ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Aaron M. Hoffman is Professor of Political Science at Simon Fraser University.

REVIEWS

“The mass media is often criticized as terrorists’ unwitting accomplices. In The Terrorism News Beat, Aaron M. Hoffman challenges this conventional wisdom of terrorism reporting as sensationalized fear-mongering, showing how sober journalistic standards, rather than profit-seeking pressures, shape the terrorism beat. Insightful and engaging, the book will be of wide interest to scholars of terrorism, the mass media, and the psychology of public opinion alike.”— Joshua D. Kertzer, Harvard University

“The Terrorism News Beat is theoretically and methodologically innovative. The issues that this book is tackling—the way that media affect perceptions of security for the public, how nonstate actors like terrorist groups react to incentives both from other international actors and from the media environment, and how the public understands and reacts to risks from terrorism and climate change—are fundamentally important questions for democracies as they face external risks to their population.”— Shana Kushner Gadarian, Syracuse University

“Hoffman provides a detailed and nuanced account of how responsible journalists inform the public about terrorism and counterterrorism. Highly recommended!”— James Forest, University of Massachusetts Lowell and Editor-in-Chief, Perspectives on Terrorism