Reporting terrorism in Muslim Asia: the Peshawar massacre

Abstract

Terrorism is not a threat to Western civilisation alone. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives and using Pakistan as a case, where the war-on-terror is being fought ceaselessly, analysis was carried out on Pakistan’s mainstream media coverage of, and citizen media reactions to, the December 2014 Peshawar school terror attack where 144 people, mostly children, were killed. Discourse analysis of media texts reflects that Pakistan’s mainstream media was spineless in openly fighting terrorism as it focused on the victims of the attack while camouflaging stories with shahadat-ism (martyrdom). On the other hand, citizen media condemned the Taliban perpetrators and hotly debated the perils of Taliban-ism and Islamo-fascism. Attempts to fight militant Islamism and mitigate terrorism were evident in an emerging citizen sphere where the issue took on new meanings, unlike the West. It is important for journalists to be culturally alert in reporting ‘terrorism’ in the light of the intersections of Islamism.