The Media and the Terrorist [electronic resource] : Not Innocents, but Both Victims / Ralph E. Dowling.
Government officials, media critics, and the public at large appear to believe that the media "cause" or strongly motivate acts of terrorism. However, analysis using Kenneth Burke's dramatistic method can explain political terrorism without reference to desire for coverage. Terrorism...
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| Format: | Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Distributed by ERIC Clearinghouse,
1989.
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| Summary: | Government officials, media critics, and the public at large appear to believe that the media "cause" or strongly motivate acts of terrorism. However, analysis using Kenneth Burke's dramatistic method can explain political terrorism without reference to desire for coverage. Terrorism would occur because of its symbolic value even with no media coverage. However, when terrorism passes into insurgency--that is, when terrorists find themselves capable of holding enemy territory and hence having traditional tactical and strategic objectives, the Burkean analysis may be less useful because communications to parties outside the inner circle of terrorists may serve instrumental objectives, while Burke's analysis best explains the consummatory functions of symbolic activity. Burke's analysis of society can also be applied to terrorist societies to explain their violence. The dramatistic approach can make it possible to predict the forms in which terrorism will appear, and to pursue efforts to control it. And if the calls for censorship and other verbal victimizations and mortifications of the media can be explained, it may be possible to avoid falling prey to them when confronted with the plausible but unsubstantiated arguments that media coverage aids and abets terrorists. (Eighty-three notes are included.) (MS) |
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| Item Description: | ERIC Document Number: ED304717. ERIC Note: Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Speech Communication Association (Spokane, WA, February 18-21, 1989). |
| Physical Description: | 21 p. |