to
manipulate them for terrorist purposes should put the media
on guard against becoming a propaganda arm for terrorism.
Title: Media and Terrorism

Journal: Journal of Security Administration
Volume: 5  Issue: 1  Dated:(June 1982)  Pages: 7-18
Author(s): C. A. Damm
Terrorists need publicity. Before the invention of the
printing press, terrorists preformed their acts of violence
before large crowds to ensure word-of-mouth publicity.
Today, terrorists rely on the presence of the
international media to instantaneously transmit their
images of destruction—and their corresponding political
message—around the globe. As individuals, most of us
depend on the media to learn about terrorists and acts of
terrorism; very few of us have personally witnessed an
act of terrorism or met a terrorist.

Covering Terrorism
Columbia University E-Seminar 2, How the Media and Terrorism
Shape Public Understanding
Taught by: Brigitte L. Nacos
"Such as it is, the press has become the
greatest power in the Western World"
(Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
The media and terrorists have a symbiotic relationship, the media regards reporting of the terrorist acts as a noble duty, and on the
other hand terrorists always want to use the media to make their demands and agendas public.

The media’s interpretations and representation of terrorism are very important as it is through this the peoples perceptions of terrorists are influenced. “The definition of terrorism has
an impact on whether or not the perpetrators of an act of violence are labelled criminals, terrorists or freedom fighters. It is especially important given that media’s choice of label in
their coverage of an act of violence stands to influence, tremendously, the audience’s perceptions of the perpetrator’s of the act (Alali and Eke 1991, p.3).

Whether the media should give importance to terrorist activities is quite a debated issue. This is so because the terrorist actually use the media to get attention and publicity. “This
debate on whether or not the media coverage of terrorist events encourages terrorists to carry out more such acts has not only involved media personnel, but also received the attention
of academics (Alali and Eke 1991, p.7).

Brigette L. Nacos is of the opinion that “through the mass media terrorists gain access to the public at large and to decision makers in their target society. The press is frequently
accused of providing terrorists their ‘lifeblood’ or ‘oxygen’ in the form of publicity. Some observers argue that if the media were to deny such coverage terrorism as such would cease to
exist” (Nacos 1994, p.10).

The book Media and Terrorism edited by Paletz and Schmid (1992) gives a good account of different perspectives of terrorism in each chapter. It talks about the Researcher’s,
Terrorists, Government’s, Broadcasting organisations, Editors’, the Reporters’, Publics’ and the victims’ perspectives of terrorism.

“The role played by the media in forming public opinion is problematic. We need to know, first, how the media present news about terrorism and, second, what other sources of
information are available to the public. How the news is presented depends upon two sets of factors. First, there are technical considerations, such as the availability of sources, news
formats, and time considerations. Second, there are political values of the media controllers and the extent of government censorship. Furthermore, the media coverage is not
monolithic: Television coverage is different from newspaper coverage and newspapers differ in their politics” (Hewitt in Paletz and Schmid 1992, p.173).

Christopher Hewitt also points out in the same book that very few studies have examined systematically how the media portray terrorism. Paletz, Fozzard and Ayanian carried out a
content analysis of how the New York Times and US television covered the IRA, Red Brigades, and FALN; Altheide (1987) examined British and American coverage of two IRA bombings;
and Knight and Dean (1982) looked at Canadian coverage of a terrorist takeover of the Iranian embassy in London. There findings were that terrorist motives and goals were largely
ignored, that official perspectives were reinforced, and governmental repression was legitimated. Paletz et al. (1983) note that there were “dramatic differences in the coverage” of the
three groups they examined (1992, pp. 173- 174). The visual representations of the media on terrorism are also very important. These representations bear a large influence on
people’s interpretations of terrorism.

Shoma Munshi in Media, War and Terrorism (2004) talks about the representations of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath in the US corporate news media as well as discussions on
the internet. She goes on to analyse how images and interpretation of news themselves exist in the dual sense of both representation and misrepresentation. Her contribution raises
important questions about censorship, propaganda and public debate in an open society (Veer 2004, p.6). Her article is an ethnographic process tracking US and foreign news channels
and discussions on the internet. She talks about 9/11 followed by the ‘war on terror in Afghanistan and then the war in Iraq. It is best to sum up her own work in her own words; “I
examine how images and interpretations of news themselves are essentially polysemic and ambivalent and exist in the double- sided sense of both representation and
misrepresentation (2004. p. 47).

Paul Mason, in the book Criminal Visions- Media Representations of Crime and Justice, (2003) tells us why media representations of issues such as crime and justice are important. He
is of the view that public fascination and interest for these issues grows because most people have limited direct contact with these issues. They rely mainly on the media reports and
various representations of them for their knowledge. This representation of reality and audiences ‘commuting’ between the realms of factual news and entertainment programming has
implications for public perceptions of law enforcement agencies, the courts and prisons as well as offenders and victims.(2003, p.5).

Brigitte L. Nacos (political science, Columbia Univ.) is the author of The Press, Presidents, and Crisis (Columbia Univ. Pr., 1990); and Terrorism and the Media: From the Iran Hostage
Crisis to the Oklahoma City Bombing (Columbia University Press 1996)
The Psychology of Terrorism: Myths and Media.
James N. Breckenridge, Ph.D.

Much of "expert" psychological theorizing regarding terrorism is inherently
flawed - typically grossly over-emphasizing within-person dispositional factors.
Situational factors related to the social context within which terrorism is
embedded, however, offer a profoundly more powerful understanding of why
individuals become terrorists, how governments can best respond to acts of
terror, and how the media plays a critical role in the public reactions to the threat
of terrorism.

Dr. Breckenridge is Chief of the Psychology Service and Deputy Associate Chief of Staff for
Mental Health Services at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System (VAPAHCS). The
VAPAHCS Psychology Service is the largest psychology clinical service in the United States. Dr.
Breckenridge is a Co-Director of the National Center on the Psychology of Terrorism and a
Senior Fellow in the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Post Graduate
School, the leading national graduate program in homeland security.
BBC Tuesday, 6 April, 2004, 06:07 GMT 07:07 UK
Parents express terrorism fears

Half of parents in Scotland worry their children will be hurt in a terrorist attack, a study has suggested.
Research at the University of Dundee also indicated that 80% of children between six and eight-years-old
know what terrorism is.

Rona Dolev has been looking into the effects of terrorism on parents and children in four countries.
About 1,400 parents from Israel, the US, Northern Ireland and Scotland took part in the survey.
The research, by the psychologist and postgraduate student, has been done in collaboration with
psychologists from all four countries.

Worries for children

Ms Dolev spoke to 200 parents in Scotland who said some of their children had become afraid to fly and had
had nightmares.

She also found that 50% of the same parents, who have had no direct exposure to terrorism, said they were
worried about their child being hurt in a terrorist attack.

Ms Dolev said: "One of the aims of the study was to find out whether Scottish children are aware of the
phenomenon of terrorism.

"According to parents' reports, 80% of six to eight-year-old children know what terrorism is,
and this figure grows to 99% by the time the children are 11 years of age."

According to the study's findings the most important source of information about terrorism is
the media, with 91% of six to 11-year-old children having watched media coverage of
terrorist attacks.

Of the parents asked, 14% reported some changes in their child's behaviour after watching
media reports, especially after 11 September.

Some parents reported behaviours such as fear of flying, nightmares, worries about family members going
abroad and fears of an attack in Scotland.

The study found that 74% of children have asked their parents questions about terrorism, with the majority of
children doing so on several occasions.

Three quarters of parents reported having talked about terrorism with their children.

Ms Dolev added: "The results of this study so far highlight just how much terrorism has become a part of ours
and our children's lives here in Scotland, and so in some sense Madrid doesn't seem so far away."
These simple recommendations have already proved to be effective in reducing the risk of media
contagion. For example, when implemented during a spate of heavily publicised subway-suicide
deaths in Vienna, subway suicides dropped by 80 per cent (Etzersdorfer & Sonneck, 1998). Of
course, they have yet to demonstrate efficacy in suicide bombing, and given today’s fragmented
but globalised and politicised media it would be naive to believe that they would be universally
applied. However, given the current epidemic of suicide attacks and the potential risk of media
contagion, perhaps there is a case for promoting and trialling them where there is political or
editorial condemnation of such attacks. In the end, structural problems need structural solutions,
but there is also something to be said for fixing broken windows. It is possible that small
changes to the environment can make big differences to behaviour. Just as the cosmetic cleaning
up of the New York subway seemed to produce a precipitous drop in city crime in the 1990s
(Gladwell, 2000), maybe fixing the broken window through which we see a distorted and
sensationalised world could be a useful first step in managing the threat of suicide bombing.


by Paul Marsden and Sharon Attia who are in the Institute of Social Psychology at the London School of
Economics.
A Deadly Contagion: The Risk of Copycat Terrorism

Published in The Psychologist: March 2005 vol 18 no. 3.

PAUL MARSDEN and SHARON ATTIA on the psychology of suicide bombing and the role of the media.

EXPLOSIVES strapped to his waist, Hussam Abdo faced the Israeli soldiers, and the camera. The Palestinian teenager had just become a global media celebrity: the ‘Boy Bomber’ of Nablus
(see tinyurl.com/4k8pt).

Although security forces ultimately thwarted Hussam’s attack, this sensational ‘reality television’ still made for compulsive viewing. ‘Terrorism is theatre’ wrote the political scientist Brian
Jenkins, and as the story made headlines around the world, the shock value of the story was undeniable and reminiscent of the 2002 media circus surrounding photos of a baby dressed in
suicide bomber gear. Hordes of journalists descended upon Hussam’s family home, all jostling for soundbites on what had motivated him. But should they have been taking a look at
themselves?

Some myths
More suicide attacks have taken place in the last three years than in the previous quarter century (Atran, 2004); 2003 saw more suicide attacks than ever recorded before; and the World Trade
Center disaster of 2001 has become paradigmatic of a deadly trend that now has global relevance and global reach. Suicide bombing is indeed a newsworthy topic. Media explanations for
suicide bombing have tended to portray bombers as mentally unstable and religiously motivated. For example, much was made of the alleged facts that Hussam Abdo was mentally retarded
and that his religion promised him sex with 72 virgins if he were to become a shahid (religious martyr). But beyond soundbite and spin these portrayals have little value. Profiling research
based on video testaments, interviews with family and friends, and with suicide bombers who survive, show most suicide bombers to be psychologically normal (Silke, 2003). There is no
evidence to suggest that suicide bombers suffer from personality disorders or psychiatric conditions.

Likewise, the idea that the cause of suicide bombing is religious fanaticism does not stack up with the data; many groups adopting suicide-bombing tactics, including those in the Middle East,
are entirely secular. Specifically, the idea that Islamist belief is the root cause of suicide bombing is false; the majority of suicide bombings in the last two decades of the 20th century were
conducted by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, from a predominantly Hindu culture (Pape, 2003).

Equally disingenuous is the portrayal of suicide bombers as typically young single men, disenfranchised, unemployed and uneducated. Suicide bombers can be men or women aged anywhere
between early teens to late forties, religious or secular, unemployed or employed, destitute or privileged, educated or uneducated, married or single, socially isolated or socially integrated
(Pape, 2003).

Another favourite media explanation is that suicide bombers, particularly the young, are somehow brainwashed or coerced into such attacks. However, virtually all would-be suicide bombers are
volunteers. The problem today for groups employing suicide attacks is not recruitment, it is managing the over-supply of volunteers (Hassan, 2001). A recent survey of schoolchildren in Gaza
found that 70 per cent wished to become a shahid in a martyr operation. Iyad Sarraj, psychiatrist and director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, concludes: ‘If you ask a little
child in Gaza today what he wants to be, he doesn’t say doctor or engineer, or businessman. He says he wants to be a martyr’ (Hawley, 2002).

A low-cost, high-return strategy?
Whilst we tend to attribute extreme behaviour to extreme personalities, scientific evidence suggests that this is often more a reflection of our own psychology than it is of those we label. It is,
as psychologists are prone to say, a ‘fundamental attribution error’. In fact, research consistently shows that the causal locus of behaviour often lies more in the external context and group
environment than it does in our heads – we are ‘contextual chameleons’, ever changing our behaviour to fit the contexts and groups within which we find ourselves. Just as laboratory
experiments show people will behave violently when placed in violent contexts and violent groups, a number of researchers now suggest that the causes of suicide bombing lie less in the mind
and more in the pathological contexts and groups within which it takes place (Atran, 2003; Silke, 2003).

When we abandon the idea of suicide bombers as mentally ill individuals acting out individual death wishes, and see suicide bombing as a coordinated community response that fits a context
of violence, aggression and revenge, then much of the incomprehensibility of suicide bombing dissolves. It is groups, not lone individuals that plan, organise, manage and execute suicide
bombing (Merari, 2000), and when understood from a contextualised group perspective, suicide bombing can appear a rational and fitting response to perceived persecution, abuse and killing
at the hands of an enemy. It is a highly adaptable low-cost, high-return technique of asymmetric warfare. It creates massive media publicity that can coerce and impress; its adoption as a
strategy has been associated with the successful furtherance of political aims (Pape, 2003); it is cost-effective in terms of human cost of operatives killed and the cost of the bomb (typically
about $50); it is efficient in inflicting a far higher ratio of enemy deaths per bomb than other forms of attack, and efficient in minimising the risk of operative capture and subsequent loss of
intelligence.

Given this contextualised group-level rationale for suicide bombing, it is therefore not surprising that groups have emerged dedicated to recruiting, training, coordinating and carrying out
suicide attacks. Only by understanding these groups and the contexts out of which they emerge will we begin to manage the threat of suicide bombing.

Media contagion
One small aspect of the contextual mix that might contribute to the wave of suicide attacks is mass media publicity (Nacos, 2002). Specifically, positive media coverage of suicide bombing in
areas of recruitment may act as effective advertising campaigns for volunteers, whilst negative publicity may nevertheless encourage suicide bombing because it still gives bombers precisely
what they want – media attention. This is not to say that the media can cause suicide bombing any more than sex (as opposed to HIV) can cause AIDS; it is at most a vector of transmission
that can precipitate its spread.

The idea that mass media coverage can precipitate the spread of certain kind of behaviour is known as media contagion (Gould et al., 2003). The everyday fact of media contagion is
demonstrated by the economics of commercial mass media, which is predicated upon it: most of what we read, see and hear in the media is financed by advertising, and would not exist if
media advertising was not effective in precipitating the spread of buying behaviour. From a cognitive perspective, it’s not so much that media publicity exerts any kind of mechanistic influence
on us, but that it provides us with selective information that we then use to help solve problems and make decisions. In other words, the media’s influence is derived from its role in
informational gatekeeping and agenda-setting. Could media contagion be implicated in the spread of suicide bombing? The role of the media in terrorism is politically controversial and much
debated (Crenshaw, 1998; Nacos, 1994; Norris et al., 2003; Paletz & Schmid, 1992). Whilst some researchers, using a time series analysis of correlations between media portrayals of violence
and violent crime rates, have found a measurable link between media publicity devoted to terrorism and terrorist attacks (e.g. Phillips, 1983), others have not (e.g. Baron & Reiss. 1985).
However, we do know from general research on media influence that media violence does appear to play a role in the spread of violent behaviour (Anderson et al., 2003). For example, the
statistical link between media violence and violent behaviour has been found to be stronger than that between calcium intake and bone mass, and between asbestos exposure and cancer
(Hurley, 2004), with such a link being particularly strong in young people. We also know that media contagion is particularly implicated in suicide; high-profile suicide stories in the media are
regularly followed by a jump of up to 10 per cent in suicide levels (Stack, 2000). Even fictional suicide stories in the media can produce this copycat effect; when a recent television hospital
drama series featured a paracetamol overdose, hospital admissions for paracetamol overdoses jumped by 17 per cent (Hawton et al., 1999). The risk of media contagion is so strong that the
World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control have issued media guidelines for covering suicide stories, based on the psychology of imitation (see tinyurl.com/6s8so and
tinyurl.com/5r2gc).Finally, we know that media publicity is an overt goal of suicide bombing; the primary targets of suicide-bombing attacks are not those who are injured but those who are
made to witness it through media coverage (Atran, 2003). So given that suicide bombing is a form of violent coercion that uses symbolic targets, surprise and resulting media publicity to
compensate for relative weakness in destructive power, media coverage is an important metric of success. If media amplification is a goal and a measure of victory for suicide bombing, then it
is logical that extensive media coverage may encourage groups to continue employing suicide-bombing tactics.

Broken windows
Of course, just because violent behaviour and suicide can be subject to media contagion, and just because there is a logical group-level rationale why media coverage of suicide attacks should
precipitate further attacks, it does not mean that media contagion is necessarily implicated in the spread of suicide bombing. The psychology of individual acts of suicide and violence may be
very different from the coordinated and planned group behaviour involved in suicide attacks, and the group motivation for media publicity may turn out to be insignificant. Furthermore, there is
no evidence to suggest that media reporting could ever play any more than a small superficial, precipitating role in the spread of suicide bombing; it is certainly not an underlying cause. So
why waste time worrying about what is at most a single broken window in a metaphorical building that urgently needs structural repair?

The simple answer is that the media is one part of the overall context of suicide bombing that we can immediately do something about, if we choose to do so. The media are a window on
suicide bombing that can distort and sensationalise, and in doing so possibly precipitate the spread of such attacks. Whilst more long-term structural work on changing the contexts that
produce suicide bombing is under way, we could choose to fix this broken window. Specifically, we could establish a general set of media guidelines for reporting suicide bombing in the mass
media that could be implemented wherever there is the political will to do so. A number of media producers, including the BBC and CBS, have already implemented internal recommendations
for reporting terrorism in general (Wilkinson, 1997), but currently there are no generally agreed-upon and theoretically informed guidelines specifically for media coverage of suicide attacks.
One possible option here could be to extend the accepted media guidelines for reporting incidents involving suicide to cover suicide bombing (see box).
References

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violence on youth. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 4(3), 81–110.

Atran, S. (2003). Genesis of suicide terrorism. Science, 299, 1534–1539.

Atran, S. (2004). Mishandling suicide terrorism. The Washington Quarterly, 27(3), 67–90.

Baron, J.N. & Reiss, P.C. (1985). Same time, next year: Aggregate analyses of the mass media and violent behavior. American
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Crenshaw, M. (1998).The logic of terrorism:Terrorist behavior as a product of strategic choice. In W. Reich (Ed.) Origins of
terrorism: Psychologies, ideologies, theologies, states of mind.New York:Woodrow Wilson Center Press.

Etzersdorfer, E. & Sonneck, G. (1998). Preventing suicide by influencing mass-media reporting.The Viennese experience 1980–
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Gladwell, M. (2000). The tipping point. London: Little Brown & Co.

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1269–1284.

Hassan, N. (2001).An arsenal of believers:Talking to the ‘Human Bombs’. The New Yorker, 77(36), 36–41.

Hawley, C. (2002, 4 June). Intifada takes its toll on Gaza. BBC News. Retrieved 29 April 2004 from tinyurl.com/6bypd

Hawton, K., Simkin, S., Deeks, J., O’Connor, S., Keen, A.,Altman, D. et al. (1999). Effects of a drug overdose in a television
drama on presentations to hospital for self-poisoning:Time series and questionnaire study. British Medical Journal, 318, 972–977.

Hurley S. (2004). Imitation, media violence, and freedom of speech. Philosophical Studies, 117, 165–218.

Merari, A. (2000). Statement before the Special Oversight Panel on Terrorism.Terrorism and threats to US interests in the Middle
East [H.A.S.C. No.106-59].Washington, DC: US Congress.

Nacos, B. (1994). Terrorism and the media: From the Iran hostage crisis to the World Trade Center bombing.New York: Columbia
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Nacos, B. (2002). Mass-mediated terrorism:The central role of the media in terrorism and counterterrorism.New York: Rowman &
Littlefield.

Norris, P., Kern, M. & Just, M. (Eds.) (2003). Framing terrorism:The news media, the government and the public. New York:
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hillips, D.P. (1983).The impact of mass media violence on US homicides. American Sociological Review, 48, 560–568.

Silke,A. (2003). Terrorists, victims and society: Psychological perspectives on terrorism and its consequences. Chichester:Wiley.

Stack, S. (2000). Media impacts on suicide: A quantitative review of 293 findings. Social Science Quarterly, 81, 957–971.

Wilkinson, P. (1997).The media and terrorism:A reassessment. Terrorism and Political Violence, 9(2), 51–64.

Dr Paul Marsden is a research psychologist at the London School of Economics
©2005 - Paul Marsden
60 minutes on Internet and terrorism

http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/47/jihad_online