Beyond its battlefield successes, therefore, al-Qaeda and its allies have scored an impressive media achievement, moving from the status of jihadi cheerleaders to that of highly modern and competent media operatives and propagandists whose focus is on influencing the Muslim audience. … a pervasive media presence via the internet. This … denies the militaries of the United States and its Western allies one pillar of their military doctrine—information dominance. The success of al-Qaeda and the Islamists in the media arena has denied Western military planners much of their previous ability to shape the battlefield environment by controlling information flows. Indeed, it may be that the U.S. military and its allies are now in the position of having to look for means with which to break the Islamists' information domination on battlefields and contested regions across the Muslim world.[1]
But the irony here is that traditional (legacy) American media outlets now depend on the terrorists and insurgents for content, so that by uploading this material to the Internet and making it available to anyone who finds it, these groups ensure that it will find its way onto American television network news shows as well. Because it has been impossible for the networks to consistently acquire visually compelling combat footage of either the fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan for any variety of reasons, all six news networks and news divisions—ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC (the cable partner of NBC), and Fox News—have made it a regular practice to download footage from terrorist and insurgent websites and integrate that visual product into their broadcasts, almost never with any indication that the audience would be able to determine the actual provenance of the footage.
Further, these groups are so sophisticated that they are producing English language propaganda that
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- ↑ Michael Scheuer, "Al-Qaeda's Media Doctrine: Evolution From Cheerleader to Opinion Shaper," Terrorism Focus, Vol. 4. Issue 15, Washington, DC: The Jamestown Foundation, May 22, 2007, available from jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2373417.
