“The End of our Holiday from History”: Media Presentation of Terror in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States

Abstract

The news media loves bad news, and terrorists love making it. The violent spectacle of terror lends itself to the commercial media’s need for eye-catching stories. Terrorists create violent events from which competitive media outlets can profit. Media coverage, in turn, affords terrorists legitimacy and a far-reaching platform and audience, which they can strive to manipulate. This cycle has prompted scholars to concluded that terrorists and the news media are locked in a sort of “symbiotic relationship.” If terrorists and the media are locked in such a dynamic, how well does the media actually reflect the stories that terrorists strive to convey?

This thesis draws from both quantitative text-as-data analysis and qualitative framework analysis to evaluate the “propagandistic effect” of terror on the news media. It applies these methods to news media coverage of three terrorist events: American media coverage of the September 11th attacks, British coverage of the 7/7 bombings, and French coverage of the Charlie Hebdo shooting. It finds that in France and the United States, news media outlets placed significant emphasis on the narrative points raised by terrorist organizations and, in certain cases, loosely reflected both the policy grievances and attributions of blame articulated by the terrorists. In the French and American cases, it also reveals a broad alignment between terrorist and media treatment of the attacks as issues of either foreign or domestic policy. Relative to the other two countries, British media outlets placed less emphasis on the motives and grievances cited by the terrorists. Where the 7/7 bombers wished for their attacks to direct attention to British foreign policy, British media outlets treated the attacks largely in terms of their domestic implications. This is likely because the bombers were British citizens. These trends provide preliminary evidence that the “propagandistic” effect of terror on the media is most apparent when the backgrounds of the attackers direct media focus to the same broad realms of policy (e.g. domestic or international) that the terrorists themselves wish to highlight.