Journalism In An Age Of Terror

The threat of terrorism and the increasing power of terrorist groups has prompted a rapid growth of the security services and changes in legislation, permitting the collection of communications data. This provides journalism with acute dilemmas. The media claims responsibility for holding power to account, yet cannot know more than superficial details about the newly empowered secret services. This book is the first to analyze, in the aftermath of the Snowden/NSA revelations, relations between two key institutions in the modern state: the intelligence services and the news media. It provides the answers to crucial questions including: how can power be held to account if one of the greatest state powers is secret? How far have the Snowden/NSA revelations damaged the activities of the secret services? And have governments lost all trust from journalists and the public?

The threat of terrorism and the increasing power of terrorist groups has prompted a rapid growth of the security services and changes in legislation, permitting the collection of communications data. This provides journalism with acute dilemmas. The media claims responsibility for holding power to account, yet cannot know more than superficial details about the newly empowered secret services. This book is the first to analyze, in the aftermath of the Snowden/NSA revelations, relations between two key institutions in the modern state: the intelligence services and the news media. It provides the answers to crucial questions including: how can power be held to account if one of the greatest state powers is secret? How far have the Snowden/NSA revelations damaged the activities of the secret services? And have governments lost all trust from journalists and the public?

This book brings together papers and articles presented at the conference “Journalism in a World of Terrorism”, held at the Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden, in 2017, which gathered together media researchers and journalists from around the world to discuss this contemporary global problem. The contributions consider what happens in the wake of a terrorist attack, how the people affected communicate, and how terrorists use social media. The book will appeal both to academic readers and to anyone interested in what happens in the wake of a terrorist attack.

We cannot truly understand - let alone counter - terrorism in the 21st century unless we also understand the processes of communication that underpin it. This book challenges what we know about terrorism, showing that current approaches are inadequate and outdated, and develops a new communication model to understand terrorism in the media age.

Terroredia is a newly coined term by the editor, Dr. Mahmoud Eid, to explain the phenomenal, yet under-researched relationship between terrorists and media professionals in which acts of terrorism and media coverage are exchanged, influenced, and fueled by one another. Exchanging Terrorism Oxygen for Media Airwaves: The Age of Terroredia provides a timely and thorough discussion on a wide range of issues surrounding terrorism in relation to both traditional and new media. Comprised of insights and research from leading experts in the fields of terrorism and media studies, this publication presents various topics relating to Terroredia: understanding of terrorism and the role of the media, terrorism manifestations and media representations of terrorism, types of terrorism and media stereotypes of terrorism, terrorism tactics and media strategies, the war on terrorism, the function of terrorism and the employment of the media, new terrorism and new media, contemporary cases of terrorist-media interactions, the rationality behind terrorism and counterterrorism, as well as the responsibility of the media. This publication is of interest to government officials, media professionals, researchers, and upper-level students interested in learning more about the complex relationship between terrorism and the media.

Since September 11, 2001, much has been said about the difficult balancing act between freedom and security, but few have made specific proposals for how to strike that balance. As the scandals over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the "torture memos" written by legal officials in the Bush administration show, without clear rules in place, things can very easily go very wrong. With this challenge in mind, Philip Heymann and Juliette Kayyem, directors of Harvard's Long-Term Legal Strategy Project for Preserving Security and Democratic Freedoms in the War on Terrorism, take a detailed look at how to handle these competing concerns. Taking into account both the national security viewpoint and the democratic freedoms viewpoint, Heymann and Kayyem consulted experts from across the political spectrum—including Rand Beers, Robert McNamara, and Michael Chertoff (since named Secretary of Homeland Security)—about the thorniest and most profound legal challenges of this new era. Heymann and Kayyem offer specific recommendations for dealing with such questions as whether assassination is ever acceptable, when coercion can be used in interrogation, and when detention is allowable. They emphasize that drawing clear rules to guide government conduct protects the innocent from unreasonable government intrusion and prevents government agents from being made scapegoats later if things go wrong. Their recommendations will be of great interest to legal scholars, legislators, policy professionals, and concerned citizens.

These candid conversations capture the difficulties of reporting during crisis and war, particularly the tension between government and the press. The participants include distinguished journalists—American and foreign, print and broadcast—and prominent public officials, past and present. They illuminate the struggle to balance free speech and the right to know with the need to protect sensitive information in the national interest. As the Information Age collides with the War on Terrorism, that challenge becomes even more critical and daunting. "We are very careful in what we talk about publicly. We do not want to paint a picture for the bad guys. So we don't talk very much at all about what we're going to do going forward."—Victoria Clarke, Department of Defense "This was a war that was very different. It was conducted primarily by about 200 to 250 special forces soldiers on the ground. There were no reporters with those soldiers until after the fall of Kandahar, until the war was essentially over. There were no eyes and ears, and that's the way the Pentagon wants it."—John McWethy, ABC News "I covered Capitol Hill for a very long time and was always astounded by the nonpolitical motivation of a lot of people that are up there who really do want to make the world better, want to make the U.S. better. So don't come away believing that because there are political implications that there are always political motivations."—Candy Crowley, CNN "There is a feeling among the community, Muslim Americans, and also overseas that we might become the new enemy. But so far nobody knows whether it is just because of the war or if it's going to last."—Hafez Al-Mirazi, Al-Jazeera Cosponsored with the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School, Harvard University.

This book explores the ideas of key thinkers and media practitioners who have examined images and icons of war and terror. Icons of War and Terror explores theories of iconic images of war and terror, not as received pieties but as challenging uncertainties; in doing so, it engages with both critical discourse and conventional image-making. The authors draw on these theories to re-investigate the media/global context of some of the most iconic representations of war and terror in the international ‘risk society’. Among these photojournalistic images are: Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of a naked girl, Kim Phuc, running burned from a napalm attack in Vietnam in June 1972; a quintessential ‘ethnic cleansing’ image of massacred Kosovar Albanian villagers at Racak on January 15, 1999, which finally propelled a hesitant Western alliance into the first of the ‘new humanitarian wars’; Luis Simco’s photograph of marine James Blake Miller, ‘the Marlboro Man’, at Fallujah, Iraq, 2004; the iconic toppling of the World Trade Centre towers in New York by planes on September 11, 2001; and the ‘Falling Man’ icon – one of the most controversial images of 9/11; the image of one of the authors of this book, as close-up victim of the 7/7 terrorist attack on London, which the media quickly labelled iconic. This book will be of great interest to students of media and war, sociology, communications studies, cultural studies, terrorism studies and security studies in general.

Communicating Terror: The Rhetorical Dimensions of Terrorism argues that the meaning of terrorism is socially constructed and suggests a new definition of terrorism, chiefly as a process of communication between terrorists and multiple target audiences. Concise yet comprehensive, this up-to-date text examines how acts of "terrorism" create rhetorical acts: What messages, persuasive meanings, symbols, do acts of terrorism generate and communicate to the world at large? These rhetorical components include definitions and labels, symbolism in terrorism, public oratory about terrorism, and the relationship between terror and media. This book examines diverse acts of terrorism, not just September 11th or recent events in the Middle East, to show the history and various effects of these acts as a medium for communication. This unique communication perspective shows how the rhetoric of terrorism is truly a war of words, symbols, and meanings.

The Pen and the Sword is the only comprehensive examination of how the media have covered the 21st century's #1 news story: terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is the full story-from 9/11 to the Obama doctrine-including