How does the business of news influence terrorism coverage? Evidence from the Washington Post and USA Today

Terrorism and Political Violence

Volumn 22, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 559-580

  Hoffman, Aaron M ^a   Jengelley, Dwaine H A ^b   Duncan, Natasha T ^c   Buehler, Melissa ^b   Rees, Meredith L ^b  

^a NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b PURDUE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c MERCYHURST COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

Competition; Counterterrorism; Economics; Media; Newspapers; Terrorism

Indexed keywords

EID: 77956497688     PISSN: 09546553     EISSN: 15561836     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2010.493778     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. Replication data files and appendices associated with this paper are available on Aaron M. Hoffman's website: http://sites.google.com/site/amhst20/
2. Norman Podhoretz, "Terrorism and the Media: A Discussion," Harper's Magazine 269, no. 1613 (1984): 43-60.
3. Brigitte L. Nacos, Mass-Mediated Terrorism: The Central Role of The Media in Terrorism and Counterterrorism (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).
4. Scott Sigmund Gartner, "Making the International Local: The USS Cole, Local Casualties, and Media Coverage," Political Communication 21, no. 2 (2004): 139-159.
5. Dominic Rohner and Bruno S. Frey, Blood and Ink! The Common-Interest Game Between Terrorists and the Media," Public Choice 133, nos. 1-2 (October 2007): 129-145.
6. Also, see Gabriel Weimann and Conrad Winn, Theater of Terror: Mass Media and International Terrorism (New York: Longman Publishing Group, 1993).
7. Benjamin Page with Marshall M. Bouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don't Get (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
8. Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder, News that Matters: Television and American Opinion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
9. Patricia Moy and Michael Pfau, With Malice Toward All? The Media and Public Confidence in Democratic Institutions (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000)
10. Kimberly Gross, Sean Aday, and Paul R. Brewer, A Panel Study of Media Effects on Political and Social Trust After September 11, 2001," Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 9, no. 4 (2004): 49-73.
11. ohn Mueller, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (New York: Free Press, 2006).
12. Brigitte L. Nacos, Yaeli Bloch-Elkom, and Robert Y. Shapiro, Prevention of Terrorism in Post-9=11 America: News Coverage, Public Perceptions, and the Politics of Homeland Security," Terrorism and Political Violence 20, no. 1 (January 2008): 1-25.
13. Rohner and Frey (see note 5 above).
14. Title 22, United States Code, Section 2656f(d).
15. Ariel Merari, Terrorism as a Strategy of Insurgency," Terrorism and Political Violence 5, no. 4 (1993): 213-251
16. Brigitte L. Nacos, Mass-Mediated Terrorism The Central Role of The Media in Terrorism and Counterterrorism (New York: Rowman and Littlefield., 2002)
17. Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat (New York: Random House, 2007).
18. Mueller (see note 9 above).
19. Richardson (see note 13 above). Some argue that the commission of unclaimed attacks suggests that terrorists do not always crave publicity. We disagree with this conclusion. The strategy of terrorism works by signaling others.
20. Andrew H. Kydd and Barbara F. Walter, The Strategies of Terrorism," International Security 31, no. 1 (Summer 2006): 49-80
21. Alex P. Schmid and Janny de Graaf, Violence as Communication: Insurgent Terrorism and the Western News Media (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1982)). In addition, anonymous attacks do not necessarily indicate lack of interest in publicity.
22. Aaron M. Hoffman, Voice and Silence: Why Groups Claim Responsibility for Acts of Terror," Journal of Peace Research, Forthcoming.).
23. See Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time (New York: Parthenon Books, 1976)
24. Doris A. Graber, Mass Media and American Politics, 7th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006).
25. Michael J. Kelly and Thomas H. Mitchell, Transnational Terrorism and the Western Elite Press," Political Communication and Persuasion 1, no. 3 (1981): 69-298.
26. Steven M. Chermak and Jeffery Gruenewald, "The Media's Coverage of Domestic Terrorism," Justice Quarterly 24, no. 4 (2006): 428-461.
27. Also see Gabriel Weimann and Hans-Bernd Brosius, The Newsworthiness of International Terrorism," Communication Research 18, no. 3 (1991), 333-354.
28. Weimann and Winn (see note 5 above); and Gartner (see note 4 above).
29. Graber (see note 16 above): 101.
30. Chermak and Gruenewald (see note 17 above).
31. Weimann and Winn (see note 5 above).
32. Alison Carper, Marketing News" in Pippa Norris, ed., Politics and the Press: The News Media and their Influences (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 1997): 45-66.
33. Gene Roberts and Thomas Kunkel, eds., Breach of Faith: A Crisis of Coverage in the Age of Corporate Newspapering (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002).
34. James T. Hamilton, All the News That's Fit to Sell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
35. The Pew Center for the People and the Press, Bottom Line Pressures Now Hurting Coverage, Say Journalists." (2004): http://people-press.org/report/214/. Accessed 5 July 2009.
36. We do not consider the consequences of "media concentration" on the coverage of terrorism because this phenomenon has not been linked to changes in the newsworthiness of terrorism.
37. Phillip A. Schrodt, Deborah J. Gerner, and Ömür Yilmaz, Methods Meets Policy: Transnational Monitoring of the Israel-Palestine Conflict," International Studies Perspectives 6, no. 2 (May 2005): 238.
38. See also, Charles Krauthammer, Terrorism and the Media: A Discussion," Harper's Magazine 269, no. 1613 (1984): 43-60
39. Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
40. Weimann and Brosius (see note 18 above).
41. Data from the Global Terrorism Database on the characteristics of terrorist attacks are available on-line at http://start.umd.edu/gtd. Accessed April 28, 2010.
42. W. James Potter, On Media Violence (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999).
43. Nacos, "Mass Mediated Terrorism" (see note 3 above).
44. Brigitte L. Nacos, Terrorism as Breaking News: Attack on America," Political Science Quarterly 118, no. 1 (2003): 23-52.
45. Mueller (see note 9 above).
46. Nacos, "Mass Mediated Terrorism" (see note 3 above): 136.
47. Brigitte L. Nacos, Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, and Robert Y. Shapiro, Prevention of Terrorism in Post-9=11 America: News Coverage, Public Perceptions, and the Politics of Homeland Security," Terrorism and Political Violence 20, no. 1 (January 2008): 1-25.
48. Ibid., 20.
49. Gartner (see note 4 above).
50. John L. Scott, "Media Congestion Limits Media Terrorism," Defense and Peace Economics 12, no. 3 (2001): 215-227.
51. Scott (see note 34 above): 216.
52. Hamilton (see note 24 above).
53. Gans (see note 16 above).
54. Scott (see note 34 above): 216.
55. Gartner (see note 4 above).
56. E.g., Chermak and Gruenewald (see note 17 above).
57. E.g., Iyengar and Kinder (see note 7 above).
58. Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw, The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media," The Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 2 (Summer 1972): 176-187.
59. The starting date for the research was determined by The Post's availability through Lexis Nexis; the end date was determined by the availability of data on international terrorism.
60. We searched using the words "terrorism" or "terrorist!" For readers interested in examining our data generation procedure more closely, including our coding decisions, a copy of the instructions we used to search the Washington Post and translate information from it into the variables for our study are available in the supplemental online materials.
61. Doris A. Graber, Processing the News: How People Tame the Information Tide (New York: Longman, 1984): 82.
62. Shanto Iyengar and Jennifer A. McGrady, Media Politics. A Citizens Guide (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007): 6.
63. Gene Roberts and Thomas Kunkel, eds., Breach of Faith: A Crisis of Coverage in the Age of Corporate Newspapering (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002): 14.
64. Leo W. Jeffres, Kimberly Atkin, and Karen A. Neundorf, A Model Linking Community Activity and Communication with Political Attitudes and Involvement in Neighborhoods," Political Communication 19 (2002): 387-421.
65. Gabriel Weimann, Terror on the Internet (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2006).
66. Twenty-four percent of respondents to the 2006 General Social Survey, for example, report getting most of their news from newspapers compared to fourteen percent who say the internet is their main source of news.
67. E.g., Kelley and Mitchell (see note 17 above); Weimann and Brosius (see note 18 above).
68. Out of the 1465 articles we examined, only one (a biographical story about an official in charge of counterterrorism in the U.S.) did not fit into any of the categories we specified.
69. Christopher C. Harmon, Terrorism Today (Portland: Frank Cass, 2000).
70. B. Hoffman (see note 27 above).
71. Sunday circulation figures, which are generally higher than the Monday through Friday=Saturday numbers, were not used since they do not reflect the size of the Post's readership most of the week. USA Today does not publish on the weekend.
72. Alan B. Albarran, Media Economics: Understanding Markets, Industries, and Concepts 2nd ed. (Ames: Iowa State Press).
73. Frank W. Rucker, Newspaper Circulation. What,. Where and How (Ames: The Iowa State College Press, 1957): 1.
74. http://www.ncta.com/Stats/BasicCableSubscribers.aspx. Accessed 23 January 2010.
75. Although it is unclear that internet news competes with newspapers (Ahlers, 2006; Althaus and Tewkesbury, 2000), including the emergence of the internet as a competitor is justified because editors behave as if the internet threatens their business.
76. The original description of ITERATE appears in Edward Mickolus, Transnational Terrorism: A Chronology of Events, 1968-1977 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980).
77. Walter Enders and Todd Sandler, The Political Economy of Terrorism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
78. The small sample of articles from USA Today meant we could not replicate the analysis we did with the Washington Post. This is both because we have fewer degrees of freedom to work with and because we lack observations for some of our variables (e.g., we have no USA Today articles detailing attacks against government facilities and=or employees). Instead, we focused on relationships that might differ because The Post and USA Today attract different audiences.
79. Unabridged results are available in the downloadable appendix.
80. We searched past polls using the iPoll archive housed at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut.
81. A list of the tactics we tracked is available in the downloadable appendix.
82. The choice of different baselines is once again the consequence of smaller sample size for our USA Today analysis. We did not have examples of all the subjects found in The Washington Post and could not make the same comparisons as a result.
83. One reviewer suggested that this result is unsurprising since counterterrorism stories are less time-sensitive than articles about attacks and can be published by newspapers on "slow" days. Our coding effort did not examine whether articles referred to fresh events or not, however it is our impression that most of the counterterrorism articles we coded reported about events that took place the day before (e.g., developments in court cases, Congressional hearings, legislative hearings, etc.). Thus, we are not convinced that the observed disparity in front page coverage is because counterterrorism articles are more likely to fill news holes than other terrorism articles.
84. Michael Schudson, The News Media as Political Institutions," Annual Review of Political Science 5 (2002): 249-269.
85. Hamilton (see note 24 above).
86. Pippa Norris, A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Postindustrial Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
87. See Joshua Woods, What We Talk About When We Talk About Terrorism: Elite Press Coverage of Terrorism Risk from 1997 to 2005," Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 12, no. 3, (2007): 3-20 for evidence that the tone of articles about terrorism has not changed appreciably over time.
88. Rohner and Frey (see note 5 above).