Abstract
Contagion refers here to a form of copycat crime, whereby violence-prone individuals and groups imitate forms of (political) violence attractive to them, based on examples usually popularized by mass media. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, for instance, Palestinian terrorists staged a number of spectacular hijackings of commercial airliners, exploited the often prolonged hostage situations to win massive news coverage for their political grievances, and appeared to inspire other groups to follow their example. Although terrorism scholars, government officials, and journalists have pondered the question of mass-mediated contagion for decades, they have arrived at different conclusions. Because of significant advances in communication and information technology, and changes in the global media landscape during the last decade or so, this article reconsiders arguments surrounding contagion theories and contends that various types of media are indeed important carriers of the virus of hate and political violence.
Introduction
On April 19th, 1995, Timothy McVeigh ignited a homemade truck bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 persons, injuring close to 700 more, and triggering massive news coverage at home and abroad. Five days later, the director of the California Forest Association, Gilbert Murray, was killed instantly when he opened a small package that had been mailed to his office. The enclosed message revealed that the sender was the mysterious person dubbed "Unabomber" by the FBI; he had killed already two other people and injured 23 via mail bombs since 1978. That same day, The New York Times received a letter from the Unabomber threatening another deadly parcel bomb mailing unless the newspaper published a 35,000 words manifesto he had written to explain his motives. It is difficult to imagine that there was no link between the non-stop coverage of the terrorist spectacular in Oklahoma City and the timing of the simultaneous mailings to Murray's office and the Times. My guess was then and is now that the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, was miffed because of the relatively modest news coverage his mail bombs had received over the years compared to the tremendous attention the mass media paid to the Oklahoma City bombing. More importantly, whereas McVeigh's grievances and motives were prominently covered since he had intentionally posited clues in his car (i.e., Waco, Ruby Ridge), there had been no definitive news about the Unabomber's motives in the wake of his long mail bombing trail.
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