More Bang for the Buck: Media Coverage of Suicide Attacks

ABSTRACT

This paper provides empirical evidence that suicide attacks systematically draw more media attention than non-suicide terrorist attacks. Analyzing 60,341 terrorist attack days in 189 countries from 1970 to 2012, I introduce a methodology to proxy for the media coverage each one of these attack days receives in the New York Times. Suicide attacks are associated with significantly more coverage. In the most complete regression, one suicide attack produces an additional 0.6 articles—a magnitude equivalent to the effect of 95 terrorism casualties. This link remains robust to including a comprehensive list of potentially confounding factors, fixed effects, and country-specific time trends. The effect is reproduced for alternative print and television outlets (BBC, Reuters, CNN, NBC, CBS), but remains weak for Google Trends (worldwide and in the U.S.), a more direct proxy for people’s interests, and is non-existent for C-SPAN, a television station dedicated to broadcasting political discussions directly. Thus, the media appears to cover suicide missions in an extraordinary fashion, which may in turn explain their prominence among terrorist organizations.     

Developing terrorism coverage: variances in news framing of the January 2015 attacks in Paris and Borno

Written news coverage of an event influences public perception and understanding of that event. Through agenda setting and news framing, journalists control the importance and substance of readers’ beliefs about the event. While existing research has been conducted on the relationship between media coverage and the geographic location of the country an event took place in, there is limited understanding of this relationship in terms of terrorist events. Utilising an agenda-setting theory and news framing theory lens to compare news coverage of the January 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, France, and Borno, Nigeria revealed significant variances in the overall coverage, headline style and discourse usage based on the event. In particular, the American news coverage positively framed France through detailed, sympathetic coverage and negatively framed Nigeria by overgeneralising and placing blame. Determining the origin and impacts of these variances is integral to forming a more comprehensive understanding of international terrorism and the most effective ways to combat it.     

American and foreign terrorists: an analysis of divergent portrayals in US newspaper coverage

American news coverage of terrorist activity consistently portrays the attacker as abnormal, but the mechanics of this othering process are entirely dependent on the nationality of the attacker in question. Coverage of domestic terrorism stresses the attacker’s personal instability and contrasts the perpetrator with his or her victims, painting the terrorist as an anomaly in American society. Foreign attackers, with whom journalists more frequently apply the terrorist label, are othered in US news media through heavy emphasis on their association with distant groups and conflicts. To explore how framing techniques differ throughout coverage of domestic and foreign terrorists, two separate corpora of articles from popular American newspapers were systematically compiled. One corpus contained articles about American attackers, while the other contained articles about foreign terrorists. The corpora were processed using both corpus linguistics software and a comparative analysis of texts. Exploring the American media’s framing choices illuminates how popular biases and perceptions of terrorist violence came to be; framing theory asserts that communicating entities inevitably shape the story they relay, influencing the reactions of those who experience the event second-hand. Not only does news coverage use distinct framing patterns for American and foreign perpetrators, but those patterns foster a populace that conceptualises American and foreign terrorists differently.     

How Does the Business of News Influence Terrorism Coverage? Evidence From The Washington Post and USA Today

Observers argue that the business of news is responsible for worsening the coverage of terrorism, but exactly how economic considerations influence coverage is controversial. Based on an analysis of over 1600 articles from The Washington Post and USA Today, we find that concerns about the effects of economic pressures on terrorism reporting are exaggerated. The business climate affects coverage, but the long-term impact of market pressures on coverage is modest. Articles about terrorist violence are increasingly prominent, but coverage of counterterrorism remains robust. Efforts to inoculate the press against the worst excesses of the market are unnecessary.     

Media and the institutional perspective: U.S. and Canadian coverage of terrorism

Abstract

This paper reports data from a content analysis of television news coverage of terrorism. A proposed typology of terrorism and media coverage is tested with stories from network news in the United States and Canada. The typology posits that media coverage of terrorism depends on the act's relation to institutional power bases. The two types of terrorism outlined either seek out or avoid media coverage, depending on whether they challenge or reinforce institutional power. Because of media's interrelationship with the economic and political institutions, coverage of terrorism will take on the flavor of these institutions’ perspective. The data show that although media cover terrorist acts that are linked to U.S. institutional interests, the tone of such coverage casts uncritical perspective. The implications for the general message system of news, with particular regard to the media's contribution to international understanding, are explored.     

Terrorism in Colombia: Logic and Sources of a Multidimensional and Ubiquitous Phenomenon

This article examines contemporary uses of terrorism in Colombia. Combining an historical analysis with the most complete database available on political violence, we illustrate how terrorism in Colombia constitutes a specific strategy that can be distinguished from other manifestations of violence. We argue that Colombia's non-state armed groups have turned terrorism into a pivotal element of their repertoires of action. These parties have not only increased their reliance on this strategy and introduced more refined forms such as de-territorialized terrorism, but also have specialized in particular terrorist attacks that suit their general objectives. While paramilitary groups rely mostly on massacres and forced disappearance, guerrillas concentrate on agitational terrorism including kidnappings and indiscriminate bombings.     

The terror experts and the mainstream media: the expert nexus and its dominance in the news media

Academic writing on ‘terrorism’ and the availability to the mainstream media and policy-makers of terror ‘experts’ have increased exponentially since 11 September 2001. This paper examines the rise of terror expertise and its use in one particular public arena – the mainstream news media. Using a combination of citation analysis and media analysis, the paper presents a ranking of the most influential terror experts in the mainstream news media in the Anglophone world. It is shown how what has been called an ‘invisible college’ of experts operates as a nexus of interests connecting academia with military, intelligence and government agencies, with the security industry and the media. The paper then takes a small number of case studies of some of the most prominent experts who exemplify the dominant trend in the field and examines the networks in which they are embedded. The last part of the paper uses the data generated to re-examine theories of ‘terrorism’ and the media, of ‘propaganda’ and ‘terrorism’, and of ‘source–media’ relations. It is suggested that the study of terror experts shows the need to study and theorise the media in a wider context by focusing on the relations between media content and production processes and wider formations of power. In so doing, the paper attempts to connect studies of media and terrorism to wider studies of terror and political violence.     

Alessandro Orsini. Anatomy of the Red Brigades: The Religious Mind-Set of Modern Terrorists

ABSTRACT

Those who study terrorism are familiar with the claim that suicide attacks are the most lethal form of terrorism today. Suicide attacks kill more people on average than non-suicide attacks, thereby justifying why terrorist organizations use this costly method of attack and explaining in part why suicide tactics have proliferated. However, extant empirical support for this claim is largely insufficient, focusing only on macro-level analysis of lethality data. Using data from the Global Terrorism Database, this study examines variation in lethality among suicide and non-suicide attacks based on geographic location, attack type, and target/victim type. It also introduces a new metric—the lethality ratio—to measure costs and benefits of attacks in terms of lives lost. It finds that, although suicide tactics are generally more lethal than non-suicide tactics, they also come at greater costs to the organization. This analysis also finds behavior that is inconsistent with the premise that terrorist groups are focused on maximizing lethality while reducing costs in all cases; that despite certain advantages, suicide attacks may remain a suboptimal tactic from the perspective of the terrorist group; and that additional criteria may help explain why suicide tactics are used.     

What Makes Terrorism Salient? Terrorist Strategies,Political Competition,and Public Opinion

This article analyzes the determinants of terrorism saliency in public opinion. It is usually assumed that after a terrorist attack, terrorism becomes automatically salient. However, this assumption is only true in those countries where terrorist attacks are exceptional events. In democracies that have suffered domestic terrorism for decades, the evolution of terrorism saliency does not only depend on the frequency or intensity of terrorist attacks. In this article it is claimed that the tactics carried out by terrorist groups (the type of victim, especially) and the dynamics of political competition (especially the ideology of the incumbent) are also factors that explain the evolution of terrorism saliency. The article also analyzes how these two factors interact with citizens’ predispositions to explain variation in their reactions to terrorist threat. The empirical test relies on a novel database from monthly public opinion surveys in Spain from 1993 to 2012.     

Understanding the media/terrorism relationship: An analysis of ideology and the news in time magazine

Conservative terrorism scholars have made the claim that the media have become a propaganda tool for terrorists and sympathetically portray terrorist activities. This article provides quantitative and qualitative data from Time magazine in 1986 suggesting that this view is mistaken. News production is treated as a social process that both informs and obscures, rather than as a neutral process that simply provides ‘objective’ facts. The results of the investigation reveal seven ways in which ideology is manifested in the terrorism news: semantics, language, headlines, social and historical context, treatment of objectives, trivialization, and amplification of violence. The ideological uniformity and lack of diversity apparent in terrorism news suggests that this kind of treatment results in a lack of understanding of the media/terrorism relationship and serves to support conservative views about the nature of terrorism and appropriate responses to it.     

The Economic Cost of March 11: Measuring the Direct Economic Cost of the Terrorist Attack on March 11, 2004 in Madrid

This article attempts to measure the direct costs that the terrorist attacks of 3/11 had on the economy of the region of Madrid. The evaluation has been made applying conservative criteria, and the results obtained have to be considered as minimum. The result indicates that the terrorist attacks caused a loss of nearly 212 million euros to the regional economy of Madrid, equivalent to 0.16 percent of the regional GDP (0.03 of the national GDP). This confirms that the immediate economic dimension of a terrorist attack such as the one of 3/11—apart from human catastrophic consequences—is relatively low.     

Immigrants and undesirables: “terrorism” and the “terrorist” in 1930s France

This article investigates French understandings of the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” in the period of the late Third Republic when a series of assassinations, murders and bombings suggested that France was dangerously exposed to the threat of terror. The article deconstructs contemporary understandings of the phenomenon, showing that, if a variety of actions were labelled “terrorist”, the term was deployed in particular in relation to matters of foreignness. It was believed that immigrants, refugees and foreign secret agents imported terrorist violence to France. French citizens did not – could not even – perpetrate terrorism. Parallels may be drawn between discussions of citizenship in the wake of twenty-first century acts of terrorism and manifestations of such violence during the 1930s when notions of terrorism, Frenchness and foreignness were intimately connected.     

The Madrid Bombings and Negotiations With ETA: A Case Study of the Impact of Terrorism on Spanish Politics

This article analyzes the impact that two terrorism-related matters had on Spanish politics and electoral processes in the country. First, the article analyzes the terrorist attacks perpetrated by jihadists on March 11, 2004, three days before Spain's general election. The indiscriminate, lethal attacks caused a state of shock in the country, brought the election campaign to a sudden end, and led to the defeat of the party in power. Second, the article analyzes the negotiations entered into with the ETA terrorist organization by the new government during its first term, from 2004 to 2008. This controversial step, upheld by the Spanish government despite massive opposition by civil society and the main opposition party, failed to bring about the end of ETA. Both the Madrid attacks and the negotiations with ETA were responsible for the breakdown of the consensus in regard to terrorism that had existed among the main Spanish political parties. The article analyzes how both events generated an unprecedented level of polarization and tension among political parties and society from 2004 to 2008, and how each event had a different impact on the general elections held during that period. The period under examination provides an example of adversarial politics; terrorism was highly influenced by the management of both events by the main political players.     

“New Terrorism” = Higher Brutality? An Empirical Test of the “Brutalization Thesis”

This article focuses on the so-called “brutalization” of terrorism. The brutalization thesis as part of the larger theoretical concept of “new terrorism” argues that “new terrorism” is more brutal than “old terrorism.” Many scholars claim that the 9/11 attacks mark the beginning of a new era of terrorism that has lifted international as well as domestic terrorism to a new level of violent brutality. Others argue that this process had already started in the early 1990s. After discussing possible ways to operationalize a brutalization of terrorism, for example focusing on suicide bombings or terrorist attacks against soft targets, this article tests the empirical credibility of the brutalization thesis regarding both potential starting points. Data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) shows that only three out of nine indicators increased significantly during the 1990s, partially backing the idea of a general brutalization, whereas increasing numbers of suicide attacks and beheadings after 9/11 support the notion of a qualitative change in terrorism and its brutality connected with the idea of maximizing media and public attention. Yet, these developments are regionally limited and the brutality of this “new terrorism” exceeds the levels known from the zenith of “old terrorism” in the 1970s and 1980s in only a few cases.     

Transnational Terrorism in the Post–Cold War Era

The article uncovers evidence that the end of the Cold War has provideda dividend in terms of reduced transnational terrorism. Significant short-run and long-run effects are quantified with time-series analysis to be concentrated in reduced bombings and hostage-taking incidents. Presumably, this dividend is the result of less state-sponsorship of terrorism by the Commonwealth of Independent States and other states, as well as the result of measures taken by industrial states to thwart terrorist attacks. A dividend does not appear untilthe last three quarters of 1994, at which time moves were well under way to integrate Eastern Europe with the West. Moreover, prior to this period, significant efforts had been made among Western nations to augment cooperative efforts to curb terrorism and to bring terrorists to justice. Using data for 1970 through mid-1996, we also examine trends and cycles in terrorist modes ofattack. There is virtually no evidence of an upward trend in transnational terrorism, contrary to media characterizations. All types of terrorist incidents display cycles whose duration lengthens with logistical complexity. Any change in these cycles in the post–Cold War era is concentrated in the high-frequency or short-lived cycles.     

Terrorist Incidents in India, 1998–2004: A Quantitative Analysis of Fatality Rates

Using data from the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database II, this paper first provides information on the nature of terrorist incidents in India in the period 1998-2004: the Indian states that were worst affected by terrorist incidents and fatalities; the terrorist groups responsible for such incidents and their modus operandi. Next, the paper focuses on the issue of fatalities from terrorist incidents. It inquires into the extent to which the number of fatalities following an incident was influenced by the type of attack (bombings, armed assault, etc.) and the extent to which it was influenced by the type of terrorist group. By examining the number of fatalities resulting from terrorist attacks in India, the paper disentangles the influence on this number of attack type and attack group. Lastly, the paper applies Atkinson's concept of equality-adjusted income to terrorism to arrive at the concept of equality-adjusted deaths from terrorist incidents: in order to avoid spectacular incidents resulting in the loss of a large number of lives—as in New York on September 11, 2001 and in Mumbai 26–29 November 2008—“society” might be prepared to tolerate “low-grade” terrorism which resulted in a larger number of deaths in total but avoided a large number of deaths from a single iconic incident.     

Indonesian state responses to September 11, the Bali bombings and the war in Iraq: Sowing the seeds for an accommodationist Islamic framework?

This paper takes as its starting point the commonalities and differences in Indonesian Muslim responses to September 11, the Bali bombings and the war in Iraq. Empirical evidence suggests that Muslim leaders from all Islamic groups, whether 'moderate' or 'radical', in varying tones condemned the terrorist attacks of September 11. Likewise, a majority of Muslims from mass organizations and political parties condemned the US and coalition attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, so it is now impossible for Indonesian Muslims to conceptualize September 11 in isolation from events in the Islamic world. This paper first attempts to consider Indonesian Muslim perceptions of terrorism and second suggests that since September 11 enhanced solidarity among Muslims is changing the contours of Indonesian nationalism, and third suggests that the ideological basis of the post-independence Indonesian state is beginning to lose its credibility in the eyes of many Muslims and may in time be replaced by an accommodationist format more acceptable to its santri adherents. The author would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of Donald E. Weatherbee, section co-editor Rasmus Gjedssø Bertelsen and the journal's anonymous reviewers, who provided sound advice (which I was not always wise enough to follow).     

The subjective and objective violence of terrorism: analysing “British values” in newspaper coverage of the 2017 London Bridge attack

This article examines how ?i?ek’s analysis of “subjective” violence can be used to explore the ways in which media coverage of a terrorist attack is contoured and shaped by less noticeable forms of “objective” (symbolic and systemic) violence. Drawing upon newspaper coverage of the 2017 London Bridge attack, it is noted how examples of “subjective” violence were grounded in the externalisation of a clearly identifiable “other”, which symbolically framed the terrorists and the attack as tied to and representative of the UK Muslim community. Examples of “systematic” violence were most notable in the ideological edifice that underpinned this framing but also in the ways in which newspaper reports served to draw upon British values in the aftermath of the attack. This directed attention away from the contradictions within the UK, towards narratives that sought to “fix” these contradictions through eradicating the problem of “the other” and/or by violently protecting the British values “they” seek to undermine. As a consequence, newspaper coverage worked to uphold the illusion that “peace” could be achieved by eradicating terrorism through further forms of objective violence, including, internment without trial; the “ripping up” of human rights; and closer surveillance of Muslim communities. Indeed, it was this unacknowledged violence that worked to maintain British values in the press' coverage.     

Framing alleged Islamist plots: a case study of British press coverage since 9/11

In the decade after 9/11, the UK terrorist threat was associated with a series of high-profile counterterrorism operations linked to specific plots. These terrorism-related episodes received significant media attention and, as a consequence, were a visible sign of the contemporary terrorist threat. This article seeks to identify the dominant frames rendered in news media reporting on these episodes. Through a longitudinal study of UK press coverage, the analysis reveals that two prominent frames were present, an inevitability and preparedness frame, with alleged plots serving to underline the risk posed by contemporary terrorism, and a belonging and responsibility frame, which cast later episodes as belonging to the Muslim communities disrupted by police operations.     

The Ancient Fire: Religion and Suicide Terrorism

Does religion lead to greater destructiveness from suicide terrorism? And if so, how does it influence this form of political violence? Recent analyses of terrorism point to the significance of religion, but are divided as to whether religion itself matters, or certain types of religious terrorist groups are actually driving suicide terrorist violence. This article draws on social movement theory and recent work in the study of suicide terrorism to argue that religion influences the severity of suicide terrorist attacks as an ideology groups use to justify their struggle and gain public support. This effect occurs regardless of a group's goals or organizational nature. The theory is tested using a generalized estimating equation to account for multiple attacks by several groups. The study finds that the religious ideology of a group greatly increases the number of deaths from a suicide attack, even if varying group motivations and structural factors are taken into account. The article helps to clarify the effect of religion on contemporary terrorism, contributing to the study of both terrorism and religion and politics.