When one says “…

When one says “terrorism” in a democratic society, one also says “media.” For terrorism by its very nature is a psychological weapon which depends upon communicating a threat to a wider society. This, in essence, is why terrorism and the media enjoy a symbiotic relationship. -Paul Wilkinson

Despite his having properly noted the symbiotic relationship between terrorism and mass media, he promulgates a dangerous inversion of the fact that it is not terrorists who use media to carry out their goals against a powerful enemy. It is instead the powerful enemy who terrorizes the colonized via their media.

In terms of U.S. mass media, and hip-hop specifically, colonized African America is targeted and then assaulted by intentionally-selected damaging forms of its own cultural expression buttressed by an entire lack of news.

As the Colonialism and Mass Media model attempts to show, popularity is determined not by the consumers but by the entities in control of dissemination. – Jared Ball