RT Article
T1 More bang for the buck: media coverage of suicide attacks
JF Terrorism and political violence
VO 31
IS 4
SP 779
OP 799
A1 Jetter, Michael
LA English
YR 2019
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/184895316X
AB This paper provides empirical evidence that suicide attacks systematically draw more media attention than non-suicide terrorist attacks. Analyzing 60,341 terrorist attack days in 189 countries from 1970 to 2012, I introduce a methodology to proxy for the media coverage each one of these attack days receives in the New York Times. Suicide attacks are associated with significantly more coverage. In the most complete regression, one suicide attack produces an additional 0.6 articles—a magnitude equivalent to the effect of 95 terrorism casualties. This link remains robust to including a comprehensive list of potentially confounding factors, fixed effects, and country-specific time trends. The effect is reproduced for alternative print and television outlets (BBC, Reuters, CNN, NBC, CBS), but remains weak for Google Trends (worldwide and in the U.S.), a more direct proxy for people’s interests, and is non-existent for C-SPAN, a television station dedicated to broadcasting political discussions directly. Thus, the media appears to cover suicide missions in an extraordinary fashion, which may in turn explain their prominence among terrorist organizations.
NO Gesehen am 14.06.2023
NO Literaturverzeichnis: Seite 19-20
NO Published online: 01 Mar 2017
K1 Economics of the media
K1 Google Trends
K1 media coverage of terrorism
K1 suicide attacks
K1 Terrorism
DO 10.1080/09546553.2017.1288112