Insurgency Research Group, 24 Sep 08: How Insurgents Shape the Media Landscape
Last week the Insurgency Research Group at KCL held a workshop on How Insurgents Shape the Media Landscape. The theme of the workshop was as follows:

The so-called Age of Terror, often said to have begun in 1968, changed irrevocably with the end of the Cold War. Where formerly news access had been sought by insurgents eager to draw global attention to their cause and struggles, the choice of what to highlight and where to focus journalistic coverage remained with news organisations. When ‘hot’ stories were supplanted by breaking news in fresh locations, public interest would inevitably shift with the departing reporters. However by the turn of the 1990s free market expansion accompanied the demise of bipolar ideological politics. At the same time information and communications technologies proliferated, offering terrorists low-cost, efficient ways of recording and disseminating their own message. An explosion in global satellite television and the consumer internet expanded the reach and penetration of groups no longer solely interested in conventional state overthrow. Instead, these aspire to transnational ideological and religious transformation by appealing to diasporas scattered around the world. Today a new wave of jihadi insurgent increasingly controls its own publicity agenda through instant connectivity of ‘battlefield’ imagery via internet, mobile telephony, and television satellite uplinks. Has the balance finally shifted away from news editors in favour of the insurgent? As time-frames between event and broadcast/publication shrink, are news organisations now wrong-footed by insurgent commanders who create and seek to shape the story? Are we in fact witnessing a revolution in the media landscape?
Daniel Bennett (a PhD student in the department who blogs at From the Frontline) has posted a 2 part report: How Insurgents Shape the Media Landscape, Part 1 and Part 2.