(to terrorize) and it is not possible to have such an effect on those who are already dead.
It is for that reason that the military force fighting today against a terrorist organization in defense of a democratic state is really fighting a two-front war. There is on the one hand the ground war, meaning the war that has to actually be won on the ground, the state of play on the ground as it exists in reality. But there is also the air war, meaning the war as it exists on the nation's front pages and television screens. For a democracy, winning one and not the other will always mean losing, and losing in a very real sense, because the loss of public support means that the war will come to an end, period.
This means that the terrorist attack is a media event in the sense that it is designed to attract the attention of the media, to gain the media's attention, the same way that a political campaign event is a media event, designed to attract the media's attention and thus garner coverage. As in the case of the presidential campaign, when we discuss media attention we are really first and foremost talking about television. When we are talking about gaining television's attention, we are really talking about gaining the attention of the cameras—and the way to do that, of course, is to provide good visuals, however those are defined in a particular context.[1]
The New Information Environment.
Unfortunately, developing strategies to fight such an enemy is particularly challenging because today's wars are taking place in a radically new information and media environment, and today's terrorists and insurgents have been brilliant at capitalizing on this environment in their operational art.
3
- ↑ For a more detailed discussion of the conditions under which particular types of attacks will attract coverage, and the amount of coverage they are likely to attract under which circumstances—in other words, using the amount of press coverage a particular attack gains as a metric for its success, see Cori E. Dauber, "The Terrorist Spectacular and the Ladder of Terrorist Success," in James Forest, ed, Influence Warfare: How Terrorists and Governments Shape Perceptions in a War of Ideas, West Port, CT: Praeger Security International, 2009, pp. 93–122.
