Media coverage of the unfolding crisis of domestic terrorism in the United States, 1990–2020

Abstract

Public relations research has paid considerable attention to foreign terrorist crises but relatively little attention to domestic ones—despite the growing salience of domestic terrorism in the United States. This study content analyzes 30 years of network television news coverage of domestic terrorism to gain insight into four theoretical issues of enduring interest within the literature on news framing and crisis management: sourcing, contextualization, ideological labeling, and definitional uncertainty. Results indicate that the sources called upon to contextualize domestic terrorism have shifted over time, that ideological labels are more often applied on the right than the left, and that definitional uncertainty has increased markedly in recent years. Implications for the theory and practice of public relations and crisis management are discussed.

News Framing in the Aftermath of the January 6 Attacks on the U.S. Capitol: An Analysis of Labels, Definitional Uncertainty, and Contextualization

“…Along with “insurrection,” two other labels in our analysis stand out as having specific political meanings that warrant additional consideration: “terror(ism)” and “coup.” As discussed above, “terror(ism)” is a heavily contested label, one that has been increasingly applied and questioned in news coverage of violent events in the U.S. (Zulli et al, 2021). “Coup” is a term so rarely used in the U.S. context that most citizens, prior to January 6, likely associated it almost exclusively with foreign countries.…”

“…As we have discussed, labels applied in the aftermath of violent events are sometimes subject to contestation, with “definitional uncertainty” around terms such as domestic terrorism rising markedly in recent years (Zulli et al, 2021). In news coverage after the January 6 attacks, certainty in usage of labels was actually the norm.…”

“…This is different than fragmentation or episodic framing, where specific events are sensationalized and disconnected from their broader context (Bennett, 2016). Although news reporting in general often tends toward fragmented coverage (Bennett, 2016), recent research provides some evidence that reporters and news commentators do situate violent events in relation to each other (Zulli et al, 2021). However, a few exceptional moments of terrorism, like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks, tend to dominate this contextualization.…”

“…We answer these questions by examining national news during the week following the attacks, first through the tracing of broad quantitative trends in the usage of specific labels and then via qualitative textual analysis to identify more nuanced discursive patterns. In so doing, this research contributes to the growing body of research interested in public definitions of domestic terrorism and related crises (e.g., Betus et al, 2020; Dolliver & Kearns, 2019; West & Lloyd, 2017; Zulli et al, 2021).…”

“…Decades of news framing research has shown that the words chosen to define a given event can affect attitudes and decision-making (for a review, see D’Angelo, 2018)—even, in some cases, when only a single word is varied (Simon & Jerit, 2007). Such effects are all the more pressing to understand in the aftermath of violence and crisis, when “definitional uncertainty” is often high (Zulli et al, 2021). Definitional uncertainty was especially evident in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol.…”