Search

In recent decades, disruptive media events, such as major terrorist attacks, have gained increasing relevance in news coverage around the world. Despite the growing importance of such globally broadcast media events, little research to date has examined cross-national variation in event coverage or the predictors of this variation. This study examines news coverage about the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States across 51 countries to analyze whether the topical focus and emotional tone of news coverage about the attacks varied according to a country's proximity to the United States and the dominant role perceptions of its journalistic culture. We show that these macro-level predictors are associated in varying degrees with the country-level topical focus and emotional tone of reporting over the 30 days following this salient event. Moreover, our analysis also suggests that temporal developments may have uniformly structured much of this worldwide coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a model for how communication phenomena can be normatively assessed using multiple normative perspectives simultaneously. We exemplify the procedure of multiperspectival normative assessment (MNA) using mediated reactions to terrorism as our case in point. We first identify the normative challenges related to the speed and substance of terrorism communication and the ways in which relations of solidarity are communicatively constructed in reacting to terrorism. We link these challenges to four distinct normative theories that prioritize competing values for public discourse (freedom, community values, empowerment of the marginalized or constructive debate). The resulting set of competing normative expectations, which help assess the performance of terrorism communication, are eventually translated into recommendations for professional and non-professional communicators. In conclusion, we show how MNA can help ground empirical scholarship in firmer theoretical foundations while simultaneously demonstrating the usefulness of normative theory in analyzing a wide range of issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how useful any particular set of event data might be for conflict research requires appropriate methods for assessing validity when ground truth data about the population of interest do not exist. We argue that a total error framework can provide better leverage on these critical questions than previous methods have been able to deliver. We first define a total event data error approach for identifying 19 types of error that can affect the validity of event data. We then address the challenge of applying a total error framework when authoritative ground truth about the actual distribution of relevant events is lacking. We argue that carefully constructed gold standard datasets can effectively benchmark validity problems even in the absence of ground truth data about event populations. To illustrate the limitations of conventional strategies for validating event data, we present a case study of Boko Haram activity in Nigeria over a 3-month offensive in 2015 that compares events generated by six prominent event extraction pipelines—ACLED, SCAD, ICEWS, GDELT, PETRARCH, and the Cline Center's SPEED project. We conclude that conventional ways of assessing validity in event data using only published datasets offer little insight into potential sources of error or bias. Finally, we illustrate the benefits of validating event data using a total error approach by showing how the gold standard approach used to validate SPEED data offers a clear and robust method for detecting and evaluating the severity of temporal errors in event data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital archives that document real-world events provide new opportunities for large-scale analyses of how news coverage represents reality. We present a method and open-source tool for linking event data to news articles, and demonstrate its application with an analysis of event and country level predictors of terrorism coverage in The Guardian from 2006 to 2018, using event data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). Our method builds on established techniques for calculating document similarity, and we propose a novel strategy for fine-tuning parameters of the event matching algorithm that requires no manual coding. An online appendix is provided that documents all code to replicate our analysis and reuse our tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]