As the “newspaper of record” the New York Times participated, in 1972, in the production of a “first draft of history” that was fundamentally flawed as it ignored the definitional question while misrepresenting the positions of nearly all actors involved.
After 1972, the General Assembly would continue to hold discussions on “international terrorism.” If the terms of the debates and of the resolutions adopted have, over time, evolved and been refined, the same 2 major points of contention remain unresolved: the question of the nature of those violent acts that “national liberation movements” or other non-state entities can legitimately use without being considered “terrorists,” and the question of the validity and exact meaning of the concept of “state terrorism.”
As the international community continued to wrestle with these questions, “terrorism” came to play, under President Reagan especially, a more and more important role in the American political discourse, with the arrival of concepts such as “state-sponsored terrorism” and the growing focus it implied on the role played by certain states in what was often described as a “terrorist threat” to the international community as a whole and to the Western world in particular. (Brulin)
At the same time however, interest in the debates on “terrorism” in the American media in general and in the New York Times in particular drastically waned. Thus there has not been, since 1976, a single article in the New York Times referring to the debates in the Sixth Committee and therefore referring to the specific arguments defended by various member states, the very rare (3 in 1985, 2 in 1987, 1 in 1997 and 1 in 1999) articles devoted to the debates having been limited to the results of and reactions to the votes on various resolutions.
The deeply flawed historical narrative produced by the New York Times in 1972 is thus historically important because it helped frame how the American public and its political or cultural elites thought about the issue as it was first discussed at the United Nations, but also because it represents the most extensive American media account ever produced of the ways in which the international community has attempted to wrestle with this most complex and powerful of concepts, “terrorism.”
Remi Brulin is a visiting Scholar at New York University, Shapiro Fellow at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, teaches on the American discourse on terrorism and the media.
All quotes and references in this excerpt are properly cited in the book If It Was Not for Terrorism: Crisis, Compromise, and Elite Discourse in the Age of War on Terror.