‘In a Wilderness of Mirrors’: The Use and Abuse of the ‘Abu Sayyaf’ Label in the Philippines

Most media coverage of the ‘Abu Sayyaf’, an allegedly militant Islamist group or organization in the Philippines, derives ultimately from official sources, but the information provided by such sources has never been subject to scrutiny. To redress the oversight, this paper critically examines official and media accounts of the ‘Abu Sayyaf’. Beginning with a survey of media reports from June 2007 to January 2009, it highlights the contradictions uncovered in the sample before accounting for such inconsistencies and other peculiarities in terms of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's propaganda model. Applying the model to the performance of the media in the southwestern Philippines, the paper then looks at the factors that render journalists in the region highly dependent on official sources for data, and hence vulnerable to state disinformation, before exploring the framework of presuppositions that influence popular representations of the ‘Abu Sayyaf’ and the troubles in the zone.