Can News Draw Blood The Impact of Media Coverage on the Number and Severity of Terror Attacks

Abstract

Using a new data set that captures the share of reporting on terrorism, we explore the nexus between terrorist attacks and the news. It turns out that terrorism mainly influences news reports through the number of incidents. Regarding the reverse causality, we provide evidence that the share of the news devoted to terrorism Granger-causes further terrorist activities. However, short-run and medium-run effects differ: in the short run media coverage on terror only has an impact on the severity of terror attacks, while it affects the number of terror attacks in the long haul. These observations are consistent with the idea of competition between terrorist groups.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 2016
Accession Number
AD1014204

Entities

People

  • K. Beckmann
  • R. Dewenter
  • Treye Thomas

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Classification
  • Competition
  • Data Sets
  • Differential Equations
  • Economics
  • Eigenvalues
  • Equations
  • Information Operations
  • Linear Differential Equations
  • Literature
  • Observation
  • Security
  • Simulations
  • Terrorism
  • Terrorists
  • Victims

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Economics
  • International Journalism and Media Studies.
  • Strategic Security Studies