Professor Scott Althaus presents “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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About Scott Althaus -
Director, Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, Merriam Professor
Professor Althaus joined the University of Illinois faculty in 1996 with a joint appointment in the departments of Political Science and Communication. He is currently the Merriam Professor of Political Science, Professor of Communication, and Director of the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois.
Professor Althaus serves on the editorial boards of Critical Review, Human Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Political Communication, and Public Opinion Quarterly. His research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, Communication Research, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Political Communication. His book on the political uses of opinion surveys in democratic societies, Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People (Cambridge University Press, 2003) , was awarded a 2004 Goldsmith Book Prize by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and a 2004 David Easton Book Prize by the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association.
He was named 2014-15 Faculty Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC, a 2004-5 Beckman Associate by the UIUC Center for Advanced Studies, and a 2003-4 Helen Corley Petit Scholar by the UIUC College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was honored with a Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIUC, and his undergraduate and graduate courses regularly appear on the university's "List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students."
See Scott's full bio at https://pol.illinois.edu/directory/profile/salthaus