The Media's Coverage of Domestic Terrorism Notes

Introduction

• The September 11 attacks significantly impacted social, political, cultural, and legal issues.
• The public's understanding of the attacks primarily came from media outlets.
• Several factors made the September 11 terrorism a major news event:
  • Media Accessibility: Immediate access to the event through media technology.
  • News Values: The event was violent, intense, unambiguous, unexpected, rare, and hostile to elite people and/or nations, aligning with journalistic conventions.
  • Fear: Uncontrollable feelings of fear and vulnerability due to attacks on American soil.
  • Media Frames: Heroes, villains, and sympathetic victims were woven into major frames, changing moral boundaries and the structure of institutional power. It was perceived that America would never be the same after September 11, and terrorism became a social problem needing a response.
• Scholars quickly produced studies dissecting media coverage of the events and aftermath.
• Post-September 11 representations of terrorism are linked to a long history of terrorism as a news topic.
• Reporters quickly defined the September 11 event as terrorism, attributing it to a well-known terrorist, similar to explanations in coverage of other events in the 1990s.
• Previous terrorism coverage provided a foundation for presenting, investigating, and researching terrorism post-September 11.
• Few studies have explored media selection and prominence decisions in covering domestic terrorism incidents in the United States before 2001, creating a gap that this study aims to fill.

Focus of the Study

• The study examines what is newsworthy about domestic terrorism.
• It proposes that to examine media coverage of terrorism and its presentation in the news, one should first identify the actuality of terrorism in the United States as a reference point.
• The study analyzes coverage of terrorism incidents in the U.S. between January 1, 1980, and September 10, 2001.
• An in-depth analysis and comparison between media coverage and actual incidents provides insights into the presentation of terrorism in the news media.

The Media's Role in Terrorism

• Understanding media choices, including selection and prominence of terrorism incidents, has consequences for:
  • How the public thinks about terrorism.
  • How policymakers respond to terrorism.
  • How terrorists attempt to use the media to accomplish their objectives.

Public's Dependency on the News Media

• The public relies heavily on news media for terrorism information.
• Media accessibility and omnipresence have altered how Americans learn about the world.
• September 11 demonstrated the media's importance.
• Nacos (2003b, p. 28) stated that the terrorist assaults on New York and Washington after September 11 were the most watched made-for-television production ever.
• She argues the media's impact will increase as newsmaking moves from hard news to infotainment.
• While scholars debate the media's influence on public attitudes, most agree the media play a role, increasing as the public's direct experience decreases.
• The media have a strong potential to influence how the public thinks about social problems like terrorism because most people only experience terrorism through mass-media accounts.
• Slone's (2000) research found that people base national security threat assessments on media exposure and that media portrayals of terrorism increase anxiety.
• Not all terrorism events are presented to the public, and responses to terrorism are not always covered.
• Most Americans are familiar with only a few terrorist incidents on U.S. soil, such as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and the 2001 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
• The FBI lists over 450 such incidents in their annual Terrorism in the United States report.
• Examining media choices helps understand media priorities by showing what events are minimized or magnified.

Policymakers and the Media

• News coverage is an effective communication platform for politicians and policymakers.
• Scholars argue the media are critical in setting agenda issues and have transformed the structure and meaning of politics and political communication.
• Media technologies impact how politicians discuss solutions to social problems.
• Altheide (1991, p. 6) notes that mass media formats increasingly used to cover events are transforming those events and altering the strategies used to promote and evaluate them.
• News values are largely representative of social organizations seeking to reproduce social order.
• Political organizations use media coverage to determine public priorities.
• These claims-making opportunities express popular sentiment and seek to transform it according to selective visions of state and society.
• Terrorism can be a strategically useful topic for policymakers.
• Shapiro (2002, p. 76) argues that effective media policy has become integral to the politics of conflict and an essential element in the international effort of terrorism.
• Chermak's (2002) analysis demonstrates that after Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh was erroneously tied to the militia movement in 1995, policymakers used the bombing to propose solutions and generate support for policy preferences.

Terrorists and the Media

• Terrorist acts can satisfy multiple objectives for terrorists, including realizing their cause, funding, strengthening morale, recruitment, revenge, liberation of comrades, spreading fear, and publicity.
• Terrorism becomes a persuasive vehicle of communication and a mechanism to gain access to the "Triangle of Political Communication" (Nacos, 2002, p. 4) for groups and individuals who feel ignored.
• Nacos' work stresses how coverage brings status to terrorists, providing an opportunity to recruit members and disseminate ideas.
• Terrorist deeds are planned and executed with the mass media and their effects on the masses and governmental decision-makers in mind.
• Most scholars highlight the symbiotic relationship between the media and terrorists, assuming terrorists attempt to capitalize on the media's power, and the media need dramatic and sensational events to increase ratings.
• Some scholars believe the relationship between terrorists and the media is overstated due to the lack of systematic evidence of motivations for terrorism.

Media Coverage of Crime Incidents

• There is a large body of scholarly work examining the presentation of crime in the media.
• This research documents variations by medium, changes in crime coverage over time, individuals/experts quoted, and major frames used to describe crime/criminal justice.
• Most research relies on content analysis to determine media's contribution to public's constructed realities about crime.
• An increasingly popular approach is to collect a population of incidents in a specific time frame and jurisdiction, then link these data to media accounts.
• Researchers document what incidents are presented, how much news space is devoted, and what factors predict selection (whether an event is covered) and prominence (placement and amount of coverage).
• Peelo et al.'s study of press coverage of homicides in England and Wales used Home Office data on 2,685 homicides between 1993 and 1996 and traced reporting in three national newspaper titles.
• Results showed that only 40% of homicide incidents received news coverage, that victim and case-related variables are more important than suspect variables, and that the circumstance of the homicide was the most important predictor of salience.
• This approach allows researchers to compare what is presented about a crime/social problem to what is ignored.
• Peelo et al. (2004, p. 256) argue that news accounts must be compared to actual incidents to see whether the "public narrative of homicide" is distorted, and by systematically charting the nature of reporting distortions, we explore the contribution of newspapers to the social construction of homicide.
• Sorenson et al. (1998, p. 1514) found that newspaper patterns of homicide do not accurately reflect homicide and homicide risk, which may explain why the public believes violence is increasing despite statistics indicating crime declines.
• Paulsen (2003) argues that research must compare the media's presentation of homicide with actual homicide incidents to understand the socially constructed realities of homicide.
• Pritchard and Hughes (1997, p. 50) argue that research on journalists' selection processes must analyze events and situations that journalists decided were not newsworthy by obtaining extramedia data and comparing what is reported in the news with what was not reported.

Media Coverage of Terrorism

• The present study applies this framework to the analysis of terrorism in the media.
• Most research has focused on how terrorists use the media to accomplish strategic/tactical goals.
• Most scholars are critical of media accounts of terrorism, but these criticisms are based primarily on anecdotal data, and fewer studies examine what the media actually present about terrorism.
• Similar to the literature on media coverage of crime, scholars examining the presentation of terrorism in the news have relied primarily on content analysis of media communication.
• The extant research has focused on three general areas:
  • The newsworthiness of terrorism.
  • What factors determine whether an incident is covered.
  • What actually gets presented in news stories of terrorism.

Newsworthiness of Terrorism

• Although some scholars conclude that terrorism is rarely presented in the news, most researchers generally agree that international and domestic acts of terrorism are important media events, but acts of state terrorism are generally ignored.
• Nacos (2003b, p. 31) concludes the contemporary news media, especially television, have customarily devoted huge chunks of their broadcast time and news columns to major and minor acts of political violence.
• Martin (1985) studied media coverage of violence or the threat of violence by a politically oriented group in four foreign and one American newspaper (the Washington Post) and concluded that there are, on average, nine terrorism incidents presented per day, but only a very small percentage of stories use the term terrorism to describe political violence.
• Kern, Just, and Norris (2003, p. 290) conclude that the September 11 attacks were particularly surprising to the American public because media coverage of terrorism had been declining: in the 1980s, US network news covered about four terrorism stories a week but only two per week in the 1990s. Not surprisingly, they also conclude that media coverage of terrorism reached "record levels" following 9/11.
• The media's tendency is to overemphasize and overdramatize terrorism at the expense of many other important social problems.
• Iyengar and Kinder (1991) find that the media presented more stories about terrorism than poverty, unemployment, racial equality, and crime.
• Since terrorism fits the infotainment frame, offering clear villains and heroes, news media will ignore other news and overemphasize terrorism.

Factors Impacting Coverage

• Research has documented factors explaining why terrorism is a newsworthy topic, applying standard newsworthiness criteria.
• Terrorist incidents harming American citizens abroad or threatening American interests are more likely to receive coverage, though overseas terrorist activity is generally ignored by US news media.
• An act is more likely to be labelled as terrorism when a US citizen is killed.
• There is considerable variation in newspaper coverage given to certain terrorist incidents.
• Picard (1993) argues that most incidents are not covered, but those presented receive massive attention out of proportion to their social/political significance.
• Paletz et al. (1982) examined every story on ABC, NBC, and CBS that discussed the terrorist activities of the IRA, FALN, and the Red Brigade and concluded that while the terrorism of these groups was certainly newsworthy, most stories about them were very brief, with only high-profile events, which usually ended in violence, receiving significant coverage. Their analysis indicated that having victims was an important variable that determined the amount of news coverage
• Nacos (2002) agrees that terrorist acts resulting in a significant number of deaths or destruction will yield substantial media coverage, but also argues that minor acts may receive coverage based on location, target, and group involved.
• The duration of an incident (hijackings) and accessibility to a location (Kelly & Mitchell, 1981; Quester, 1986) are important variables.
• Quester (1986) found that the hijacking of the Achille Lauro received less coverage compared to the TWA hijacking because the media could not reach the ship's location at sea.
• Media emphasize the dramatic, violent, and conflictual terrorist accounts while ignoring historical, cultural, and social explanations.
• Paletz et al. (1985) find that one-third of the stories focused primarily on the violence of an incident, government responses and concerns were included in nearly 40 percent of stories, and less than 6 percent of stories discussed goals of these groups or underlying social conditions central to the conflicts.
• Atwater (1987) concludes that background information about terrorist groups is presented in only about 3 percent of network television coverage.
• Terrorism is presented in a one-sided fashion, generally supporting extant government policy.
• Journalists selectively use the term terrorist in a way that corresponds with government interests, mediated by organizational and technological issues.
• Terrorists are often presented as irrational fanatics.

Media Coverage of Terrorism Incidents

• Most studies examining media presentation of terrorism have simply reported media images about a particular media event or type of event, or from a general sample of media articles, but there have been a few important studies that have looked at coverage of all incidents.
• Gabriel Weimann and colleagues studied media coverage of international terrorism committed by nonstate actors, relying on a chronological list of international terrorism acts developed by the RAND Corporation and examining media coverage of the 2,239 international terrorism incidents in the database that occurred between 1968 and 1980.
• Electronic and print media were examined.
• These studies indicate that only 1/3 of international terrorism incidents were presented in both electronic and print media (Weimann & Brosius, 1991; Weimann & Winn, 1994).
• Stories published in the New York Times are often exported to the rest of the world.
• On average, an incident received about 120 seconds of television coverage and two newspaper articles.
• Factors determining selection and prominence included act type (kidnappings, hijackings, hostage takings), seriousness (death/injury), location (Middle East, Palestinian terrorists/Israeli targets), and duration.
• Negative effects were found when responsibility was unknown or acts occurred in Latin America.
• Another study focuses similarly on media coverage of international terrorism but uses a different database (Delli Carpini & Williams, 1987).
• These scholars compare the amount and type of network television coverage of international terrorism that occurred between 1969 and 1980 to terrorist occurrences in a data set called ITERATE (International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events).
• Television networks cover terrorism similarly, but none of the network's coverage parallels the ITERATE data (Delli Carpini & Williams, 1987, p. 53).
• Although the number of terrorist incidents increased dramatically, the amount of coverage remained about the same over time.
• International terrorism was covered intensely in some years but received only minimum coverage in other years.
• Terrorism incidents in North America and the Middle East were overemphasized, while activity in Latin America was downplayed.
• Bombings and political threats are downplayed (compared to their actual occurrence), and hostage situations and hijackings are overemphasized.
• Coverage of terrorism against US citizens does not differ from general terrorism coverage, and it does not correspond to changes in the ITERATE database.

Study Justification and Hypotheses

• The present study explores media coverage of terrorism incidents starting with a database of actual incidents, similar to research using the ITERATE and RAND databases and scholars studying homicide.
• The current study comments on the characteristics that influence issues of selection (what incidents received coverage) and prominence (what incidents received significant amounts of coverage).
• The focus is on characteristics found to be important in previous research: type of act, seriousness, location, target, tactic, and origin, but our study extends this work in several ways.
• First, the database of terrorism incidents starts where both studies end (1980) and continues to September 10, 2001.
• Second, the focus of this study is on media coverage of terrorism within the United States.
• Most media and terrorism research focuses on international events occurring abroad, and very few studies look at domestic incidents.
• Third, this study uses multiple measures of media salience:
  • Which terrorism incidents are covered.
  • How many articles and words are presented about each incident.
  • Media coverage related to specific and general accounts of an incident.
• This approach indicates which factors increase the likelihood of coverage and opens up a dialogue on how terrorist incidents are used by policymakers and other claimsmakers.
• The study provides an opportunity to more completely examine the symbiotic relationship between terrorists and news organizations.
• Identifying key variables critical to this relationship furthers our understanding of how media objectives and formats contribute to a very narrow understanding of terrorism.
• It also provides some measure of how successful terrorist groups have been in accomplishing publicity goals.
• The success of a terrorist organization depends on the amount of publicity it receives (Nacos, 2003b; Nelson & Scott, 1992).
• Nacos introduces the idea of "mass-mediated terrorism" to illustrate the role of media considerations in the calculus of political violence (Nacos, 2003b, p. 23).
• Comparing media selection and prominence of terrorist incidents is an important next step in considering the role of media publicity in terrorist activities and terrorism as "mass-mediated action."
• The variations in the amount of publicity received across incidents may indicate which groups actually attempt to accomplish objectives using the media.
• Rather than simply assuming that all terrorists seek publicity, this study provides systematic evidence about which terrorists seek publicity and which may try to avoid it.
• The desire of achieving media publicity may push certain groups towards certain tactics or strategies.
• The publicity-seeking terrorist must understand media logic and communication formats to successfully accomplish communication goals.
• Applying the existing theoretical and empirical literatures in terrorism and the news media and the literature on newsworthiness generally, we expect the following characteristics of terrorism incidents to increase the likelihood that an event is selected and prominently presented (Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Weimann & Winn, 1994):
  • First, we expect the news media to exaggerate the attention given to the most serious terrorist events. An event must surpass a certain emotional threshold for media workers to consider covering an incident. As homicide is a rare event relative to other offenses, death by terrorism is very rare and thus an event that will be presented prominently in the news.
  • Second, we also expect the nature of the incident to influence media decision-making. Certain types of terrorist events-those short and intense in duration or an ongoing dramatic incident such as a hijacking-that are consistent with the routines of news production will likely receive much more news coverage.
  • Finally, the relevance of the incident (and the intended targets) will likely increase media salience. Political violence occurs throughout the world with some frequency, but most incidents are ignored because the media believe consumers are not interested-these events are too far removed to be of concern to American news consumers. This study examines only incidents occurring in the United States, but even these incidents are not equally meaningful. Attacks on foreign nationals or installations are likely to be defined by the media as being less important. All else being equal, domestic attacks targeting American interests and US citizens will be more likely to receive some coverage as well as extensive coverage.

Method

• This study is concerned with the news coverage of terrorist incidents occurring within the United States from 1980 to September 10, 2001.
• The analysis is based on a list of terrorist-related incidents and New York Times articles pertaining to each incident.
• Terrorist-related incident data came from both the FBI's Terrorism in the United States annual report and the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) Knowledge Base.
• With the two data sources combined, the list consisted of all reported terrorist incidents, suspected incidents, and prevented incidents investigated by the FBI as well as incidents recognized by court documents pertaining to individuals indicted for acts of terrorism for over two decades.
• Approximately 25 percent of the incidents were listed in both data sources, while 25 percent were located only in the MIPT database, and the other 50 percent of incidents were located only in the FBI's report.
• Defining domestic terrorism is problematic, but this study relies on the FBI's most recent definition of domestic terrorism, allowing the inclusion of all incidents from both data sources that occurred within the United States, including those in the U.S terriroty: [18 USC2331(5)].
• Terrorist-Related Incidents (1980-2001)
• There are 412 incidents included in the database constructed for this study.
• Slightly over 63 percent are completed acts of terrorism, while the rest are either prevented (24.8 percent) or suspected (11.9 percent) incidents.
• Approximately 40 percent of the incidents occurred in the Northeast, 28 percent in the West, 10 percent in the Midwest, and 22 percent in the South.
• At least one person was killed in approximately 6 percent of the incidents.
• Fifty-two percent of the incidents involved a domestic group or individual, and 45 percent are of international origin.
• Approximately 13 percent of the targets were airlines, 27 percent were non-government organizations (NGOs), 30 percent were government installations, 7 percent were private citizens, and 2 percent were other targets.
• The tactic used in the majority of the incidents was a bomb (63.6 percent).
• Approximately 10 percent were sabotage, 8 percent were hijackings, 6 percent were hostage situations, 4.5 percent involved firearms, and 4 percent were attacks against installations.

News Salience

• Keywords and names from terrorist-related incident descriptions were used to search for news coverage in Proquest's New York Times Historical Database.
• The New York Times was selected because its coverage is indicative of national media coverage (Winter & Eyal, 1981), thorough (Best, 1990), a reliable indicator of the importance of the issue on the national news agenda (Chermak & Weiss, 1998), and an agenda-setter for other major newspapers and networks(Brown, 1971; Danielian & Reese, 1989).
• From this data source, each article as it appeared in the newspaper, its word count, and how it was placed in relation to other news stories on the same page were gathered.
• Because of the two-year lag in the New York Times' online archive, Lexis Nexis was used to search for references to the terrorist incidents in the database through 2004.
• Two types of articles were collected:
  • First, were all articles that described and focused specifically on the terrorism incident (referred to as specific-incident articles).
  • Second, we collected any additional article where an incident was referenced by a reporter (referred to as general-incident articles).

Findings

• The findings were presented in three sections:
  • First, an overview of the amount and type of coverage received by these terrorism incidents with key bivariate relationships highlighted.
  • Second, logistic regression results showing the variables influencing whether a terrorism incident was covered are presented.
  • Third, multivariate results for the variables influencing the amount of space are presented.

Ignore, Mention, or Magnify

• Only 228 of the 412 (55.3 percent) terrorism incidents were presented in the New York Times.
• Over 4,000 articles and nearly 3.8 million words were written about the 228 terrorism incidents receiving coverage.
• On average, an incident receives approximately 10 articles and 9,000 words.
• 48 percent of the articles presented were classified as incident stories-stories describing the facts, circumstances, and response to a specific case.
• 52 percent of the articles were classified as general policy stories.
• Several incidents immediately ignited debate and legislative action regarding what may have been an important but dormant social problem.
• Nearly 85 percent of the incidents received less than five articles, and less than 1,500 total words were written about 70 percent of the incidents.
• The top 15 most news-producing incidents accounted for 79 percent of the total number of articles presented about all incidents, 71 percent of the specific articles, 86 percent of the general articles, 85 percent of the total number of words, 77 percent of the words on specific incidents, and 89 percent of the words on general articles.

Is an Incident Worthy of Coverage?

• To examine the factors influencing whether a terrorism incident is selected for presentation in the news, two logistic regression models were used.
• The results for both models are quite similar.
• Terrorism incidents occurring in the Northeast are significantly more likely to be covered compared to those in the South.
• Domestic incidents are significantly more likely to be covered than international incidents in the US, confirming a cultural relevance factor.
• Seriousness of the event, measured here as terrorism with at least one casualty, significantly increases the odds of being covered.
• Hijackings and incidents involving firearms were significantly more likely to be covered compared to sabotage, and the targets examined including NGOs and government installations were significantly less likely to be covered compared to airlines.
• In Model 1, prevented incidents were significantly more likely to be covered compared to suspected incidents.
• In Model 2, the incidents in the Midwest were significantly less likely to be covered compared to incidents in the South.

Factors Predicting Story Salience

• The database includes a number of outlier cases.
• Robust regression in STATA 12.0 is used to estimate the models presented below.
• In all of the models, terrorism incidents involving death were more prominently displayed than incidents without casualties (more words and articles, and high average number of words per article).
• On average, over 7,000 more words and 10 articles were written about incidents involving a death.
• Domestic terrorism incidents were more prominently presented to the public compared to international terrorism incidents in most of the models (6/12 models).
• Incidents occurring in the Northeast were more prominently presented (8/12 models) compared to incidents occurring in the South.
• Attacks against NGOs, in general, received less news space compared to airline attacks (5/6 of the models), and hijackings received more coverage compared to sabotage in all six tactic models.
• Incidents involving firearms (5/6 models) and bombings (2/6 models) were more prominently presented compared to incidents involving sabotage.

Discussion

• Researchers have probably overstated the overall importance of achieving media publicity for terrorists when balancing the risks and rewards of carrying out an incident.
• The sample is limited in that it focus on a single national newspaper, and thus it is possible that many more of these incidents were covered in local and regional newspapers. Terrorists may want to achieve local or minimum media coverage instead of making a media impact such as what occurred on September 11 or in Oklahoma City, but this does not seem likely.
• Scholars have documented an increase in mass-casualty terrorism but have provided only general explanations for this growth. Certainly, a plausible hypothesis is that a mass-casualty act is the only way for terrorists that want to achieve publicity to be competitive in the ultra-competitive social problems marketplace.
• Government resources, policy construction, and law enforcement efforts may focus on the most media-savvy terrorist groups, potentially ignoring the activities of less media-savvy but dangerous groups.
• Research examining how domestic terrorist incidents are presented in the news is crucial to understanding the role of the news media in shaping public and political understandings about this social problem.
• The research presented here is an attempt to move scholarly discussions to consider media accounts of terrorism more systematically.
• Almost all terrorism incidents, if covered by the media at all, are insignificant news events, but a few account for the vast majority of news space devoted to terrorism.
• Media messages are inherently ideological because they help establish public priorities, restrict general awareness about problems, and limit the field of response options
• As is in the case of how the media cover violent crime like homicide, there are some terrorist events that receive more news media attention than others, and others that did not receive any attention at all.
• For example, President Clinton introduced broad sweeping anti-terrorism legislation soon after the Oklahoma City bombing, including adding new airline security measures, funds for new technology, and increasing the authority of law enforcement in the investigation of terrorist cases.
• All coverage of terrorism and terrorist incidents is framed and read by the public through a new lens-that which was created by the media following the event. This reality confirms the important role that the media play influencing priorities, understandings, and policies about terrorism.
• The results highlight several characteristics that consistently increase the newsworthiness of terrorism incidents.
  • The seriousness of the event matters: terrorism resulting in death increases the newsworthiness of an incident.
  • Incidents that might strike a familiar chord with readers, as evidenced by the importance of regional convenience and domestic incidents, increase the newsworthiness of an incident as well.
  • Certain targets and tactics also matter: attacks against airlines and hijackings were particularly important.
• The factors that were found to influence the coverage and significance of these incidents are very much consistent with the extant scholarly research in this area (see Delli Carpini & Williams, 1987; Nacos, 2002, 2003b; Weimann, 1987; Weimann & Brosius, 1991; Weimann & Winn, 1994).
• Our findings also confirm Altheide's (1991) important conclusion about how mass-media formats transform images of terrorism. The formula that guides general concerns about newsworthiness and news production issues about location and type of media shape the media reality that is constructed in the news about terrorism.

Future Research

• Future Research may consider:
  • How did the September 11 incidents impact media decision-making about terrorism coverage?
  • What impact foreign groups had on the increase of terrorist-related incidents?
  • The debate within newsrooms occurring among journalist about the conceptual problems with defining terrorism.
  • The representation of suspected terrorism groups.
  • Using data to include other media, examine some characteristics of suspects and victims, and to use data from other terrorism databases.