Communication and International Relations

Tuesday. 7:48 a.m. London. Another monotonous day. I stop at the news stand above the Metro station, grab a Times and another morning’s intake of that pathetic excuse for coffee. I fight the crowds down the stairs and onto the train. Just like clockwork. I’m moving towards the financial district. The train smells of body odor and various scents trying to cover body odor. I stand in the middle of the car and do my best to balance myself against the motion of the train. There’s a young man standing to the right of me. He has on a thick jacket and a backpack. I look down to read a headline in my paper but something in the man’s hand catches my attention. I look. I see it. It’s a button trigger of some kind. Oh no. He looks at me, smiles, and depresses the...

When we think of suicide bombers we rarely think of the settings and the people involved before the moment of impact. What we think of in our mind’s eyes are the images of mangled bodies, shredded metal, splattered blood, and the dazed and confused looks on the faces of those who’ve somehow survived. How did these images get there? The answer is... the terrorists planned it that way. They know the media will be complicit in their plots. They understand the media is a tool; an accessory to their crimes. They use mass-mediated terrorism.

You may be asking yourself: mass-mediated terrorism? What’s that? In her book Mass-Mediated Terrorism, Brigitte Nacos gives us a clear definition. “...mass-mediated terrorism [is] understood as violence for political ends against noncombatants/innocents with the intention to publicize the deed, to gain publicity and thereby public and government attention. So, it turns out, what we thought terrorism was—some act of destruction intended to cause pain—is in reality, an act of communication. It targets the few in a way that claims the attention of the many.

The value of the publicity that terrorism creates far outweighs the success of the act. Terrorists carefully choose symbolic times and places to commit their violence with the full intent of gaining as many cameras as possible. They don’t want our blood. They want our eyes.

The media acts as a facilitator—a force multiplier—for the terrorists, giving them far more impact and power than they previously had. The media serves terrorists' agendas well by creating a legitimate place for them to get their messages out. They could never do it in any other way because in truth, they are very small, weak, and powerless organizations.

Without the media there is no terrorism. The pictures. The drama. They just cannot resist. It’s just too easy and too tempting to not broadcast. It is news after all, right? It’s a match made in the version of heaven with the forty virgins for each suicide bomber. Nacos points to the symbiosis: “the inevitable and primary role of communication and propaganda in the terrorist design and the contemporary mass media’s appetite to facilitate the need of virtually all terrorists to have their deeds publicized.”