Why do some terrorist attacks receive more media attention than others?

Media coverage of terrorism is highly unequal: some events receive a lot of attention while most receive very little.

An earlier study which looked at terrorist attacks in the US from 1980 to 2001 found they received more attention if there were fatalities; airlines were a target; it was a hijacking; or organized by a domestic group.¹

What does this relationship look like post-9/11? In a recent study, researchers looked at the differences in media coverage of terrorist events in the US from 2005 to 2015.² They focused on three key characteristics: who the perpetrator was; the target of the attack; and the number of people killed. They assessed how these factors affected the amount of coverage attacks received in the US media.

We’ve summarized the results of their analysis in this visualization. It’s presented in three panels: for all media outlets (top); for major national news sources only (middle); and ‘non-major’ sources (bottom). In this study the authors define five major news sources as CNN.com, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and USA Today. ‘Non-major’ sources are thousands of local news outlets.

What’s striking is the much larger coverage if the perpetrator was Muslim. Across all media sources, attacks received on average 357% greater coverage if the attacker was Muslim; for major outlets this was higher still at 758%. It appeared to play less of a role for local outlets.

From this analysis we also see that media coverage was higher when the perpetrator was arrested (partly because an arrest is a reportable event in itself); the target of the attack was law enforcement or government; and when people were killed in the attack. One additional fatality meant an average increase of coverage by 46%.

Which events do and do not receive media coverage matter: evidence shows that media plays a defining role in shifting public opinion; perceptions of the importance of particular issues; and national policy conversations. It can have a significant impact on how the public perceives terrorism and its associations.

In particular, increased coverage when a perpetrator is Muslim presents an unbalanced overview of US terrorism to the public. In the dataset that this study relied on, Muslims perpetrated 12.5% of attacks in the US, yet received half of the news coverage.

That the worst attacks – those that cause the greatest number of deaths – get most attention further exacerbates public fear. But it does mean that it’s not just terrorism that receives a lot of attention; it’s the rare but most extreme events that become easiest for us to recall.

Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2019) - “Why do some terrorist attacks receive more media attention than others?” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/why-do-some-terrorist-attacks-receive-more-media-attention-than-others' [Online Resource]

@article{owid-why-do-some-terrorist-attacks-receive-more-media-attention-than-others,
    author = {Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser},
    title = {Why do some terrorist attacks receive more media attention than others?},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2019},
    note = {https://ourworldindata.org/why-do-some-terrorist-attacks-receive-more-media-attention-than-others}
}

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