Terrorist organizations create dramatic events to stimulate certain forms of strategically desirable news coverage. Terrorists want news coverage that increases their own visibility, legitimacy, and prestige while also instilling feelings of threat, panic, or moral indignation in a target population. Despite strong academic interest in the strategies and effects of terrorist activity, how these terror events are communicated to target populations remains less well understood. It is especially unclear whether news coverage of terrorist events tends to be presented in ways that advance the strategic communication goals of terrorist organizations. This project draws on the lived history of tens of thousands of terrorist attacks around the world to assess how discourses about terrorism have evolved in New York Times reporting from 1945 to 2019. We leverage known features of terrorist attacks as a natural experiment to examine whether strategically important features of Times-produced news discourse respond to terrorist activities in ways that align with the strategic aims of terrorist organizations.