A Review of: “Joshua Alexander Geltzer. U.S. Counter-Terrorism Strategy and al-Qaeda: Signalling and the Terrorist World-View.”

Augustus Richard Norton, Amal and the Shi'a: Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1987. Pp. xxii + 238.

Leonard Weinberg and William Lee Eubank, The Rise and Fall of Italian Terrorism. London and Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987. Pp.155.

Robin Erica Wagner‐Pacifici, The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama. London and Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Pp.360.

Leonardo Sciascia, The Moro Affair. London: Carcanet Press, 1987. Pp.175.     

A Review of: “Alfred G. Gerteiny. The Terrorist Conjunction: The United States,the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,and Al-Qa'ida”

Since the advent of the Good Friday peace agreement, violence associated with dissident Irish Republican groups continues to present major security challenges. While there has not been a tragedy on the scale of the 1998 Omagh bombing, the level of violent dissident Republican (VDR) activity has risen steadily in frequency since then, and in 2010 reached unprecedented levels. This article presents findings from the VDR Project at the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Pennsylvania State University. The research is based on the extensive identification, collection, and analysis of open source material examining the nature and extent of VDR activity from 1997 to 2010. The project analyses data on VDR activity across this period as well as the individuals taking part in these violent events. The data suggests that while originally recruitment was predominantly southern based it is now more focused on Northern Ireland. Analysis of the data also indicates that the VDR leadership continues to recruit individuals with skill-sets to serve the movement's aims.     

A Review of: “Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers,by Pablo J. Boczkowski”

This study examines the way in which USA Today used tracking poll data in its strategy‐oriented coverage of the 1992 presidential campaign. Scrutiny of the methodological features of tracking polls suggests the news media's potential misuses of them. Studies on media polling lead to the general hypothesis that tracking polls serve the mass media as a device for generating news accounts that focus on candidate strategy. Using the ARIMA modeling technique, I conclude that as changes in the margin of difference between Bush and Clinton in the Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll increased, USA Today cited the poll results more frequently. The increase in the number of tracking poll references corresponded to an increase in the number of strategy‐oriented words in USA Today's campaign coverage. I discuss the implications within the context of the 1992 election campaign coverage.