Economists: news coverage of terrorism=more attacks

This is interesting: Washington Post "Unconventional Wisdom" columnist Richard Morin directs our attention to a new study that says news coverage of terrorist attacks causes more attacks:

More ink equals more blood, claim two economists who say that newspaper coverage of terrorist incidents leads directly to more attacks.

It's a macabre example of win-win in what economists call a "common-interest game," say Bruno S. Frey of the University of Zurich and Dominic Rohner of Cambridge University.

"Both the media and terrorists benefit from terrorist incidents," their study contends. Terrorists get free publicity for themselves and their cause. The media, meanwhile, make money "as reports of terror attacks increase newspaper sales and the number of television viewers."

The researchers counted direct references to terrorism between 1998 and 2005 in the New York Times and Neue Zuercher Zeitung, a respected Swiss newspaper. They also collected data on terrorist attacks around the world during that period. Using a statistical procedure called the Granger Causality Test, they attempted to determine whether more coverage directly led to more attacks.

The results, they said, were unequivocal: Coverage caused more attacks, and attacks caused more coverage -- a mutually beneficial spiral of death that they say has increased because of a heightened interest in terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001.

This sounds like either an alarmist real-world take on the movie "The Ring"--watch and die--or, depending on your point of view, a natural extension of the premise that terrorists operate with an eye toward using the news media as public relations tools. But here's the kicker: author Frey suggests, as a solution, a ban on using the word "terrorist" in news reporting, saying "Nobody can be called a criminal -- in our case a terrorist -- if this has not been established by a court of law."

This, of course, will never happen, but it will be interesting to see which television news outlets might subtly lean toward that kind of pie-in-the-sky remedy--the word "alleged" springs inexorably to mind--in the future.

Tweet