Media terror?

Violence, it is now sometimes acknowledged, can be a form of communication. Distorted, limited, destructive, immoral, counterproductive perhaps, certainly monologic rather than dialogic, but a kind of communication nevertheless. A quarter-century ago, two European peace researchers argued that a defining characteristic of insurgent terrorism was the use of politically motivated violence against victims who were not the primary targets of the action (Schmid and de Graaf, 1982).

The targets, rather, are other groups – typically, enemy governments or publics (‘we have a cause that you must attend to; meet our demands or ignore us at your peril’), or rival groups and potential supporters (‘we are the truest, most militant defenders of our cause: the enemy is not invincible; awake, arise, join us!’). Schmid and de Graaf saw it as no coincidence that the mass press, and modern insurgent terrorism (the Russian social-revolutionaries’ use of ‘propaganda of the deed’) emerged at the same historical moment, towards the end of the nineteenth century.

The televised (or internet) spectacle is integral to contemporary insurgent terrorism. The calculating fanatics who planned the 9/11 atrocities clearly knew that the first aircraft crashing into the twin towers would generate a nation-wide, real-time audience for the second plane’s stunning arrival. Political communications scholar Eric Louw (2005: 241-42) identified a variety of goals that al-Qaeda achieved through its choreographed violence: it created fear, anger, and thirst for revenge throughout the US; it demonstrated American vulnerability; it boosted recruitment and morale for al-Qaeda and other Islamicist groups; it propagandized al-Qaeda’s cause; and it generated political polarization throughout the world – dangerous for humanity, but politically useful to elements on both (discursively constructed) ‘sides’ in the subsequent ‘war on terror’.

Modern terrorism though, was originally an instrument of rather than against state power – viz., Robespierre’s Reign of Terror during the French Revolution (Schmid and de Graaf 1982: 9). State violence, particularly state terrorism that operates in violation of accepted human rights or international law, often prefers to hide in the shadows. But not always. Counter-insurgency campaigns often include both direct violence, and efforts to ‘win hearts and minds’ (WHAM) through public relations and media manipulation (Louw 2005: 248).

States may also use violence itself as a form of one-sided communication. The show trials of authoritarian states, intended to intimidate potential dissidents, are one example. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. government spoke of the bombing of Hanoi as a way to ‘send a message’ to the North Vietnamese government. In this context, one might contemplate the brand-name of the U.S. invasion of Iraq: ‘Shock and Awe’. Was it demonstrative violence, intended in part to dramatize the potential consequences of defying the imperial world order?

Media as violence?

If terrorism is a distorted form of communication, can mass-mediated communication also be a form of terror? One common view sees news media as at least unwitting accomplices of insurgent terrorists, by not only spreading their messages and psychological impact, but by enhancing their legitimacy and recruitment efforts. Liebes and Kampf (2004) argue that in the changed media ecology (including the emergence of al-Jazeera) since 9/11, global journalism has turned terrorists into regular sources, and even cultural ‘superstars’.

That is a contestable view, at least in the North American context, where mainstream media are far more likely to focus on the destructive actions and future threat of insurgent terrorism, rather than on its grievances or even the social conditions that breed it. A more plausible case can be made that media are more typically handmaidens of state terror. The US media’s largely uncritical amplification of the Bush government’s now-discredited claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and links to 9/11, is now widely regarded as a key to unleashing the catastrophic war that followed (see, e.g. Schechter 2003).

Beyond such overtly political/propagandistic functions, dominant media have nurtured a culture of terrorism. Why did so many New Yorkers express a sense of ‘surrealism’ at the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers? Perhaps because the attack was the materialization of a catastrophe already embedded cinematically in the public imagination, one that has been primed by a profit-driven, commercially-oriented film and television industry to expect a dystopic future. Or none at all. Social theorist Klaus Theweleit has provocatively suggested that ‘The producers of catastrophe films are of course terrorists, simply in a milder form’ (cited in Herz 2004: 53).

Add to the mix a local commercial television journalism that emphasizes fires, crime, collisions and murder, and the US mediascape has the makings of what the late communications scholar George Gerbner considered a degrading, inhumane and even toxic cultural environment. In his lifelong research on how media ‘cultivate’ particular perceptions of and orientations to the world, Gerbner showed that heavy TV viewers were disproportionately likely to distrust other people, to see the world as a threatening place, and to support authoritarian approaches to social problems (see e.g. Morgan 2002, chaps. 15, 23). (A homespun version of this view was popularized in Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine.)

Dominant media are complicit in a culture and a politics of fear. Such a cultural environment creates incentives for politicians and governments to appeal to ‘security’, military strength and crime crackdowns as a fast track to popularity, and as a convenient way to avoid climate crisis and other pressing issues that might disrupt business as usual. It is a political culture that fuels the military-industrial complex, the private security industry, the small arms trade, a gated community/Fortress America mentality, and a foreign policy that arguably practices state terrorism, economic exploitation, and cultural domination, fostering hatred amongst subordinate populations. A recipe for a cycle of terror and counter-terror.

What is at the root of media-as-terror? Some see a link forged by technology. A generation ago, Jerry Mander analyzed a host of what he considered to be inherent technological biases in western culture’s then-dominant medium, television. TV, he said, favours death, commodities, artificially highlighted events, compressed time, charismatic leaders, fast-paced and fixation-inducing techniques – and war rather than peace: War is better television than peace. It is filled with highlighted moments, contains action and resolution, and delivers a powerful emotion: fear. Peace is amorphous and broad. The emotions connected with it are subtle, personal and internal. These are far more difficult to televise (Mander 1978: 323).

That’s a plausible argument, so long as we do not ‘essentialize’ television as a medium. Any international survey would show that TV is quite capable of offering diverse and thoughtful programming. It is not inherently a violence-promoting medium. What is important is the governing logic, the political economy, within which the medium is institutionalized. Gerbner argued that the prevalence of violent programming in American TV and films was shaped not mainly by audience preferences, but by profit-making strategies, such as the relative ease with which ‘action films’ could be translated and exported to overseas markets. Majid Tehranian (2002) argues that the world’s media are dominated by state and commercial/corporate organizations, tied respectively to the logics of identity and commodity fetishism. Such media generate political or commercial propaganda that too often constructs hostile and demonizing images of the Other, fertile cultural soil for the weeds of terrorism. Thus, he says, the ‘envy and hatred generated by global communication seems to have outpaced mutual understanding, respect and tolerance’ (p. 59).

It’s possible to go still further: media terror isn’t only about media representationsof violence. Media themselves are a form of structural violence, which Lynch and McGoldrick define as ‘a structure, usually understood as a system of political, social or economic relations, [that] creates barriers that people cannot remove...an invisible form of violence, built into ways of doing and ways of thinking,’ a form that ‘includes economic exploitation, political repression and cultural alienation’ (2005: 59-60; emphasis in original). Through the dominant global media, perhaps the world is wired in such a way as to reproduce the social/economic inequalities and cultural hierarchies that fuel the resentment, ignorance and desperation underlying political extremism and insurgent terrorism.

Writing in the wake of the 1980s New World Information and Communication Order movement, which called inter alia for more equal information flows between the global North and South, Jörg Becker attacked the liberal notion that the extension of transnational information flows necessarily promotes peace. Deriding the typical research focus on the effects of media (representations of) violence on their audiences, Becker reframed the issue: media are embedded in, and help to reproduce, relations of inequality within and between nations.

Accordingly: If mass-media reception as well as production are at once expression and motor of structural violence; if communications technology can be understood, historically, only as an integral part of the emerging military industrial complex; if the access to and the power over the mass media are unequal and unbalanced... then the mass media can fulfill their original hoped for function as ‘peace-bringers’ [only] under rare and exceptional circumstances. The representation of violence in the mass media, then, is part and parcel of the universal violence of the media themselves (Becker, 1982: 227).

Since the 1980s, media globalization (the emergence of global media and advertising markets, the rise of transnational media conglomerates, etc.) has arguably (sometimes) moderated state authoritarianism or promoted notions of human rights, but its relationship to democratization is at best contradictory (Zhao and Hackett, 2005). Its dark side reveals a doubly repressive role.

First, global media too often facilitate and legitimize relations of inequality, hostility and hierarchy, whether through explicitly political propaganda, or through promoting the consumerist lifestyles available only to a minority of the world’s people, and at huge environmental costs. Second, the very structure of dominant media excludes the global majority from participation in public discourse, whether through overt censorship or through market mechanisms that embody a logic of one dollar-one vote, rather than one person-one vote.

A way out?

Some caveats are immediately in order. I would never suggest that the everyday work of reporters, professionals trying their best to deliver honest accounts of the day’s events, is the moral equivalent of suicide bombing. Their respective intentions and immediate impact differ, it goes without saying, and that matters. And the category ‘media’ is far too general, conflating organizations of different size, orientation, governing logic and quality.

Still, in a world where politics and conflict are increasingly mediatized, one need not accept all of the above arguments to acknowledge that dominant national and global media, generically speaking, are too often implicated in relations and acts of violence, and the politics of fear. Is there a way out?

The censorship of terrorist spectacles, in a misguided effort to deprive insurgent terrorists of the publicity they need, is hardly an option. Censorship would undermine a core putative function of media – to assist audiences in ‘surveying the environment’, obviously including violent assaults on social order. Moreover, a censored press would deepen the shadows around the problem of state terrorism, and sharpen the hierarchies of access that comprise a form of structural violence. In any event, outside of very closed regimes, censorship of terrorist spectacles is not likely to be effective in the era of the internet and the blogosphere.

Nor does the pursuit of ‘objectivity,’ as it is normally understood and practiced within western journalism, offer a way out. To the contrary, as numerous authors have shown, the ‘regime of objectivity’ is precisely one of the mechanisms that too often tie journalism to narrow official optics and to war propaganda (Hackett and Zhao, 1998; Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005).

Rather, the challenge is to find ways that media can contribute to a more humane culture, to genuinely representative and transnational public spheres, and to the prevention or transformation of conflicts into non-violent conflict management and/or resolution. The practice of peace journalism within established media institutions is a (so far) small but significant step in this direction. So too is the emergence of independent community-based media (encouragingly on display at the recent sixth Our Media conference in Sydney), in so far as they are committed to values of human development and solidarity. Finally, the rise of media reform movements internationally, and in various regions, puts the question of structural change for media justice on the political agenda.

We should take comfort in the fact that people can still be outraged by overt acts of terror. While Philip Lee rightly cautions in this issue that we are en route to normalizing state counter-terror and repression, we have not yet reached the point portrayed in Terry Gilliam’s satirical film Brazil, when a terrorist bomb exploding in a restaurant attracts no attention from those diners not immediately eviscerated.

Can those of us in the globe’s gated communities extend our sense of outrage to forms of structural violence that do not immediately threaten us? Ultimately, a terror-free world requires an ‘enabling environment’ for entrenching popular communication rights, empathizing with those we have been taught to see as the Other, and transcending a politics of fear and hate.

References

Becker, Jörg (1982). ‘Communication and peace: The empirical and theoretical relation between two categories in social sciences.’ Journal of Peace Research, 19 (3): 227-40.

Hackett, Robert A. and Zhao, Yuezhi (1998). Sustaining Democracy? Journalism and the politics of objectivity. Toronto: Garamond.

Herz, Marion (2006). ‘Prime time terror: The case of La Jetee and 12 Monkeys’, in Anandam P. Kavoori and Todd Fraley (eds.), Media, Terrorism, and Theory: A reader (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), pp. 53-68.

Louw, Eric (2005). The Media and Political Process. London: Sage.

Lynch, Jake and McGoldrick, Annabel (2005). Peace Journalism. Stroud, UK: Hawthorn Press.

Mander, Jerry (1978). Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. New York: William Morrow.

Morgan, Michael (ed.) (2002). Against the Mainstream: The selected words of George Gerbner. New York: Peter Lang.

Schechter, Danny (2003). Embedded: Weapons of mass deception. Prometheus Books.

Schmid, Alex P. and de Graaf, Janny (1982). Violence as Communication: Insurgent terrorism and the Western news media. London: Sage.

Tehranian, Majid (2002). ‘Peace Journalism: Negotiating global media ethics’, Harvard Journal of Press/Politics 7(2)(April).

Zhao, Yuezhi and Hackett, Robert A. (2005). ‘Media globalization, media democratization: Challenges, issues and paradoxes’, in R. Hackett and Y. Zhao (eds.), Democratizing Global Media: One world, many struggles (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield), pp. 1-36.

Robert A. Hackett is a professor of communication at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. He is an editorial consultant for Media Development, and serves on WACC’s North American region’s executive committee. His most recent publications include Remaking Media: The struggle to democratize public communication (Routledge, 2006, with William K. Carroll); and Democratizing Global Media: One world, many struggles (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005, co-edited with Yuezhi Zhao).