Terrorism and public relations
Abstract This paper asks what we can learn from the parallels between terrorism and PR, either for the understanding of terrorism or—of more direct concern here—for the understanding of PR and its place in contemporary society. The already poor public image of PR may suffer from insufficient clarity about these parallels. It is suggested that while analogising between the two is of value, the differences between terrorism and PR also need to be stressed. Public communications need to be differentiated in two ways, firstly in terms of the distinction between spectacular and participatory types of public sphere, and secondly in terms of the distinction between values-based and power-based modes of address. Combining these concepts generates a simple 2×2 matrix for c1assifying public communications. This can help both to identify terrorism and PR as different forms of public communication, and also to identify the practical PR challenges facing governments and civic society in the struggle against terrorism.
PR: The social history of spin
Stagecraft And Truth In An Age Of Public Relations * Visiting Edward Bernays * Dealing in Reality: Protocols of Persuasion The Crowd Is In The Saddle: Progressive Politics And The Rise Of Public Relations * Truth Happens: An Age of Publicity Begins * Controlling Chaos * Educate the Public! * House of Truth Changing Rhetorics Of Persuasion * Social Psychology and the Quest for the Public Mind * Unseen Engineers: Biography of an Idea * Modern Pipeline of Persuasion * Optical Illusions Battles For The American Way * Silver Chains and Friendly Giants * The Greater Good * The New Deal and the Publicity of Social Enterprise * Money Talks: Publicity of Private Enterprise Commercializing The Cosmos * Public Ultimatums * Engineering Consensus * Coda: The Public and Its Problems: Some Notes for the New Millennium
Transnational terrorism and the western elite press
Abstract This paper seeks to analyze transnational terrorism as a political resource or, more specifically, as a means of political communication. In order to examine how terrorists have used the media, we have performed a content analysis of the coverage given to a selected sample of 158 incidents of transnational terrorism in two major daily newspapers of the Western world: The New York Times and The Times of London. Our findings indicate that while transnational terrorism does generate a considerable amount of press attention, the particular type of coverage it receives would appear to undermine the effectiveness of terrorism as a communications strategy.