Chapter One

Protest and the Media: A Brief History

Political violence and protest have always had a complicated, even symbiotic relationship with the media. The media depends on unrest for stories and ratings, because people find it interesting and even entertaining; for dissenting groups, the media is seen as necessary to get the message across to a wider audience. This is part of a long, complicated relationship between anti-establishment groups, the media, and the establishment itself, that goes back to the Russian Anarchists’ use of ‘propaganda of the deed’ in the 19th century. Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will) was a left-wing group operating in several Russian cities at the end of the 19th century, which campaigned for universal suffrage, freedom of press, communal self-government, and the transfer of land to the people, among other things. After a campaign of ‘regular’ propaganda, such as distribution of their newspapers, The Worker’s Gazette and Narodnaya Volya, the group turned to more radical means of communicating their message and enforcing political change. After seven attempts, the group assassinated Tsar Alexander II on Sunday the 13th of March 1881 on the streets of St. Petersburg, when 20 year-old Nikolai Rysakov threw a bomb at his carriage. The Tsar was immediately taken to the Winter Palace where he was given Communion and died later that day of his extensive and terrible injuries.

Through this violent stunt, Narodnaya Volya had communicated their message of revolution not only to the immediate target and the state, but to the public, through the recently invented newspapers. People were apparently more interested in reading about politics via a violent attack than through regular polemics. Nevertheless, the people did not support Narodnaya Volya to the extent that the group really made any progress politically in the way they had envisioned. Their violence certainly made them famous, but it did not give them their demands. The Russian government, meanwhile, launched a counter-offensive, ultimately exiling, killing or imprisoning the group’s members.

Despite the fate of Narodnaya Volya, though, their tactic of ‘propaganda of the deed’ became popular with other dissenting groups, especially as the media developed. After the invention of the printing press in 1830 came pamphlets and news stories about anarchism and rebellion; with satellites and TV (from 1968) came longer dramas involving plane hijackings, in which the TV channels would play a part in the drama themselves, by interviewing hostages or terrorist groups, and by exploiting the panic of families and onlookers. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian People (PFLP) favoured plane hijackings. Their first was El Al Flight 426, which, en route from London Heathrow to Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport and then Lod Airport, was redirected to Algiers. One of three PFLP members on board knocked out the co-pilot with his pistol and ordered the pilot to fly to their new destination, while the two other members kept passengers in a state of terror, wielding hand grenades and pistols. At Dar El Beida airport non-Israeli passengers were let off, while the hijackers kept twelve Israeli passengers and the plane crew hostages – eventually letting them go after negotiations with the Israeli and Algerian governments, in a prisoner exchange. After this initial success, the group continued to hijack planes (to varying degrees of success, but usually maximum publicity, either way), as did further groups with prisoners to free and agendas to publicise. Television and satellite – newly invented – meant that these dramatic stories would usually find an audience. Hijackings were invented to exploit this new public interest and ability to watch as well as read.

With the invention of the Internet and the popularity of social media, groups such as ISIS have adapted once again, for example by putting violent acts such as beheadings and torture, or speeches filled with threats and bravado, on YouTube, and recruiting teenagers via Twitter. As the audience has become more involved in the media, conveying a message has become at times more intimate and direct, and recruitment more global and disparate.

What is contemporarily known as ‘terrorism’, then, is an inherently attention-seeking tactic that evolved from ‘propaganda of the deed’. It communicates a political message to its audience through spectacular violence. Recent terrorist events such as the Moscow theatre siege and 9/11 were clearly designed with the global audience in mind. While the Moscow attack was actually in a theatre, the 9/11 attacks resembled, as many said at the time, some terrifying Hollywood thriller. Those attacks, without the media, would not have been designed as they were, let alone have had the huge global impact they did. Other terrorist attacks such as the murder of Lee Rigby, the Boston Bombings, and ISIS’s filmed beheadings were likewise dramatic stunts that aimed to draw as much attention as possible to the perpetrators’ cause, to tempt the state (or states) into overreaction, and to influence public opinion and put pressure on them to change various foreign or domestic policies (existing or subsequent) that they considered unjust. Whether terrorism works or not (and when, if so, it does) is a subject for another book, but as a PR move it has the effect, at least, of drawing attention. As we’ll discuss later, however, this may not ultimately get a movement very far, whether it’s extreme violence such as ISIS’s filmed beheadings, or much less fatal or dangerous violence such as vandalism at a protest. A message can be seen and heard by millions and have less than desired reactions. It is an unpredictable tactic, to put it mildly.

But propaganda of the deed is not only about drawing attention to a cause. Iconoclasm for example (recently and in the distant past) is also a kind of propaganda of the deed. Designed to shock, upset and scare, violence against buildings and art undermines the messages and identity of existing political ideologies and groups as well as asserting the dominance of the iconoclasts and their contrasting belief system. During the Reformation in the 17th century, for example, Puritans destroyed Catholic art and cathedrals; later on, in the early 20th century, the Suffragettes damaged artworks held by public galleries, as “property that belonged to the nation” (Mohamed in Barber & Boldrick (eds.), 2013, 115). The attack was on the public space of the gallery or museum as much as the artwork, though; the space represented the people and the state in virtue of its accessibility and funding channels. The attack would also (and crucially) be seen; an audience and a public interest were a given. When Mary Ricardson attacked Diego Velázquez’s renowned painting, The Rokeby Venus, with a meat cleaver on March 10th 1914, for example, she exclaimed, as she was publicly arrested and removed by police: “Yes, I am a Suffragette. You can get another picture but you cannot get another life, as they are killing Mrs Pankhurst” (qtd. in Gell, 1998, 62-5).

More recently, ISIS shattered ancient cities in Syria and Iraq, and their prized art and monuments, including artefacts in Iraq’s Mosul Museum (the attacks there were also filmed). These deeds tend not to kill, but through dramatic action they state the new ideologies they represent and convey. A war of symbolism and imagery is inherent in these assaults, dubbed ‘heritage terror’ by some, including Dr Stephennie Mulder: “This is a propaganda video that is intended as an act of heritage terror. [ISIS] know this kind of action will cause alarm in the international community… It demonstrates their mastery over everything. Their mastery over the past and it has a deep impact on the people of Iraq as well as [those] who cherish these objects” (Mulder, 2015).

A deed need not even be violent to have a similar effect, however, and to have a similar relationship with the media and the public. The past century’s public protests in the UK and US are also related to the idea of propaganda of the deed. A protest – a march, with placards, chants and slogans – is a dramatic action intended to communicate a message in a rebellious way (even when entirely peaceful). The action aims to put political ideas centre stage – to win a part in the wider political spectacle and therefore to achieve attention for the cause. It is a publicity stunt, and therefore a form of propaganda of the deed just like violent acts dubbed ‘terrorism’ or iconoclasm. Protest probably relies on the media more than terrorism and iconoclasm, because the deed itself is not generally as shocking or permanent. A march is transient, placards are discarded and slogans forgotten far more so than a collapsed building, broken masterpiece, or ruined lives. Protest, to have any effect, usually needs to be recorded. (Of course terrorism and iconoclasm also tend to draw in the press.)

It is not my intention to conflate violent ‘terrorist’ groups such as ISIS with non-violent and legal dissenting groups, but to understand the latter in that wider context of dissent and public relations. Given that legal groups are often lumped into the same category as violent groups by the media, to some extent, which in itself is a substantial problem for peaceful, legal groups, it follows that if we are to understand how dissenting groups should use PR to their advantage, we need to know how other groups use it. They are relevant associations, if not welcome ones.

One group can learn from another, furthermore: a legal group that is against austerity measures, for instance, can learn from ISIS’s grasp of social media and video-editing skills. They can also observe that the use of horrific violence by that same group, while appealing to some of their supporters, alienates many people, and that the use of violence more generally may therefore be a mistake for their own political movement. In essence, by discussing a wide range of groups and a broad spectrum of dissenters, and their use of various PR strategies, we can learn and apply those findings to (ideally) democratic and peaceful groups.

The relation of dissent to violence and violence to politics will also be discussed, given its relevance to this subject, and the underlying question of why the media covers some political statements and groups, and not others, and why the public engages with some politics and not others. The conclusions from those discussions will inform the ultimate question of how a dissenting group should conduct itself in a world so influenced by PR, performance and appearances, and how the public should engage with all political actors when they are inevitably treated as an audience.