Reality and newsworthiness: Press coverage of International Terrorism by China and the United States

Abstract

This study adds to research on terrorism and international news by combining real-world information about terrorist events with perceptions about the deviance and social significance of events and how these impact the events' coverage prominence. The news values of the USA and China are compared by selecting a set of these highly newsworthy events from the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) for study. The NCTC provided archival data about 137 international terrorism events covered in the US and Chinese newspapers (85 of 137 events covered in Chinese media) and an analysis of newspaper coverage of the events (three newspapers in each country) provided perceptions of the events' deviance and social significance. Our findings suggest that Chinese journalists rely more on perceptions of events' social significance than on perceptions of deviance or facts about the damage the events create. In contrast, Americans apparently use a mix of factual and perceptual information to decide how prominently to cover terrorism.

Keywords:

• newsworthiness
• comparative research
• deviance
• social significance
• terrorism

Notes

1. Because this study approaches terrorism and media from the perspective of gatekeeping, framing studies, which have constituted the majority of terrorism and media studies since 2001, are not discussed in the literature section. For a comprehensive review of such studies after 2001, please refer to the works by Keränen and Sanprie (2008).

2. For a complete comparison between the five terrorist event databases, please see Sheehan (2012).

3. We performed pairwise t-tests (for the two dummy-coded variables, chi-square tests were conducted) that compare the factual indicators of the events covered and uncovered by the Chinese media. The results of the analysis suggest that only minor differences exist between the events covered and not covered by China, with only the total number of casualties of a terrorist event displaying a statistically significant difference. Thus, the events covered are basically comparable to those not covered.

4. WITS defines children as people under the age of 18.