Terror, Media, and Moral Boundaries Nachman Ben-Yehuda* ABSTRACT The relationship between terror and its presentation in the media is examined. The process of presenting terror is characterized as a method of challenging, negotiating, and redrawing moral boundaries. On the one hand, examining the terror–media relationship in this fashion enables us to transcend issues involved in taking a stand regarding the contents of specific acts of terror. On the other hand, making a stand regarding the nature of terror requires a moral decision. Any such stand regarding the content of terror, in terms of its explanation and justification, is thus based on a moral agenda that can be deciphered from the way it is presented. I use the case of political assassinations and executions to illustrate this terror–media connection through the conceptualization of negotiating moral boundaries. Keywords: assassinations, media, moral boundaries, terror, war Introduction ‘One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter’ is a common statement. And, indeed, some famous world leaders were incarcerated or hunted as ‘terror- ists’, only to appear years later as genuine freedom fighters for peace. Israel’s Menachem Begin and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela are just two illustrations. How can one make such a distinction? And on what grounds? I will argue below that such statements are morally bounded, and that making them requires explicit or implicit invocation of some moral context. To be meaningful, this suggested contextualization must be framed within a historical perspective. Moreover, the decision about whether one is faced with a genuine case of terror or of a fight against cruel oppression or occupation has a strong moral element. It is this moral element that dictates both the type and nature of responses and the presentation of the act or acts. However, examining terror from a moralistic point of view alone (that is from a ‘right’ versus ‘wrong’ perspective) may create myriad points of view, dictated by the different symbolic-moral universes of the examiners. One way of avoiding this kaleidoscopic view is to regress to mere chronologies of events, devoid of social context, focusing on temporal sequencing made to show that earlier events somehow caused later events. Alas, this is a barren and boring Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications www.sagepublications.com (London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi) Vol 46(1–2): 33–53. DOI: 10.1177/0020715205054469 * Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel.