Terrorism and Public Relations

The events on September 11, 2001, when terrorists hijacked and crashed four U.S. commercial aircraft, resulted in the tragic deaths of thousands of innocent people. However, it was the symbolic nature of this act of terror that was, and remains, highly significant. September 11 was a powerful example of “propaganda of the deed,” which broadcast a message that the militant Islamist organization al-Qaeda was taking its “war” to the United States and the West. According to the propaganda of the deed thesis, the primary aim of the terrorist is to draw attention to their cause by engaging in acts of political violence in order to exploit the mass media as a communication channel. In one sense, it is the crudest form of press agentry; the terrorist act by itself is of secondary importance, publicity is everything.

Studies of terrorism, and in particular of terrorism and the media, identify different viewpoints in the debates surrounding terrorism in democratic societies. One position is sometimes labeled the official perspective; it stresses terrorism's criminality and irrationality and tends to be articulated by those who speak for the “state” (e.g., government ministers, conservative politicians, top security experts). Another view is described as the alternative perspective; it is articulated by those who dissent from the official view, but who accept that violence is not legitimate within democratic societies (e.g., civil libertarians, critical academics, some journalists, some politicians). The alternative perspective seeks to remind citizens to be vigilant about the way in which the term terrorism is used lest it become a semantic tool of powerful state actors. From this standpoint, a distinction is made between wholesale terror, produced by state actors, and retail terror, produced by small groups, with state-sponsored terror (including by Western democracies) causing the greater number of civilian casualties and societal instability worldwide.

Recent scholarly work on terrorism and public relations tends to frame the debate within the official perspective and also largely restricts the concept of terrorist public relations to propaganda of the deed. However, some studies investigated other aspects of terrorist public relations. For instance, Robert G. Picard (1989) highlighted the fact that terrorists groups frequently utilize most of the strategies employed by public relations professionals. His research demonstrated that terrorist groups not only use propaganda of the deed, but in fact employ recognizable public relations techniques like press releases, statements, preformulated articles for publications, and background information in the form of press kits, fact sheets, press conferences, interviews, and the provision of visual materials.

Public relations efforts of governments in response to terrorism are an important development since 9/11. There is a great deal of study of the communication activities surrounding U.S. President Bush's “War on Terror” in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Interestingly, the initial aims of the War on Terror, defeating al-Qaeda and other militant Islamist terrorist groups, quickly changed to advocating regime change in certain countries, in particular Iraq. This shift from targeting terrorist groups to targeting nation-states in the War on Terror involved a significant public relations effort, which was analyzed by several scholarly studies. Juyan Zhang's (2007) analysis of the metaphors used in U.S. government communications helps reveal its campaign strategy. To take one example, in his State of the Union address in 2002, President Bush declared that “States like these [Iran, Iraq, North Korea], and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” The metaphor “axis of evil” was designed to make audiences see the world in terms of the World War II struggle between the Allies and the Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Japan, and Italy). However, a strategy based on creating a dichotomy of heroes (the United States and its coalition partners) and villains (Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda, the Taliban) was a dangerous one. With no Muslim forces actively engaged on the U.S. side, the dichotomy ironically began to resemble the one that al-Qaeda's public relations efforts wished to emphasize, that of the West versus Islam.

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