Il simulacro della Bbc. Il linguaggio della propaganda Isis nei filmati con John Cantlie

This article analyses two of the Islamic State’s propaganda videos portraying the British journalist John Cantlie, kidnapped by the IS in 2012. The videos promote everyday life in the areas controlled by the IS, with a language truly resembling that used by the BBC. Drawing on Bauman’s postmodern propaganda, on studies by Baudrillard, Uva and others on the relationships between reality and representation, and on the concept of remediation, the article applies multimodal analysis to two of Cantlie’s videos. By historically contextualising the results, it illustrates that, like other terror organizations and like the IS in the past, these videos re-mediate other languages – in this case that of the BBC, which is particularly credible for the Western public – in order to legitimise their propagandistic messages while overlapping and weakening Western journalistic languag. Ultimately, however, the IS «simulacrize» a simulacre, recognising the BBC’s value and the political-economic model that it implies.