Sedition on the television

Charles Foley

Los Angeles California's leading think-tank, the Rand Corporation, is in the course of making a wide-ranging study of international terrorism, and some of its conclusions are already emerging. Among the odder ones is that terrorists don't really want to kill—they're just in the advertising business.

'They are choreographers of violence,' says Rand expert Brian Jenkins. 'The objective is not murder and bloodshed, but publicity. They know that television's appetite for dramatic incident is insatiable, and they devise coups for maximum dramatic effect. What they want is a lot of viewers, not a lot of corpses. That they do kill, often wantonly, is incidental.'

Terrorism as theatre? Certainly it earns excellent Nielsen ratings. Most of America, much of the world, tuned in to the Patty Hearst Show, produced by and featuring the Symbionese Liberation Army—a tiny band of rather boring young white ideologues with a black ex-conman as their symbolic leader. At the most they numbered a dozen, this Army, and support for their revolutionary-Marxist notions in the community they claimed to be saving from fascist oppression was minimal.

The SLA lived by TV, and it died on TV, during a three-hour media spectacular not always distinguishable from such cops-androbbers shows as SWAT or Switch or The Blue Knight. The aftermath continues, with the few surviving SLA members still employing their talent for media manipulation through interviews and blatant play-acting for the ever-present cameras. This week SLA-ite Wendy Yoshimura is on trial, demanding to act as her own lawyer and generally playing to the gallery.

At the Rand Corporation's monasterylike cloisters overlooking the Pacific in Santa Monica, where researchers labour in tiny book-lined cells like so many bees in a honeycomb, they tell you that they don't want to sound callous, or to minimise the casualties: but the incidence of death by terrorism is trivial compared with the daily toll taken by the automobile. It is the impact of terrorist acts on world consciousness that is significant.

And without television, to bring the carnage into millions of homes around the world, there would be little impact. Had anyone heard of the South Moluccans, let alone their struggle for independence, asks Mr Jenkins, before TV gave global coverage to a twelveperson group which captured a commuter train and occupied the Indonesian consulate in the Netherlands?

Of the dozens of irredentist groups espousing 'liberation' causes from the Spanish Basques to the Tupamaros of Uruguay, the IRA, the Japanese Red Army and the West German Baader-Meinhof gang, none has shown more finesse in using the media than the Palestinians. For decades various Palestinian groups pleaded and worked in vain for attention from the world. They received little, until September 1972, when eight Black September guerrillas descended on the Israeli quarters at the Munich Olympic Games—a site chosen for no other reason than the presence of TV cameras ready to beam the spectacle to the world.

A grim spectacle it was: clashes with the German police, the murder of eleven Israeli athletes, the death of five guerrillas andfinally—the release of three captured Black Septembrists in response to the Arab hijacking of yet another jet. But the world watched.

'Without the attention given him by this kind of violence,' says Jenkins of Rand, 'I doubt very much that Yassir Arafat would have gained recognition for the Palestine Liberation Organisation at the United Nations.' The Palestinian leader's triumphal appearance before an applauding UN audience in New York was itself a television coup of the first order.

Rand specialists also point out that terrorists often time their efforts to make best use of satellite communication availability. When, last December, pro-Arab guerrillas seized the HQ of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna and kidnapped eleven oil ministers, the leader of the group was careful to keep his men in the building until the TV cameras appeared.

Another expert, Dr David Hubbard, who has written a book called Skyjacker, based on conversations with a number of men convicted of hijacking aircraft, says he was inpressed by the frequency with which theY thought of their success in terms of media coverage. One man called television 'a whore who would give her favours to anyone who waved a pistol.'

And as terrorists need TV, so TV needs the terrorists, according to Dr Frederick Hacker, a specialist in counter-insurgency tactics. 'Television finds these sudden, dramatic acts of violence an ideal programme formula. They're exciting, they come to a quick resolution, one way or the other, like a halfhour police show. If television didn't exist, terrorists would have to invent it.'

Hacker, a California-based psychiatrist, was called in by newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst as adviser and behind-scenes negotiator with the SLA during the Patty Hearst kidnapping. He believes that the mass media to a large extent 'created' the Symbionese Liberation Army as a political force by taking its revolutionary fantasies seriously and reporting them often on the SLA's own terms.

The Rand Corporation experts acknowledge that terrorism as an attention-getter and fear-maker has been a considerable success, and this is likely to lead to further incidents. But Mr Jenkins says its triumphs are usually short-lived. In terms of achieving long-range goals, bombings, kidnappings and other criminal acts against innocent people do very little. A take-over of power or a change in social and economic cond it ions is only achieved where the terrorists are backed up by a grass-roots organisation among the people they hope to 'liberate, and that after long years of struggle, as in Algeria or Cyprus. In Argentina, Canada, Ireland, Iran, Turkey, Spain and other countries hit by terrorist violence in recent years, the insurgents can claim scant progress.

Is there any way, in an open society, t° prevent push-button exploitation of the media by terrorists? Not really, say the experts. Some self-censorship by the TV networks has been suggested; but this, it Is argued, might simply encourage insurgents to conduct still more bizarre and bloodY acts that no station—given the competitiveness of Western society—could afford to ignore. Everyone agrees that television should reduce its coverage to a level commensurate with the event's significance, which can be minimal. (Did the SLA's one kidnapping, one murder and lone bank robbery reallY rate world-wide media attention over three years?) But no one can come up with a waY to do it, under the present social order. The public wants these spectaculars. 'They-cater to a hidden need,' says Dr Hubbard, who calls live coverage of such events 'social pornography'.

'Whether we like it or not, and whether deliberately or not, television is spreading sedition.'