U.S. News Coverage of Global Terrorist Incidents

Linking event archives to news: a computational method for analyzing the gatekeeping process

“…In contrast, the effect of a suicide attack on likelihood of coverage is not strongly corroborated. In the study by Sui et al (2017) the effect of suicide attacks was also hypothesized but not supported (though some indication of an effect was found in the robustness check).…”

“…As a general rule of thumb, distance has a negative relation with coverage. For terrorist attacks, Sui et al (2017) found support that geographical distance between the U.S. and other countries indeed has a negative effect on coverage. However, distance does not have to be geographical, but can also be cultural (Chang et al, 1987;Galtung & Ruge, 1965;Sheafer et al, 2014).…”

“…We focus on two event characteristics documented in the GTD that reflect these values: the number of fatal victims (bad news, magnitude), and whether or not it was a suicide attack (drama). A positive effect of the number of fatal victims on the likelihood of coverage has been found in U.S. coverage of international terrorism (Sui et al, 2017) and terrorist attack on U.S. soil (Kearns et al, 2019). Interestingly, Zhang et al (2013) also observed a positive effect of the number of victims in U.S. newspapers on the prominence of terrorism coverage, but found no such effect in Chinese newspapers.…”

“…Moreover, it relies on the news database not only for what articles it contains but also for its search functionalities. Sui et al (2017) conducted an analysis of news coverage in the United States about global terrorist incidents, for which they linked the GTD to news articles. To perform this analysis, the authors wrote an algorithm to link a GTD event to a news article if (1) the article was published within 7 days after the event, and (2) the city and attack type documented in the GTD event description were mentioned in the article.…”

What is terrorism (according to the news)? How the German press selectively labels political violence as “terrorism”

“…Studies also indicate for perpetrators' ideology to play a role. Attacks by self-identified Muslims (Kearns et al, 2019) and, partly, Islamist extremist groups (Sui et al, 2017) are covered more as Muslims are considered an out-group in many Western societies. While most studies analyse how incident and perpetrator characteristics influence the volume of coverage, their impact on the labelling of political violence has largely been neglected.…”