American Media Discourses On Terrorism

The thesis explores the role the freedom of the press played and continues to play in a terrorized America. In particular, it challenges the claims that the free flow of ideas and expressions is to blame for the development of terrorism. By analyzing the multiple features of terrorists'images in American media discourses, it criticizes a corrupted interpretation of Muslims.The research starts from conceptual frameworks:what does it mean to terrorism and how free can the press be? The tensions created by the dilemma of the freedom of the press are reviewed in detail. Given the indictment of the media as being pro-terrorist or anti-terrorist, it makes an estimation of the merits and demerits of the American media discourses. The analysis then focuses on the extent to which the freedom of the press has affected terrorism. Several broad issues emerge from the discussion:the American media is rather an agent of hegemony and ideology than a watchdog for the political struggles, the discourses on terrorism in films, news, televisions, books and websites tend invariably to be distorted, producing "cultures of fear" both in Whites and the Non-Whites. Taking the neo-Gramscian cultural studies as a theoretical paradigm, the thesis keeps a positive attitude towards the capability of the audiences to decode the media discourses on terrorism and the opportunity of the independent press to release the energies of the weak. The balanced approaches offered by this research are to build a more independent and justified media community for the sake of free expression immune to ideologies, and to improve the public media literacy to actively make responses to media discourses.The freedom of the press is being challenged by the tactics of terrorists for making their voices heard and by the manipulation of authorities for gaining political ends. By drawing on the theory of counterterrorism critically, the thesis invites researchers to reinterrogate the relationship between terrorism and the freedom of the press in the United States.