Propaganda of the Deed
IRG member Neville Bolt has responded to John Mackinlay’s The Taliban’s Propaganda of the Deed Strategy over at the IRG blog, and it’s well worth reading. Neville’s PhD is on PoD and has also published recently on PoD and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (more about that here). An extract from his comments:
The Western counter-narrative has to live with a permanent dilemma. The Taliban and other insurgents will continue to piggy-back on Western (and non-Western) media outlets. Indeed they will do their best to control them, shaping campaigns within a strategy of ‘political marketing’, completely cognisant of the demands of what makes a ‘good story’. Why are we so surprised? After all, our own political parties and lobby groups do that to each other every hour of every day. However censoring footage from a Taliban ‘spectacular’, crosses the line in the sand. Moreover persuading news editors to remove the violent spectacle from a news compilation (one ingredient of a ‘good story’), and merely replacing it with talking heads recounting what they witnessed, offers a new take on the myth of Sysyphus. Media outlets already exercise discretion, periodically self-censorship. But even if these images were to be self-censored and removed from our screens, we know they will get out somehow from bystanders, non-Western news networks, NATO troops or Taliban propagandists. Consequently the damage to journalistic credibility, built on fair and truthful reporting, with Western domestic and foreign audiences and readerships, risks being even more far-reaching. It’s a dilemma.
Neville also mentions that Peter Taylor will be addressing the IRG later this year, which I’m looking forward to. Taylor is responsible for the current BBC series Age of Terror which, thus far, has substituted dramatic re-enactments and survivors’ tales for explanation and analysis. I hope it’ll improve.
