Deadly foreign terrorism and the rank-ordered tournament for foreign press attention: implications for counterterrorism

ABSTRACT

Limiting the attention countries receive from the foreign press is thought to reduce the incidence of deadly foreign attacks, but by how much? We show that the incidence of deadly foreign terrorism increases as a nonlinear function of the level of foreign press attention states receive. As a result, the benefits of reducing foreign press attention to prevent deadly foreign terrorist attacks are uneven: some states stand to benefit more than others. Nevertheless, we also show that reducing press attention produces, at best, only minor reductions in the number of deadly foreign terrorist attacks states experience. These results suggest that reducing foreign press attention may not provide as much security as governments expect.

Keywords:

• Counterterrorism
• deadly foreign terrorism
• press attention

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Tatiana Rizova, Keven Ruby, S. Laurel Weldon, Erin Hennes, Kim Suisseya, Alex Braithwaite, and the anonymous reviewers for providing valuable comments on the manuscript. We would also like to thank Emily Dewey and Brandon Pratt for their research assistance.

Notes

¹ Access facilitates foreign press attention but is not necessary for it. Additionally, states that grant journalists access may still find themselves ignored by the press.

² Foreign press attention and news coverage are not synonymous. Foreign press attention is where the job of gathering material that could become coverage (“the news”) begins. News coverage, what people read and watch, is the end product of the journalism process.

³ Foreign correspondents can travel around the world to cover important stories. Still, moving from place to place increases the costs of gathering foreign news. Consequently, many worthy stories never get written up in the first place (Dell’Orto 2015).

⁴ Bloom (2004) argues that competition among terrorist organizations stems from the effort groups expend trying to secure the loyalty of the same supporters. We argue that competitive dynamics are also triggered in pursuit of foreign press attention, a scarce resource that groups deny to others when they secure it.

⁵ Randomness also plays a role in determining who wins coverage. Nevertheless, the rank-order tournament for foreign press attention mainly rewards skillful publicity seekers.

⁶ The start and end dates of this study reflect the availability of data on Reuters news service reports (described below).

⁷ Most attacks are committed by one person. We excluded 117 deadly attacks committed by unknown perpetrators since we could not tell if these were foreign attacks or not.

⁸ Ranking countries by the mentions is preferable to using the total number of mentions states receive. The ranking preserves each country’s relative importance to the press without permitting changes in the availability of electronic records to skew our results. We want our measure to reflect Reuter’s reporting priorities, not its switch to new technologies and recording methods.

⁹ One of our reviewers notes that dividing the foreign press attention ranking by the number of states worldwide means that the benefits terrorist organizations reap from deadly attacks declines as the interstate system expands. Our analysis suggests that using an uncorrected ranking would not change our conclusions in important ways. We prefer the corrected measure, however. It more accurately reflects the difficulty the foreign press has covering an expanding interstate system and, therefore, produces more accurate estimates of the influence of this variable on deadly foreign terrorism.

¹⁰ The GDELT data does not rely on material from Reuters. It draws on reports issued by AfricaNews, Agence France Presse, Associated Press, Associated Press Online, Associated Press Worldstream, BBC Monitoring, Christian Science Monitor, Facts on File, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, The New York Times, United Press International and The Washington Post. See https://www.gdeltproject.org/about.html.

¹¹ We tried controlling for executive constraints, a common way of incorporating expected government reactions to terrorism into statistical models. However, we are unable to include both polity and executive constraints in the same models because the correlation between them is so high.

¹² We confirmed the appropriateness of using a quadratic term (press attention²) by comparing models with the quadratic terms (reported in Table 1) to models without them (Osborne 2014). A Box–Tidwell Transformation suggests the same conclusion. In every case, the Aikake Information Criterion (AIC) scores suggest the models that include a quadratic term provide a superior fit to our data than the models without it (see Appendix Table B).

¹³ Models that include foreign press attention² fit our data better than models that do not use this term (see Appendix Table B).

¹⁴ In the interests of space, we discuss the successful and unsuccessful robustness checks in the Appendix.

¹⁵ We used the margins command in Stata 14 for these calculations.