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    The Terrorism News Beat

    External Review of Whole Manuscript

    Professionalism, Profit, and the Press

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    Author(s)
    Hoffman, Aaron M.
    Language
    English
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    Abstract
    Critics of terrorism news coverage often describe it as a sensationalized and intimidating area of reporting. However, this characterization offers a misleading guide to the coverage of terrorist threats and attacks, counterterrorism, and community responses to terrorism that appears in U.S. newspapers. Counterterrorism—not terrorist threats or attacks—is the most reported-on subject in newspapers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Rather than focusing on accounts of terrorist attacks, militarized counterterrorism, or counterterrorism failures, journalists more often cover counterterrorism successes, criminal justice, and diplomatic or community responses to terrorism. The Terrorism News Beat engages thinking about terrorism and the news media from the fields of political science, communication, criminology, economics, and sociology using multimethod research involving more than 2,500 newspaper articles published between 1997 and 2018. Chapters analyze the terrorism news beat’s subject matter, language, and coverage of the Oklahoma City Bombing, Olympic Park bombing, 9/11 attacks, DC Sniper case, and Dallas Police shooting. When it comes to language use, Hoffman finds that, rather than giving into the temptation to convey the news in lurid detail, journalists are minimalists. The language used to depict events on the terrorism beat is typically moderate and extreme words like “torture” appear only as necessary. The Terrorism News Beat shows that contrary to claims of sensationalism, the tone of terrorism coverage becomes even more sober during terrorism crises than it is during non-crisis periods and meets journalistic standards for quality.
    URI
    https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/99841
    Keywords
    terrorism, counterterrorism, news, media, reporting, newspapers, psychology, politics, security, language, sensationalism, journalism, political science, communication, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Boston Marathon bombing, 911, DC Sniper, Oklahoma City bombing, Olympic Park bombing, Dallas police shooting, construal level theory, experiments, statistics
    DOI
    10.3998/mpub.14327772
    ISBN
    9780472077304, 9780472057306, 9780472904914
    Publisher
    University of Michigan Press
    Publisher website
    https://www.press.umich.edu/
    Publication date and place
    2025
    Grantor
    • Simon Fraser University
    Classification
    Politics and government
    Terrorism, armed struggle
    Media studies
    Pages
    255
    Rights
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
    • Imported or submitted locally

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    License

    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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