Terrorist groups commit violent, dramatic events to generate strategically desirable public attention, desired attention that increases terrorists’ own visibility, legitimacy, and prestige while also instilling feelings of threat, panic, or moral outrage in a target population. Despite strong academic and governmental interest in the strategies and political effects of terrorist activity, how these terror events are communicated to target populations remains less well understood, particularly whether news coverage of terrorist events tends to be presented in ways that advance the strategic communication goals of terrorist organizations. This presentation draws on the lived history of tens of thousands of terrorist attacks around the world to assess how discourses about terrorism have evolved in New York Times reporting from 1945 to 2019. Leveraging known features of terrorist attacks as a natural experiment, the Responsible Terrorism Coverage project examined whether strategically important features of Times-produced news discourse respond to terrorist activities in ways that align with the strategic aims of terrorist organizations. Findings from this research underscore how journalists and social media users can responsibly share information about terrorist attacks that undermines the strategic purpose of terrorist violence – in order to share information but not give terrorists the attention they are seeking.
Scott Althaus has a joint appointment in the departments of Political Science and Communication, and he is currently the Merriam Professor of Political Science, Professor of Communication, and Director of the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research. He serves on several editorial boards, and his research has appeared in many political science and communications journal; and his book on the political uses of opinion surveys in democratic societies, Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People (Cambridge University Press, 2003) received several awards and accolades, as has his teaching of undergraduate and graduate students.
