The Suburban Illini Club Dr. Scott Althaus, Director of the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, for a presentation titled “What Terrorists Want from News Coverage and How to Stop Them from Getting It.”

Terrorist groups commit violent, dramatic events to generate strategically desirable public attention. Terrorists want attention that increases their own visibility, legitimacy, and prestige while also instilling feelings of threat, panic, or moral outrage in a target population. Despite strong academic and governmental interest in the strategies and political 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 presentation 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. Leveraging known features of terrorist attacks as a natural experiment, the Responsible Terrorism Coverage project examined whether strategically important features of Times-produced news discourse respond to terrorist activities in ways that align with the strategic aims of terrorist organizations. Findings from this research underscore how journalists and social media users can responsibly share information about terrorist attacks that undermines the strategic purpose of terrorist violence. The trick is to give terrorists just some—but not all—of the attention they want.

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