Media and Terrorism

Utilizing his four-year database of barricade-and-hostage and hijacking atrocities by international terrorists and the coverage afforded those events by newspapers from three Western nations (Germany, Great Britain, and the United States), Schaffert observes the effect of media coverage (newspaper column space provided, articles and photographs published) on whether concessions were made to terrorist demands, and establishes a strong positive relationship between coverage and terrorist success.

Based on an analysis of more than 200 evening newscasts aired during the first six years of the Reagan administration, Tales of Terror offers a detailed account of the ways in which news media escalate public panic about terrorism and encourage support for specific U.S. policy objectives, rather than build sympathy for terrorists. Dobkin explores similarities between news media and government portrayals of terrorism, combining textual criticism with an interpretation of official U.S. policy statements, and argues that government depictions and news presentations of terrorism reproduce an ideology that supports military strength and intervention.

Bruce Hoffman describes the changing face of terrorism, probing the new adversaries, new motivations, and new methods that have surfaced in recent years to challenge many of our most fundamental assumptions about terrorists and how they operate. Hoffman dissects terrorism past and present, charting its evolution and predicting where it might be headed in the next century. Inside Terrorism traces the history of terrorism from its roots in the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution, to Communist movements in Russia, Germany, and Italy, to longstanding nationalist organizations such as the PLO, which emerged on the world stage after the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Despite the ambush and murder of its own members, the PLO became a powerful and notorious terrorist group, and made the cause of a Palestinian homeland well known. Turning his attention to recent events, Hoffman argues that our notion of terrorism as a form of limited violence has been shattered by the emergence of more lethal and less predictable terrorist organizations, like the Aum sect in Japan -- responsible for the Tokyo subway nerve gas attack -- fanatical Jewish and Islamic groups in the Middle East, and radical wings of the militia movement in the United States. These fringe groups are built upon -- and react to -- a sense of isolation, and are more likely to use weapons of mass destruction than the nationalist terrorist groups with which we are familiar. Hoffman also considers the issue of media coverage and how it relates to political power. Although the media provide a platform for terrorist agendas, terrorists only occasionally achieve their ultimate political goals by exploiting the media, and are often captured as a result of news reports -- as in the Unabomber case. South Africa's African National Congress, which won sympathy for its plight and eventually obtained power in part through terrorist activities, is a rare exception to the rule. Carefully researched and filled with up-to-date information, Inside Terrorism presents a sharp and chilling portrait of a phenomenon that poses new and ever deadlier threats to peace and stability around the globe.