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I had high hopes for this book, because the title and the first section after the forward and preface looked good. The forward promised an interesting analysis of a topic I read quite a bit about in graduate school, the interactions between terrorism and media, and how media supports the functionality of terrorist acts through sensationalized reporting (or more concerningly through any coverage of terrorism, a thesis that I was pleased to see this author recognized). The preface had me a bit worried that my initial favorable assessment of this book might be too hasty- it was written in 2002 and was an odd argument about how the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was obviously a terrorist act, an argument directly contradicted by the analysis provided in both the forward and the first main section of the book. These three sections together already suggest that this is not a well-planned and coherent book.
The first main section, and the only one that seemed well-polished (though without a reference page) is listed in the table of contents as the introduction. This section goes on for 70 pages, and is a bit repetitive and unorganized, but still reads like a professional, perhaps student-published paper. It goes through an analysis of existing definitions for 'terrorism' and attempts, with some success, to create a better, more nuanced definition. Javaid briefly discusses two topics- issue framing and othering- that he ought to have gone into in a lot more detail in order to tie in the media aspect of his thesis as introduced in his forward and introduction.
After the introduction, the train wreck began and the book just got worse for the rest of its pages. The introduction uses reasonably good citations, is fairly well proofread, and comes across as professional, objective, and well-supported. Chapter 1, which addresses the 'Western' media, has practically no citations, and thus no supporting sources for the many broad generalities and bold statements of 'fact' that the author throws in. This chapter reminded me very much of papers former students wrote when they ran out of time and had to just create a laundry list of the stuff they know on a topic, without a bibliography or any solid research. Chapter 2, on 'Eastern' media, has some interesting information on media in South-Western Asia, but again with almost no source information. These chapters are both outdated, discussing a world before Internet became the news media outlet it is now. There is no updating to take into account the major upheavals of the Arab-Spring movements a few years ago, let alone anything more recent.
After these two chapters the author throws in a bunch of 'case studies' in which partial statistics are provided on some data concerning public opinions and awareness of media, with respect to various conflicts covered by the media in the 1990's and through 2004. The conflicts covered include wars and terrorist attacks in several different countries and under a wide range of contexts, with most of the text in each case study simply providing in words a brief overview of some of the raw statistics, with no analysis, let alone discussion that would tie these case studies in with the long forgotten thesis presented in the forward and introduction.
The book concluded with several pages of text copied and pasted from the previous chapters, with very minimal changes. Following this 'conclusion', Javaid provides a very short bibliography, which can in no way account for all the sources mentioned in the book, and which is not formatted correctly by any professional publication's standards. There is no source listed in the bibliography that dates past 1995, and all Internet sources are just lumped under "Different Resource Articles From Internet". If I saw such a statement in a student's bibliography I would be using the Internet to do some text-matching and find out whose work the student plagiarized, but I am sure (at least I am hoping; I didn't check for plagiarism for this manuscript) that none of this book was actually lifted from sources without attribution. Actually, since from one chapter to the next his source citations shift from being in-text parentheticals to footnotes to odd bolded sources reminiscent of propaganda pamphlets, where sources are mentioned at all, it is not surprising that his bibliography would not be good enough to have earned him a passing grade in a freshman political science course.
In short, while this book had, and still has a lot of promise, especially for its theoretical analysis of terrorism, it needs a lot of copy-editing and reworking before it could be recommended for any demographic, academic or otherwise. Thus I gave this book 1 out of 4 stars. I could see parts of the introduction being reworked into a professional paper for a theory, international relations, or media studies journal, and the rest of the book has a lot of ideas that could be developed further in future papers, but as a whole this is not a coherent book.
***
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