Terrorism and the Media
How terrorists use the media—and how coverage can shape terrorism.
Teaching Resources—Terrorism: Introduction (including lesson plan with slides)
In 1985, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher urged officials to “to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.” Three years later, she took her own advice and banned television and radio stations in the United Kingdom from broadcasting the voices of members of Irish paramilitary groups. The so-called British broadcast ban was just one chapter in the long history of the symbiotic relationship between the media and terrorists. From Russian radicals landing front-page coverage in the nineteenth century to present-day attacks captured on smartphones or streamed online, this uneasy dynamic has existed for more than a century
