Pre-mediating guilt: radicalisation and mediality in British news

Abstract

This article offers an account to terrorism and security studies of radicalisation as a discursive phenomenon delivered and constructed by news media. In our mediatised lives the ubiquitous recording of our activities and opinions means we may be inadvertently pre-mediating a later category of criminality which can be imposed retrospectively on what we thought was an innocent life. A study of two instances of ‘radicalisation’ reported on British television news appears to demonstrate this. Family photographs, mobile cameraphone footage and other recordings may be used retrospectively to construct a single definition of a person as radicalised. Equally, such media materials can be used to achieve a coherent meaning of radicalisation. We identify three dimensions of British news media's relationship to radicalisation: (1) an unreflexive and possibly incoherent clustering of terms, phrases and discourses by journalists, policy-makers and security services to form a rhetorical structure of radicalisation; (2) the uncertainty around radicalisation may itself contribute to the term's connotations of risk and danger; and (3) media reporting of radicalisation constructs and presents a continuum of normality/safety and deviant/dangerous because of the medial continuity of ‘our’ media practices with those of ‘radicals’.

Keywords:

• radicalisation
• terrorism
• television
• mediality
• risk

Acknowledgements

This article draws on emergent work undertaken under the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Programme ‘New Security Challenges: ‘Radicalisation’ and Violence – A Critical Reassessment’ (http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/nsc/). The research project is ‘Legitimising the Discourses of Radicalisation: Political Violence in the New Media Ecology’ (Award Number RES-181-25-0041), led by Andrew Hoskins (University of Warwick) and Ben O'Loughlin and Akil Awan (both Royal Holloway University of London).

Notes

1. See, for example, http://www.newmediaecology.net.

2. We are grateful to Carole Boudeau for this point.

3. On the contested meanings of the term ‘jihad’, see Esposito and Mogahed (2007), Roy (2004) and Knapp (2003).

4. At the time of this Newsnight broadcast, Mercer had resigned from this post after making comments about black soldiers (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/6434053.stm). That he was selected to appear in this broadcast could be explained by his (ex)-job description on the Conservative Party website: ‘This job was designed to underline the Government's incoherent approach to the preparation of this country for a terrorist attack’ (see http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=people.person.page&personID=4775).

5. See http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page8041/.