Yes, suicide bombing, claiming responsibilities of terrorist acts are effective in gaining media coverage but are certainly old tricks.
Except from grabbing media attention, what's more? If just as Edward Bernays said, "PR is the engineering of consent", surely terrorist are also seeking on new ways to gain sympathy and recognition while publicising their ideology. However, they no longer required doing it solely through the traditional media.
The anti-terrorist war might have driven Al-Qaeda away from their camps, terrorists now turn to the internet. Since 2001, terrorist websites have proliferated. Terrorist are also turning to new platforms like comics books and video games to promote and infiltrate their ideologies into youngsters' mind.
This could be a disturbing trend. Some say this is even more dangerous than real guns and weapons since it perverts people's mind, especially the next generation.
You might not aware what you are reading is actually from Al Qaeda and you could be their next target audience. Of course you might not be persuaded, but how about thousands and millions of young children in the Muslim world and in the West?
2 comments:
Nguyen Thai Ha : I really like the topic.
Regarding terrorism and propaganda,I do think that this is a prominent trend and will continue to develop in the future thanks to the rapid change of the Internet.
During 19th centuries, American used pamphlets as a mean of propaganda for the civil war. Later on, public relations campaign on television and radio were utilized in Gulf War.
2001 remarked a series of suicide attacks by al-Qaeda upon the USA. And this time, Internet served as an useful mean of terrorist communication.
I've heard that terrorist organizations also use the web page to employ young people to work for them. Surely this is seen as a way of PR or propaganda for the War in the era of Internet.
Governments and the world press attempt to monitor the terrorist website in oder to fight against the attacks.
However, It seems that terrorist groups take the best advantage of technology while governments still use traditional media such as television and newspaper to call on the war against terrorism.
As typing "Terrorism" on Google, I've found some boring web pages. Do you think the role of PR in the war against terrorism is quite blur?
I would say war against terrorism has posed immense challenges to the Pentagon. Warfare has been increasingly PR-ised. The importance of applying PR tactics in driving media/public support could be viwed as important as guns and weapsons in winning the war. This is especially true in democractic countries.
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