Philosophical and Theoretical Analysis of “Terrorism and the Politics of Fear” by David L. Altheide The WritePass Journal

Philosophical and Theoretical Analysis of â€Å"Terrorism and the Politics of Fear† by David L. Altheide Philosophical and Theoretical Analysis of â€Å"Terrorism and the Politics of Fear† by David L. Altheide (a) Identify the philosophical or theoretical perspective underlying the research. The events of September 11th 2001 caused terrorism to become central to the social landscape of the contemporary world. It was not only terrorism in itself that became an important issue, but also the changing rhetoric and ideas involving terrorism around the globe. In his content analysis of US newspapers, Altheide focused on the ongoing dialogue characterising terrorism as something to be feared by the American people. The main hypothesis is summarised by Altheide as follows:   Ã¢â‚¬Å"The terms crime, victim and fear are joined with news reports about terrorism to construct public discourse that reflects symbolic relationships about order, danger, and threat that may be exploited by political decision makers.† (Altheide 2006: pp. 416). The inference here is that the three terms at hand represent fairly negative social concepts which are familiar to the US audience at large. Altheide posits that associating these concepts with terrorism was politically beneficial for a government who were trying to justify a ‘war on terror’ in the Middle East in that it defined the idea of terrorism in very immediate, negative terms. Considering social realignment and redefinition of fundamental concepts in this way is a very subjectivist mode of study (Benton Craib 2001). The idea that social concepts like terrorism are innately subjective and relative can be traced back to the roots of subjective sociological study: Durkheim posited that such concepts are defined and redefined by their relationship to other concepts and should be studied and viewed in terms of these relationships (1982 [1895]). The aim of this mode of comparative study is that subjective facts could be studied in comparison to each-other rather than in comparison to the bias of the researcher, this arguably allows for an objective scientific study of highly subjective social concepts (Collins 1975). Such an approach is evident in Altheide’s study of the social concept of terror. The concepts at hand are studied in the context of their presentation by the mass media in order to reach a conclusion regarding the way in which the press act to build consent for interventionist political ends. This conclusion makes comparisons with Herman and Chomsky’s (1988) propaganda mode of political economy almost unavoidable. The early Marxian model of ruling classes and ruling ideas in the German ideology (1932) is also relevant to the conclusion. Both of these models see distinctive elites subjectively redefining concepts and presenting them as banal and objective truths to be accepted by the masses in a model of elitist social constructionism (Berger Luckman 1967).   This subjective, constructionist perspective seems to be very much the theoretical basis of Alheide’s work as evidenced below. (b) Show how the philosophical or theoretical perspective informs the research design and conclusions. Altheide states his methodology as a qualitative content analysis of media coverage of terrorism: He attempts to track and situate the discourse around it in relation to the words fear, crime and victim, and how they are â€Å"joined with news reports about terrorism to construct public discourse which reflects symbolic relationships about order, danger, and threat that may be exploited by political decision makers.† (Altheide 2006, pp. 422). This illustrates the critical link between Durkheim’s (1982) situated subjective concepts and the terms being qualitatively assessed. It also illustrates the constructionist view of the pursuits of ‘political decision makers’ taken by Altheide.   Further to this Altheide acknowledges the dynamic nature of the subjective concepts he handles by deciding to compare the newspapers’ discourse in the eighteen months preceding September 11th to the discourse in the 18 months immediately following it in order to track the change in consideration of terrorism as a concept. Social constructionism holds that society is built, defined, rebuilt and redefined to a greater or lesser degree by all of the actors and agencies which constitute it based on definition and situation of concepts.   Recently more and more consideration has been given to the powerful elites in society and their relatively greater contribution to these concepts and how they work in society, politics and the media are two such elites (Wanda 2003). In Altheide’s case the study leads him to conclude that American society has been redefined as a group of victims on a large scale. Further to this he posits that this new definition leads to increased reliance on American institutions and decreased criticism of them. The eventual effect of this is that security institutions can overstep previous boundaries and justify the kind of mission creep that would have been unacceptable before 9/11. This conclusion reads soundly with Herman and Chomsky’s (1988) model of media based political economy. The fact that the focus is on the newspapers’ handling of the issues rather than the discourse of the politicians themselves indicates that the as well as the conclusion research is informed by Herman and Chomsky’s model rather than a more directly government-focused idea which might have had more immediate but less incisive results. Chomsky has already applied this rhetorical position to the context of 9/11 albeit loosely (Chomsky 2001) he concludes similarly to Altheide: â€Å"In short, the crime is a gift to the hard jingoist right, those who hope to use force to control their domains†. In other text he has called for and supported the work of others in applying his and Herman’s model to this context (e.g. Herring and Robinson 2003), whether Altheide heeded this call in designing his research or whether it was a happy coincidence is unknown. Wha t is known is that the conclusions support Chomsky’s earlier reading, but to what degree is the research theoretically effective? This is considered below. (c) Critically assess the adequacy of the research in terms of its philosophical or theoretical perspective.    The selection of qualitative content analysis over quantitative methods is an obvious choice for a researcher looking to subjectively analyse a concept in terms of how it relates to other ideas, this is because by its very nature qualitative content analysis considers the context of words in a text (Krippendorf 2004 Ch2: Conceptual Foundation). This research methodology is inherently relative and subjective; by contrast it would be very challenging to construct an essentialist qualitative content analysis. If terrorism is to be considered from a subjective point of view, tracking the discourse relating to it comparatively before and after a major definitive terrorist event allows solid insight into the changing definition of the concept. The hypothesis that the definition of the concepts at hand has changed can only be proved through a comparative, long term analysis identifying the concept’s relation to other ideas. Just as comparison of two media sources will reveal differences in their handling and definition of a subject, so comparison of two time periods will reveal changes in definition and handling of subjects over time (Riffe et al. 2008). The same newspapers and magazines were used throughout, a basic step which ensures representative constancy throughout the time period in question allowing firmly based comment on the changes in approach. The selection of these newspapers and magazines to provide a definitive, representative cross section of the US press is important to Altheide’s theoretical stance and is acknowledged as such in the study methodology (pp. 422). Altheide’s hypothesis that press and media elites were constructing ‘rhetorics of fear’ for the American public in general requires consideration of a representative portion of the media in question read by a representative portion of the American public, to achieve this a range of large scale sources with large readerships were the focus of the research. This ensures that the sources in question have the descriptive power which Herman and Chomsky saw as central to their role in the political economy (1988), as well as providing a numerically representative audience. The search policies and protocols used by Altheide are based on the words fear, victim, crime and terrorism. These words are not simply searched for in terms of their occurrence in isolation, instead articles with these words â€Å"in various relationships or within several words of each-other† (pp. 422) were selected and analysed in context with particular attention to the relationships themselves. This is important from the theoretical standpoint of sociological subjectivism and constructionism as it provides a socially defined context for the concept of terrorism in terms of relevance to other social concepts. The identification of the major newspapers as definers, their large audiences as receivers and the politicians as profiteers provides a very solid basis for Altheide to create an account of the socially constructed political economy being considered. Questions have been raised about the limits of qualitative inquiry where subjective definitions are concerned (Krippend orf 2004), however these remain unanswered. Although not perfect, Altheide’s work is a representative and rational example of subjective, constructionist research into media politics. (d) Offer an alternative interpretation of the research findings and/or an alternative research design based on a different philosophical or theoretical perspective. In his conclusion Altheide reads the situation in a way which follows rationally from his results, but in a way which is very focused on the press as a creator of concepts, he makes a number of important critical statements: Firstly that the media is at least partly responsible for defining social concepts which affect the views and actions of the American public. Secondly that this was done by linking concepts to create definitions where there were none before. Thirdly that the political elite profited from this in that it helped them gain public compliance. And lastly that this relationship was, to some degree at least, consciously created â€Å"by a compliant press [who] stressed fear of terrorism† (pp. 425). This reading is based on the evidence that after 9/11 press coverage of terrorism changed to create a rhetoric of a crime against the united states, which had identifiable perpetrators (terrorists) and identifiable victims (the US public) and which the government could prevent in future.   This is an unavoidably partisan view, the government are characterised by the press as a white knight and the terrorists as the evil enemy. As Chomsky (2001) commented this is not an objective truth but a subjective illustration and Altheide analyses it as such. However the subjective illustration does not necessarily have to be considered in terms of its origin from a social construction of subjective ideas. It can equally be seen as a reaction to real events, based on empirically defined human nature. This reading can be summarized in four comparative critical statements which contrast with the summary of Altheide’s laid out above. Firstly the media are a fundamental means of reacting to events in coordination or contention with others, a social product of human nature (Kueter 2005: Ch 9). Secondly that the concepts with which they deal, such as fear and will to power are equally natural and equally innate in the human condition, they are not socially constructed, their application is the only thing that is defined by their context. On the third point there is some agreement, the political elite did profit by virtue of being able to control the context in which the ideas were applied, they did not control the ideas themselves. Ironi cally, Noam Chomsky’s critical redefinition of 9/11 (2001) can be used as proof of this theory in opposition to his own, if the government and the media had had definitive control over the concept of terrorism Chomsky would have been unable to define it separately as a rational reaction. His redefinition arguably shows that there is an essential definition of terrorism outside of what the media creates.   Lastly, it is natural that any kind of human interaction is defined by its support of or opposition to the status quo, agreement and disagreement are the basis of all critique (Kueter 2005). That the US press and government are in support of each-other is unsurprising given that they both represent the public of the country which suffered a very public attack. In this way the conclusion becomes one of natural constants such as group solidarity and Nietzsche’s will to power, rather than of subjective manipulation and relativity. Conclusion    Bibliography Altheide, D. L. (2006) ‘Terrorism and the Politics of Fear’ Critical Methodologies 6 (4) pp. 415-439 Benton, T. and Craib, I. (2001) Philosophy of Social Science. Basingstoke: Palgrave Berger, P. L. Luckmann, T. (1967) The Social Construction of Reality New York: Anchor Chomsky, N. 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