Media Events: The Case of International Terrorism

Media-oriented terrorism has stirred growing interest in the communication strategy of modern terrorism and in the quantity, forms, and consequences of media coverage of terrorist events. One limitation of previous analyses is the lack of a theoretical framework to pinpoint the uniqueness of terrorism as media drama, and the commonalities with other kinds of media drama. A theoretical media-event framework is proposed. The attributes, social processes, and impact of media events are compared with these same factors in terrorist events. The representative case selected to illustrate terrorist events is the June 1985 TWA airliner hijacking.