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IMAGINING TERROR: THE PEOPLE, THE PRESS AND
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5108 K1/Prolecc8PrelelRCIDateDueindd

IMAGINING TERROR: THE PEOPLE, THE PRESS AND POLITICS
By

Joshua Woods

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Sociology

2008

ABSTRACT
IMAGINING TERROR: THE PEOPLE, THE PRESS AND POLITICS
By
Joshua Woods
After 9/11, public concerns about terrorism in the United States escalated. In the

next years, the threat of terrorism prompted several far-reaching foreign and domestic
policies, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the massive increases in federal
defense spending, upgraded security measures in all areas of the critical infrastructure,
reductions in civil liberties and shifts in immigration policy. Given the signiﬁcance of
these changes, it is important to learn more about how the public perceives the threat of
terrorism. The general goal of this dissertation is to investigate the social and
psychological processes that affect people’s responses to the threat. Speciﬁcally, I use an
exploratory, experimental study to identify the types of news portrayals (“frames”) that
increase people’s worries and risk judgments about terrorism. Drawing on a quantitative
content analysis, I also attempt to explain when and under what circumstances fear-

inducing news frames appear in the elite press in the United States.

For Roberta Robinson Gabier and Thell Woods, my Mom and Dad

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Much has been given to me. I wish to thank the Department of Sociology for
providing me with a strong education. Stan Kaplowitz has been a supportive advisor to
me throughout my graduate career, as well as an excellent teacher. I am grateful to him
for his scholarly support and friendship. While many know that Stan is a talented
researcher and statistical expert, few know that he also brings a respectable game on the
racquetball court. Toby Ten Eyck served as an outstanding model for my professional
socialization and a keen advisor on publications. He also stands as a pillar of optimism,
from which many around him beneﬁt. Fred Fico taught me much of what I know about
analyzing content and studying the media. He is a ﬁrst-class teacher and scholar and I am
indebted to him for his clarity, encouragement and generosity. There were many other
memorable learning moments in my doctoral career, especially during classes with
Bernard Finifter, Steve Gold, Alan Rudy and Maryhelen MacInnes, and, of course,
during conversations over beer and popcorn with my good friends Chris Oliver, Mike
Brennan and Tom Boyd.

I move now to the subject of Vladimir Shlapentokh, who, in my mind, stands
alone in many respects, and thereby deserves his own paragraph. Though I never attended
one of his classes, he has taught me more about the world than any other professor.
Though I served as his editor, it was he who educated me in the art of writing and
argument. Though I rarely agree with his ideological standpoints, I highly respect his
intellectual integrity and ﬁnd his unique worldview fascinating. Among his many gifts to

me, I am especially grateful to him for demonstrating the joy of curiosity. I would also

iv

like to thank Vera Bondartsova, a fellow graduate student in Vladimir’s research group,
for her academic and friendly encouragement and advice.

I most want to thank my family and ﬁ'iends. My wife Jill Higgins has served as a
vital and continuous source of love, sacriﬁce and inspiration. She has been a skillful
critic, conﬁdant and counselor. She reminds me that the worlds of art, creativity, reason
and science need not conﬂict. She makes me smile. Together, her family and mine have
proven the basic sociological assumption that our success in life depends, to a great

extent, on who stands beside us.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................... viii

LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................. ix

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: A VERY DIFFERENT KIND OF THREAT ........................ 1
Terrorism and the Media ............................................................... 5
Foreign and Domestic Policy Changes after 9/ 11 .................................... 7
Plan of the Dissertation .................................................................. 10

CHAPTER 2

THE 9/11 EFFECT: HOW 9/11 CHANGED THE AMERICAN MINDSET ........... 14
Introduction .............................................................................. 14
The Perceived Threat of Terrorism: Before and After 9/11 ........................ 15
Effects of Perceived Threat ............................................................ 18
Methods of Studying 9/11 Effects ..................................................... 20
Four Changes: An Analytical Framework ............................................ 22
Effects of 9/11 on Mental and Physical Health ...................................... 22
Rally Effects .............................................................................. 24
Pro-social Tendencies ................................................................... 29
Authoritarian Tendencies ............................................................... 33
Summary of 9/11 Effects ................................................................ 43
Discussion ................................................................................. 45

CHAPTER 3

FRAMING TERROR: WHAT SCARES US MOST ABOUT TERRORISM ........... 51
Introduction .............................................................................. 5 1
The News Frame as a Concept ......................................................... 53
The Effects of News Frames: Strong or Weak? ..................................... 57
Framing Terror ........................................................................... 62
Hypotheses ............................................................................... 63
Method .................................................................................... 70
Results ..................................................................................... 75
Discussion ................................................................................ 80

CHAPTER 4

ELITE PRESS COVERAGE OF TERRORISM: WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN

WE TALK ABOUT TERRORISM ............................................................ 85
Introduction .............................................................................. 85
Media and Society ....................................................................... 85
Story Elements as Indicators of Terrorism Threat .................................. 88
Factors Related to the Threat Level in Newspaper Articles ........................ 90

vi

Method ................................................................................... 94

Measurement ............................................................................ 95
Analysis .................................................................................. 100
Discussion ............................................................................... 107
CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION: STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THE STUDY .............. 111
Summary ................................................................................. 111
Strengths and Weaknesses ............................................................. 114
APPENDIX A .................................................................................... 117
APPENDIX B ..................................................................................... 118
APPENDIX C ..................................................................................... 120
LITERATURE CITED ........................................................................... 132

vii

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Manipulation Check for Radical Islamic Frame .................................. 72
Table 2: Manipulation Check for Nuclear Frame ........................................... 74
Table 3: Manipulation Check for Terrorism Frame ......................................... 75
Table 4: Framing Effects on Risk Judgment ................................................. 76
Table 5: Framing Effects on Dread ............................................................ 78

Table 6: Regression Model Showing Standardized Coefﬁcients for Predictors of Worry
about Terrorism .................................................................................. 79

Table 7: Regression Models Showing Standardized Coefﬁcients for Predictors of

Willingness to Give Up Civil Liberties and Support the Iraq War ........................ 80
Table 8: Correlations Between Terrorism Threat and Other Variables in Newspaper
Articles ............................................................................................ 103
Table 9: Mean Terrorism Threat Level by Source Dominance ........................... 104

Table 10: Regression Model Showing Standardized Regression Coefﬁcients for Five
Predictors of Terrorism Threat in Newspaper Articles (all newspapers combined)... 105

Table 11: Regression Model Showing Standardized Regression Coefﬁcients for Four

Predictors of Terrorism Threat in Newspaper Articles (newspapers separated by
proximity to 9/11 Sites)107

viii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: The Causes and Effects of Mass Mediated Portrayals of Terrorism ........... 11

Figure 2: How Worried Are You that You or Someone in Your Family Will Become a
Victim of Terrorism -- Very Worried, Somewhat Worried, Not Too Worried, or Not At

All Worried? ....................................................................................... 17
Figure 3: George W. Bush’s Job Approval Ratings .......................................... 25
Figure 4: Presidential Approval and Government Trust Before and After 9/11 .......... 28
Figure 5: Support for War in Iraq and Harsh Anti-Terrorism Tactics ...................... 36
Figure 6: Additive Effects of Frames ............................................................ 66
Figure 7: Average Terrorism Risk Level in the Press from 1997 to 2005 .................. 102

ix

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: A Very Different Kind of Threat

After 9/11, the threat of terrorism captured the attention of media, scholars,
politicians and the public. In the next years, increased national security concerns played a
pivotal role in the ongoing debate and formulation of numerous foreign and domestic
policies. In an effort to make sense of the nation’s response to 9/11, several scholars
suggested that the dangers posed by international terrorist groups were, in some ways,
similar to those presented by the Soviet Union, or at least that the two threats led to
comparable social, economic and geopolitical circumstances (Norris, Kern and Just,
2003; Entman, 2004; Davis, 2006).

Although the likeness here is worth considering, the differences between the Cold
War and the War on Terrorism tell us more about the circumstances that emerged after
9/11. First, unlike the Soviet Union, international terrorist groups such as al Qaeda are
not controlled by a powerful, centralized government. As Cronin (2002, 119) suggested,
the destructive potential of these groups is “unbridled by the interests, form and structure
of a state.” In the 19903, al Qaeda looked more like a loosely coupled, multinational
business alliance than a typical, top-down organization. Authority was not concentrated
at the top, it was scattered, and the framework became even more fractured as the ofﬁcial
War on Terrorism began in the aftermath of 9/11 (Hoffman, 2003, 26). The al Qaeda
adhocracy may help it, in some ways, disrupt and harm the United States, but it is not the
ideal structure for pursuing a long-tenn Offensive aimed at ending U.S. statehood, or

confronting its dominance in the world.

As a second contrast to the Soviet threat, terrorist activities are not motivated by a
clear and cohesive ideological or religious position. “Terrorism” involves a wide variety
of groups and social movements. Pape (2005) develops this contention in his study of
suicide terrorism. Based on an investigation of hundreds of attacks, he argues against the
popular notion that terrorism is driven primarily by religious zealotry. Among other
things, he notes that the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri
Lanka, a non-Muslim secular group. The organizers of terrorist activities, according to
Pape, are not ideological dreamers. Many of them are logical, determined individuals
motivated by speciﬁc political and economic goals.

If international terrorism was facilitated by a singular organization with a uniﬁed
set of fervent beliefs and objectives, it would pose an even greater threat to the United
States than the Soviet Union. Given its reliance on suicide attacks, the strategy of
deterrence, which proved effective during the Cold War, would not have the same effect
on such an organization. However, after a careful consideration of numerous terrorist
events around the world, one can clearly see that the raison d’étre of most terrorist groups
and individuals is more local and pragmatic than global and idealistic (Page, 2005).

In fact, the ideological inconsistency of international terrorism has even been
reﬂected in the Bush Administration’s ofﬁcial statements about the threat. In the ﬁrst
days after 9/11, President Bush framed the conﬂict in religious terms. He referred to the
perpetrators as “Islamic extremists” (2001a) and the war on terrorism as a “crusade”
(2001b). In the next months, however, he curtailed his references to Islam and relied

instead on phrases such as “good versus evil” and framed the enemy as “haters of

freedom.” Although this phraseology contained emotional or moral substance, it lacked a
clear intellectual framework.

As the War on Terrorism spread across the Middle East, Iraq in particular, the
Administration’s statements remained devoid of conceptual and ideological reﬁnement. It
suffices to point out that, while the term “terrorism” may be difﬁcult to deﬁne, the
Administration’s chosen catchword “terror” is even vaguer. In a recent search of the
White House website (www.whitehouse. gov), I found that the phrase “War on Terror”
appeared in roughly three times more articles, press briefs and speeches than the
alternative frame, the “War on Terrorism.”

The terrorist threat has been around for centuries, generating an abundance of
detailed explanations and public knowledge, but the “War on Terror” suggests something
new, amorphous and indeﬁnable, if no less menacing. The central political advantage of
this frame lies in its ﬂexibility. The less Americans understand about terrorism, the easier
it is for ofﬁcials to shift their deﬁnition of the threat and their plans for confronting it.

During the Cold War, in stark contrast, government ofﬁcials clearly denoted the
dangers of communism and its proliferation throughout the world. Setting aside the
controversy surrounding the Soviets’ real intentions toward international communist
organizations, there is no denying that communism itself was understood by most
Americans as a coherent, global movement, orchestrated and propelled by the Soviet
Union, and determined to destroy capitalism, democracy and the “American way of life.”
As conﬁrmed by Gallup polls, the “threat of communism” ranked highly on the list of

America’s “most important problems” throughout the 1950s-l9605.

The Soviets’ ideological predilections were a regular topic of discussion for the
principal Cold Warriors, from Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy to Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. In the last year of his presidency, Reagan was still quoting
the Communist Manifesto in his diatribes on the Soviet threat. For instance, in May 1988,
during an interview at the White House with a Soviet journalist, Reagan made a reference
to “the declarations of Karl Marx,” and suggested that “Communism could only succeed
when the whole world had become Communist.” He went on to proclaim that “every
General Secretary but the present one [Gorbachev]” “reiterated their allegiance to that
Marxian theory” (New York Times, 1988).

The third distinction lies in what is known about the potential consequences of a
Soviet versus a terrorist attack. While there is still fervent debate about the general level
of safety of American citizens during the Cold War, there is little disagreement about the
technical capacity of the Soviet Union to unleash its nuclear arsenal and cause massive
death and destruction in the United States and its allies (Johnson, 1994; Mueller, 2005;
Shlapentokh, 2001).

The available information about terrorism is far less reliable. Putting aside for a
moment the Bush Administration’s inaccurate assessment of Saddam Hussein’s terrorist
links and weapons of mass destruction, estimating the risk of terrorism has always been
extremely difﬁcult. The extraordinary character of the 9/11 attacks only intensiﬁed the
uncertainties surrounding this threat. Since mid September 2001, “the realm of the
possible” has been stretched far beyond most foreign or domestic dangers of the past,

manmade or otherwise.

A cloak of ambiguity covers not only the magnitude of a ﬁiture attack, but also
the potential type and variety of assaults. In contrast to the centralized danger posed by
the Soviets, the number of terrorist threat scenarios is virtually limitless. As Slovic (2002)
suggested, 9/11 represented a “new species of trouble,” an unbounded threat that could
not be assessed with quantitative risk analysis. Unlike natural hazards such as hurricanes
and earthquakes, the threat of terrorism has no ﬁxed geography. And unlike common
hazards such as crime, car accidents and illness, the number of major terrorist attacks in
United States history is so small that robust statistical estimates are not possible.

These limitations have been noted by several risk experts and highlighted in a
number of government reports. For instance, in a lengthy account by the Ofﬁce of
Homeland Security (2002), the assessment of terrorism risk was portrayed as “difﬁcult,”
because “our society presents an almost inﬁnite array of potential targets that can be
attacked through a variety of methods.” In a report on the terrorist threat to the food
supply, the US. Food and Drug Administration (2003) stated plainly that “it is difﬁcult
for the FDA to predict with any certainty the likelihood that an act of food terrorism will
occur.” In its otherwise assertive report on the risk of terrorism, the RAND Corporation

conceded to similar difﬁculties (Willis et al., 2005).

Terrorism and the Media

The lack of clear information about terrorism has not limited the public’s demand
for it, nor the willingness of news media to produce and disseminate such information.
Both before and after 9/11, the media discussed numerous aspects of the threat, including

the nation’s porous international borders, the vulnerability of the food and water supply

and the weakness of security in almost all areas of the country’s critical infrastructure,
such as airports, seaports, chemical factories and the postal system. There were public
debates on whether an airplane could breach a nuclear power plant. Commentators,
experts and politicians talked about the threat of dirty bombs, nuclear and chemical
attacks, cyber-terrorism, bio-terrorism and corporate sabotage (Chapin 2002).

The media routinely reported changes in the Department of Homeland Security’s
Advisory System, which described the risk with vague, color-coded modiﬁers, such as
“severe,” “high” and “elevated” (Gray and Ropeik 2002). In many cases, government
ofﬁcials warned the public of an increased risk without identifying a particular city or
region of the country (Friedman 2005; Zimbardo and Kluger 2003).

There has also been a great deal of public debate over the possible strategies of
the terrorists. Would they target only large urban centers and symbolic structures, or
would they attack anywhere in order to spread fear and chaos across the country? This
discussion took on an important political dimension in the post-9/11 period as public
ofﬁcials grappled over the formula for dispensing federal funds from the Department of
Homeland Security.1 Each state could point to a number of possible terrorist targets,
which not only justiﬁed the increase in federal funding for ﬁrst responders and other
aspects of the local anti-terrorism effort, but also served as news fodder for local
newspapers and broadcasters. For instance, the Anchorage Daily News published a series
of reports on the terrorist threat to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, while a Nebraska
newspaper, the Lincoln Journal Star, offered extensive coverage on the risk of anthrax

delivered through the postal system.

 

I. See, for instance, articles in the New York Times by T. H. Kean and L. H. Hamilton (2005, 23), S. M.
Collins and J. I. Lieberman (2005, 20) and Votes in Congress (2005, p. 31).

Terrorism is not a one-dimensional danger. The terrorist threat actually consists of
a number of qualitatively different dangers. These characteristics are reﬂected in a variety
of media portrayals, which may, in turn, evoke a range of thoughts and feelings. Given
the complex and multifaceted nature of this hazard, a systematic exploration of mass
mediated portrayals of this danger and the public’s response to it is worthwhile.
Considering how US. foreign and domestic policies have shifted in the face of terrorism,

this topic becomes all the more important.

Foreign and Domestic Policy Changes after 9/11

No other twenty-ﬁrst century threat has had a greater impact on American politics
and society than terrorism. In response to the horriﬁc attacks on 9/11, the US. initiated
two military campaigns, one in Afghanistan and another in Iraq. As these conﬂicts grew
into protracted wars, they claimed the lives of thousands of American soldiers and
hundreds of thousands of civilians. At a time when the US. needed international
cooperation most, its military and political responses to 9/11 coincided with a signiﬁcant
drop in the country’s favorability ratings in foreign countries, among both its allies and
enemies (Shlapentokh, Woods and Shiraev, 2005).

The perceived threat of terrorism transformed the domestic policy agenda as well.
The Bush Administration created the Department of Homeland Security, focused the
nation’s attention on countering terrorism like never before and increased federal
spending on police, ﬁreﬁghters, medical ﬁrst-responders and a host of new technologies
and measures to prevent nuclear and biological terrorism, secure the borders and improve

security at the nation’s numerous points of critical infrastructure.

The US. Congress responded to 9/11 by rallying around the ﬂag and showing
widespread support for the Administration’s policies, including its plans to violently
punish those involved in the attacks. Within three days of 9/11, Congress approved a
resolution authorizing the president to take military action. This decision was unanimous
in the Senate. Among the 420 representatives in the House, only one member dissented.

A few weeks later, when the bombs began dropping in Afghanistan, dozens of
lawmakers issued strong endorsements of the president’s actions. For instance, a special
joint statement was issued by a bipartisan group of Republican and Democratic leaders
who commended Bush for his decision and assured him that “We stand united with the
president and with our troops” (Rosenbaum, 2001). One year later, congressional support
for the Administration’s “solution” persisted as Congress authorized the war in Iraq (the
Senate by a vote of 77 to 23 and the House, 296 to 133). The president responded to the
vote by declaring that “America speaks with one voice” (Burniller and Hulse, 2002).

In addition to the geopolitical changes after 9/11, there were signiﬁcant economic
reverberations as well. While 9/11 did not lead to an immediate economic crisis, it did
inﬂuence long-term economic growth, insofar as resources that may have increased
productivity were now being spent on security. As suggested by Gail Makinen (2002, 7),
a specialist in economic policy for the Congressional Research Center, “Since it will take
more labor and capital to produce a largely unchanged amount of goods and services, this
will result in a slower rate of growth in national productivity, a price that will be borne by
every American in the form of a slower rate of growth of per capita real income.”

A more signiﬁcant economic impact, however, was seen in the massive rise in

federal spending on national defense and homeland security. Between 2001 and 2003,

US. defense expenditures increased by 26 percent from $335.9 billion to $422.5 billion
(in constant 2005 dollars) (Pena, 2005). By 2007, the defense budget reached $481.4
billion, levels not seen since the Reagan-era buildup of the 19803 (Tyson, 2007;
Rosenberg, 2006). Between 2001 and 2007 an additional $661 billion was spent on
supplemental emergency funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The main benefactors of this shift in federal spending were private-sector defense
contractors. As one ﬁnancial analyst estimated, the deluge of funding boosted stocks in
the defense industry by 114 percent between January 2001 and June 2006 (Cohan, 2006).
The big losers were the American citizens who relied on the numerous domestic
programs, including programs in education, welfare and healthcare, which were frozen,
reduced or eliminated altogether as the Administration shaped the outlays of the federal
budget.

Other socially signiﬁcant effects emerged as policymakers struggled to balance
the country’s security concerns with the need to preserve the rights and liberties of people
living in the United States. In October 2001, the Administration, led by Attorney General
John Ashcroft, introduced the USA Patriot Act, which passed in the Senate by a vote of
98 to 1 and by 357 to 66 in the House. Although the legislation enjoyed strong
presidential and congressional support and was renewed by Congress in March 2006, the
bill generated a great deal of controversy among scholars, civil rights advocates and
ordinary people. Three of the act’s provisions proved to be particularly contentious: one
allowed law-enforcement agencies to search private residences without informing the
owners (known as “sneak-and-peak” searches); the second gave federal authorities the

right to access the library and bookstore records of anyone connected to a terrorism

investigation; and the third permitted the detention and deportation of non-citizens

without due process.2

Plan of the Dissertation

The foregoing pages outlined three important points. First, the threat of terrorism
is extremely difﬁcult to calculate scientiﬁcally; second, media outlets have, nevertheless,
widely covered the numerous dimensions of this risk; and third, the events of 9/11 led to
major changes in foreign and domestic policy. Each of these points adds to the demand
for more research on media coverage of terrorism, public perceptions of this threat and
the effects of these perceptions on other social attitudes, beliefs and behaviors.

These research topics are related to a diverse and expansive body of research. To
organize this literature and establish a theoretical framework for this dissertation, I use
the “centrality model of communication content” (Riffe, Lacy and Fico, 2005, 11). The
model places communication content at the center of a causal chain. The characteristics
of media content are thought to be determined by antecedent conditions, including social,
political, economic, cultural and other contextual factors. On the other side of the model,
the content is thought to have immediate or delayed eﬂects on individuals, groups and
society. This model, as shown in Figure 1, illustrates the substantive and theoretical
framework of the present study. Speciﬁcally, each arrow in Figure 1 represents one of the

three main parts of this dissertation.

 

2. For more about the Patriot Act, see Cole and Dempsey, 2006; Chesney, 2005; Wong, 2006.

10

FIGURE 1

The Causes and Eﬂ‘ects of Mass Mediated Portrayals of Terrorism

/\ /\

 

Antecedent Portrayals of Eﬂ'ects: Effects:
Conditions: Terrorism:
Social, Political, Media Content Public Perceptions of Social Attitudes,
Economic Factors & the Terrorist Threat Beliefs & Behaviors
Events

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

V

In Chapter 2, I explore the relationship between people’s perceptions of terrorism
and other social attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. Public worries about this threat increased
dramatically and remained elevated for several years after 9/11. Numerous studies in the
social sciences showed that these new threat perceptions affected a number of general
social values, as well as speciﬁc attitudes and behaviors. Drawing on a broad range of
pre-post 9/11 studies, this chapter attempts to catalogue these supposed effects. Given the
scope and diversity of these changes, I suggest that the elevated concerns about terrorism
after 9/11 functioned as an “organizing force,” not unlike an ideological dimension or
belief system, which shaped people’s political and social worlds. Chapter 2 investigates
the strength and permanence of this organizing force by distinguishing short-term
attitudinal and behavioral changes from long-term ones.

Moving to the previous arrow in Figure 1, Chapter 3 addresses the link between
media coverage of terrorism and people’s perceptions of the threat. After 9/11, several

researchers studied the ﬂood of news coverage on this topic and the new role of the

11

terrorist threat in political communication. Most of this research focused on shifts in the
quantity of coverage as the driving force behind public worries about this danger. Chapter
3, in contrast, emphasizes the qualitative variations in this coverage. Using an
experimental study, I test whether subjects perceive some news portrayals of terrorism as
more threatening than others. As mentioned, there are a great number and variety of
terrorism news frames, which prohibits a comprehensive analysis. Chapter 3 provides
case study results on three frames. I begin by testing the effects of the term “terrorism”
itself. I also look at how linking the threat to radical Islam and nuclear technology
inﬂuences people’s perceptions of the danger.

In order to build on the ﬁndings of Chapter 2, I also examine the relationship
between perceived threat and two important social attitudes: support for the Iraq War and
willingness to give up civil liberties in order to reduce the threat of terrorism. The social
and political implications of this experiment, as well as its importance to future research
on the perceived threat of terrorism, are discussed.

Chapter 4 covers the ﬁnal arrow in Figure 1. It attempts to answer the following
question: If some news frames worry people more than others, what predicts the use of
these portrayals in the press? Drawing in part on the ﬁndings from Chapter 3, the ﬁrst
goal of this chapter is to further identify the dimensions of terrorism that are most likely
to increase public worries about the danger. Second, I describe how these dimensions
were portrayed in newspaper content over an eight-year period centered around the
attacks on 9/11. Finally, I explain how these portrayals were associated with other
important news topics, including the use of military force, the protection of civil liberties

and the image of the Muslim religion.

12

In the Conclusion, Chapter 5, I summarize the results of the empirical analyses
and discuss the importance of these ﬁndings. The theoretical, methodological and
substantive contributions of this dissertation are discussed, along with a detailed

treatment of the weaknesses of this research and a suggested path for future studies.

13

CHAPTER 2

The 9/11 Effect: How 9/11 Changed the American Mindset

Introduction

The attacks on 9/11 killed 2,992 people, left a smoldering crash site in the
Pennsylvania countryside, severely damaged one section of the Pentagon and wrought
enormous destruction in New York City. According to a report by the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York, 30 million square feet of ofﬁce space in lower Manhattan were
demolished (Bram, Orr, and Rapaport 2002). It took six years and eight months to build
the World Trade Center and one hour, forty—two minutes to destroy it (Remains of a day,
2002). The character and magnitude of these events had no precedent in United States
history. For a time, no matter where one lived, the attention of almost all Americans was
brought to bear on the threat of terrorism.

Social scientists have examined the possible effects of 9/11—the perceived
terrorist threat in particular—from a wide range of perspectives. Some assessed its
inﬂuence on globalization, foreign trade and international relations (Bahgat, 2003;
Kennedy-Pipe and Welch, 2005; Markey, 2007; Brewer, 2006; Rosecrance and Stein,
2006; Daalder and Lindsay, 2003; Denzin and Giardina, 2007; Jackson and Towle, 2006;
Mandelbaum, 2005; Suder, 2004). Others focused on developments at home, such as the
creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the USA Patriot Act and the level of
security everywhere (Webb, 2007; Northouse, 2006; Gerdes, 2005; Etzioni, 2004). Still

others examined 9/11’s effect on American organizations, groups, political processes, the

14

economy, technological changes and social movements (Nguyen, 2005; Williams, 2006;
Famam, 2005; Enders, 2006; Wiktorowicz, 2004; San Juan, 2007).

Without denying the importance of these approaches, this chapter, in contrast,
examines the effects of 9/ 11 on the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of individuals. I
begin by describing the substantial increase in public worries about terrorism after 9/11.
Next, I review classic and contemporary theories on the possible effects of these threat
perceptions on other social attitudes and behaviors. I then develop a framework for
categorizing and analyzing these effects in the context of 9/11. After reviewing a broad
array of pre-post 9/11 studies, I conclude that the attacks had a number of substantial,
long-lasting effects on the thoughts and feelings of many Americans. This claim is most
convincing when one ponders the massive scope and variety of small-to-moderate 9/11
effects, rather than the strength of any one change in the public mindset.

Considering the diversity of these changes and their possible implications, I offer
a tentative suggestion that the events of 9/11 functioned as an “organizing force,” not
unlike an ideological dimension or belief system, which helped people quickly make
sense of the complex world and draw conclusions about a number of political and social
problems. Whenever possible, an attempt is made to determine the strength and
permanence of this organizing force by distinguishing short-term attitudinal and

behavioral changes from long-term ones.

The Perceived Threat of Terrorism: Before and After 9/11

Perceived threat has two deeply intertwined components: emotional reactions

(concern, worry or fear) and cognitive reactions (risk beliefs) to danger. It is also

15

important to distinguish between threats to individuals versus collectivities. After 9/11,
many people perceived an increased threat to their personal safety and the safety of their
family and friends. Given the symbolic nature of the attacks, some people also sensed a
threat to their individual or collective identity. Unless otherwise speciﬁed, I use the term
“perceived threat” loosely to describe the range of these thoughts and feelings.

After previous attacks in the United States, including the ﬁrst assault on the
World Trade Center in February 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, the
threat of terrorism captured the country’s attention, but did not become a long-term
government priority, an enduring narrative in the media, or a permanent concern for most
Americans (Woods, 2007). According to national surveys, the percentage of respondents
who were very or somewhat worried about being personally victimized by terrorism
peaked at 42 percent after the Oklahoma City attacks, dropped to 35 percent one year
later (April 1996) and remained at this level until declining further to 24 percent in April
2000 (see Figure 2).3

The response to 9/11 was quite different.4 With the wreckage still shifting in New
York City, 58 percent of Americans said that they were very or somewhat worried about
being personally victimized by terrorists. A greater percentage (66 percent) believed that
a new attack was very or somewhat likely. Almost half the population believed that

“Americans have permanently changed the way they live” (49 percent). Large

 

3. Gallup Organization, Terrorism in the United States (accessed online July 18, 2007 at:
http://www.galluppoll.com/content/?ci=4909&pg=l ); see Kuzma 2000.

4. The Gallup Organization has asked the open question “What do you think is the most important problem
facing this country today?” since the early twentieth century. In the two decades prior to 9/1 1, “terrorism”
never made the list of America’s most important problems (see Lewis 2005). After 9/1 1, terrorism became
a top concern (mentioned by 46 percent of respondents in October 2001) and stayed on the list up until the
time writing on this manuscript began (see Gillespie 2001).

16

percentages reported being less willing to “ﬂy on airplanes” (43 percent), “travel
overseas” (45 percent), “go into skyscrapers” (35 percent) and “attend events where there
are thousands of people” (30 percent).5 The attacks also increased personal concerns

about “opening mail” and “food safety” (Davis, 2007).

 

r
: Figure 2: How worried are you that you or someone in your
l family will become a victim of terrorism -- very worried,

{ somewhat worried, not too worried, or not at all worried?

l
I

l —Vefyt;m;vﬁrat worriedj

Percentage

 

 

 

Data from the Gallup Organization (see www.gaIluppoll.com)

While the intensity of people’s emotional and cognitive responses to 9/11
diminished in the years aﬁer the attacks, the threat of terrorism did not disappear. In the

ﬁrst three years, rather than declining uniformly, as in the case of the Oklahoma City

 

5. Gallup Organization, Terrorism in the United States (accessed online July 18, 2007 at:
ImpM/www “ “ ’ ’?ci— 909&pg=l ).

bombings, the percentage of those who were very or somewhat worried ﬂuctuated, falling
23 points by November 2001 only to rise 13 points by February 2003. One year later, the
level of worry assumed a steady upward trend. Between 2005 and 2007, worry levels
exceeded the peak rating after the Oklahoma City bombings. These sustained concerns
may have resulted from the tumultuous events of the time, including the start of the war
in Iraq (March 2003), the Madrid train bombings (March 2004) and the London
bombings (July 2005). In July 2007, 47 percent of Americans were very or somewhat
worried about being personally harmed by terrorists; 40 percent believed that a new

assault was very or somewhat likely.6

Effects of Perceived Threat

The next question to address is how these high and stable threat perceptions may
have affected other social attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. Over the decades, researchers
from a range of academic disciplines have offered several answers to this question.
According to inter-group conﬂict theory, higher levels of threat are associated with
increased out-group bashing (Taj fel and Turner 1979), stereotyping and attribution errors
(Brewer 1993). Perceived threat may also activate authoritarian tendencies, such as
greater adherence to conventional values, submissiveness to moral authorities,
identiﬁcation with powerful ﬁgures and rejection of outsiders (Adomo et a1. 1950; Doty,

Peterson, and Winter 1991; Duckitt 1989; Feldman 2003).

 

6. Gallup Organization, Terrorism in the United States (accessed online July 18, 2007 at:
http://wwwgalluppoll.com/content/?ci=4909&pg=1); see also Moore 2004; Sjoberg 2005. Survey
questions that measured “sociotropic threat” (the perceived threat to the United States as opposed to one’s
self) also showed stability over time. According to a series of nationally representative panel studies, Davis
(2007, p. 123) found that the percentage of Americans who were very or somewhat concerned that “the
United States might suffer another terrorist attack in the next three months” stayed in a tight range (80
percent to 85 percent) between November 2001 to November 2004.

18

Other researchers offer different psychological explanations of how people
process threat, but make similar predictions about its effects. According to terror
management theory (Greenberg et al. 1990), violent attacks, such as those seen on 9/11,
heighten people’s awareness of “the inevitability and potential ﬁnality of death”
(Pyszczynski et al. 2006, p. 526). This heightened “mortality salience,” in turn, is known
to increase authoritarian tendencies and out-group derogation, as discussed above
(Greenberg, Solomon, and Pyszczynski, 1997).

In addition to its inﬂuence on people’s orientations toward outsiders or
“deviants,” perceived threat also orients people’s attitudes toward insiders and
themselves. The ﬂipside of inter-group conﬂict theory holds that threat not only increases
out-group derogation, but also in-group favoritism and a desire to protect and afﬁrm
one’s values and social identity (Taj fel and Turner 1979; Taj fel 1982; Gaertner and
Dovidio 2000). Perceived threat may reinforce group connectedness, inspire people to see
themselves as part of a collective and encourage them to “rally around the ﬂag” (Mueller
1970; Olivas-Lujan, Harzing, and McCoy 2004; Landau et al. 2004). An extreme external
danger may even operate as a “galvanizing crisis” that generates increased levels of
social capital and civic engagement (Putnam 2000).

In summary, people respond to perceived threats by adopting a number of
defensive positions, including an increased readiness to commit or condone violence,
assert the value and boundaries of their collective identities and take steps to rethink their
lives as something more permanent and impenetrable. In the context of 9/11, these
general orientations, or “defense mechanisms,” may be relevant to a wide range of

speciﬁc policy-relevant attitudes.

19

Here lies the subject of inquiry of this review. Did the events of 9/ 11 have a brief
effect on a limited number of public views, or did it produce numerous, long-term
changes in the way Americans think and feel? To the extent that the latter can be
supported empirically, I suggest that theorizing on the public’s response to 9/11 should be
expanded beyond the defense-mechanism perspective to include a new conceptualization
of perceived threat as an “organizing force,” not unlike an ideology or belief system, that

helps people understand their political and social worlds.

Methods of Studying 9/11 Effects

Given the extraordinary nature of the attacks and the subsequent shifts in US.
policies, there has been a big demand for information about the public’s response to 9/11.
What is more, many researchers saw 9/11 as a unique, if tragic, window of opportunity. It
served as a natural experiment for studying a number of important social issues. As a
result, a ﬂood of social scientiﬁc research poured out of universities and other research
centers in the years following the attacks. This review focuses on the empirical ﬁndings
published between 9/11 and the completion of this text in early 2008.

In order to measure a change in attitudes or behavior, researchers must collect
data that are relevant to at least two points in time. The studies in this review produced
such data using three different research designs: pre-post, retrospective and experimental
studies. Researchers using pre-post studies collected comparable data from both before
and after 9/11. Retrospective studies were conducted in the post-9/11 period and relied on
subjects to self-report how their views had changed over time. Experimental researchers

attempted to simulate the events of 9/11 (or prime theoretically equivalent psychological

20

reactions) and examined the effects of “9/ 1 1” in a controlled environment. While I
consider studies based on all three designs as supporting evidence, this review focuses on
pre-post research, the most “naturalistic” empirical representation of 9/11 effects.

Nationally representative, cross-sectional surveys conducted by major polling
ﬁrms at multiple time periods before and after the attacks (using identical or comparable
questions) were the most abundant sources of pre-post research on these effects. Much of
this information has been reviewed in scholarly books and journals. Almost all of these
reviews, however, consist of in—depth discussions on a particular set of post-9/ 11
changes. This review, in contrast, examines a larger range of 9/11 effects, even if the
details offered on each case must be abbreviated.

In addition to the national polls, there were other important sources of empirical
data. In many cases, independent survey and experimental researchers working in the pre-
9/11 period saw the attacks as a sort of natural experiment and decided, if unexpectedly,
to repeat their studies in the post-9/11 period to assess the possible changes in their
results. Although their samples were sometimes less representative (based on college
undergraduates, for example), the diversity of their topics and the strength of their
ﬁndings greatly expand our understanding of 9/ 11 effects.

Quantitative content analysis was also used in creative ways to produce
interesting results. Years after the events, this method is now one of our most reliable
instruments for producing pre-post data. Any analysis of 9/11 effects that relies only on
national polls and disregards the ﬁndings produced by independent pollsters,
experimental researchers and content analysts will inevitably understate the scope and

complexity of America’s reaction to 9/11.

21

Four Changes: An Analytical Framework

In response to the horrifying images of 9/11 that were aired and re-aired by
countless media, many people experienced severe psychological distress. The direct
impact of the attacks on people’s mental and physical health represents the ﬁrst of four
types of 9/11 effects.

The other three categories include less immediate effects. As discussed, perceived
threat has the power to bring us together (reinforce in-group solidarity) and tear us apart
(strengthen animosity toward out-groups). The manifestations of the ﬁrst category have
been broken into two subcategories: “rally effects” and “pro-social” tendencies. Rally
effects (Mueller 1970) include increased levels of presidential approval, government trust
and patriotic sentiment. Given the pertinence of these changes to partisan politics, I
separated them from the second subcategory, pro-social tendencies, the normative value
of which is less controversial. Pro-social tendencies include helping behavior, social trust,
civic engagement and collectivism.

In addition to rally effects and pro-social tendencies, Americans also showed a
greater willingness to repress, censor and punish other people and groups after 9/11. I

refer to these changes as “authoritarian tendencies.”

Effects of 9/11 on Mental and Physical Health

In the aftermath of 9/1 1, some experts warned that a vast number of Americans
would suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Gafﬁiey 2006). Although such
warnings overestimated actual levels of psychological distress after 9/11, munerous

studies showed that the short-term impact was not trivial. New York City residents were

22

found to be particularly susceptible to psychological harms (Schlenger et al. 2002).
Roughly 8 percent of Manhattan residents and 20 percent of those living near the World
Trade Center suffered from PTSD (Galea et al. 2002; Piotrkowski 2002). Public health
ofﬁcials reported that people’s mental health needs in the state of New York increased
signiﬁcantly after 9/11 (Herman et al. 2002).

The heightened stress was also shown to increase the number of heart attacks, as
well as the use of cigarettes and alcohol (Allegra et al. 2005; Vlahov et al. 2004; Richman
et al. 2004; Cardenas 2003). Holman et al. (2008) found that stress responses to 9/11
were associated with a signiﬁcant increase in cardiovascular ailments over a three-year
period following the attacks, even after controlling for pre-9/11 health status factors and a
number of demographic variables.

Parents and health officials were particularly concerned about the effects of 9/11
on children (Gaffney 2006). A study of New York City public school students found an
association between students’ exposure to the 9/11 events and mental disorders, including
agoraphobia, separation anxiety and PTSD (Hoven et al. 2005). Other studies on New
York City youth supported these ﬁndings (Agronick et a1. 2007; Aber et al. 2004;
Mowder et al. 2006).7

Although PTSD was shown to be more prevalent in New York City than
elsewhere (Schlenger et al. 2002; Ford et al. 2003), several studies found that 9/11 had at

least some effect on the psychological wellbeing of people living throughout the country.

 

7. A number of other populations were shown to be particularly vulnerable to psychological trauma as a
result of 9/1 1, including people with previous psychiatric illnesses (Franklin et al. 2002; Silver et al. 2002),
people who had been victims of crimes or other distressing events (Latino et al. 2006; Saylor et al. 2006),
refugees who had been traumatized in their native countries (Kinzie et al. 2002; Hinton et al. 2007), people
with pessimistic outlooks (Ai et al. 2006) and people suffering from depression (Moric et al. 2007).

23

Based on a nationally representative sample, 44 percent of adults and 35 percent of
children reported one or more substantial symptoms of stress due to 9/11, which included

,9 ‘6

“feeling very upset,” having “disturbing thoughts, trouble falling asleep” or “angry
outbursts” (Schuster et al. 2001). Other national studies conﬁrmed these results (Silver et
al. 2002).8

Mental health researchers also showed, however, that the various symptoms of
psychological harm diminished substantially over time, returning to near pre-9/11 levels
in six months or less (Stein et al. 2004; Silver et al. 2002). Ford et al. (2003), for instance,
found that reported sadness returned to the baseline within four to six weeks. In sum, a
great body of research demonstrated that the effects of 9/ 11 on physical and mental health
in America were diverse and substantial, but short-lived.

Nevertheless, even if the overt symptoms of psychological harm were transitory,
social scientists should bear in mind that millions of Americans now store these traumatic
events and affective experiences in their memories. When recalled, these thoughts and

feelings may have renewed affects on mental health, as well as inﬂuence other attitudes,

beliefs and behaviors.

Rally Effects
Presidential Approval
One of the most noticeable ways in which Americans pulled together after 9/11

was by supporting their local and national leaders. As shown in Figure 3, President

 

8. Based on a national cross-sectional study with comparison groups before and after 9/1 1, Ford et al.
(2003) showed that the percentage of young adults who reported “sadness at least some of the time in the
past 7 days” increased signiﬁcantly for both males and females; female respondents experienced a
signiﬁcant increase in psychological distress.

24

George W. Bush’s approval rating increased dramatically following the attacks, rising
from the mid 503 in the weeks before 9/11 to a “record high” rating of 90 percent on
September 21-22, 2001 (Gallup 2003, p. 15). Other polls showed that the swell of support
for the president cut across party lines, even if it was higher among Republicans (96
percent) and Independents (76 percent) than among Democrats (66 points) (Gaines
2002).9 Members of Bush’s cabinet, the US. Congress, as well as some local leaders,
such as the former Mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani, also received relatively

strong increases in favorability after 9/11 (Gallup Organization 2001a).

 

 

Figure 3: George W. Bush's Job Approval Ratings

1 :pBBEII

Percentage
01
O

    

 

O y. :"hm‘ r w ”1"“ .1 ”‘1‘ rm. .. w
n — .o — o > *-' '- 0) c c > '— o. .a —
a) 3, E q, .3, cu m 0 ‘5 a to a O ‘3- a) a) 3..
u. ‘_ 4 u. N D 2 O 2 < -a -: z < a) u. N
‘- o ‘- N o on 00 v *0 *0 Ln ‘9 N
o o u o o 8 o O 3 O 0 0 O 8 8 o 8
o N o o N o o o o o O O o N o o N
N o N N N N N N N N N N N

r-
o
o
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Data ﬁom the Gallup Organization (see www.galluppoll.com)

 

9. The rally also included different racial and ethnic groups. As Smelser (2004, p. 268) noted, “black
Americans, who had given President Bush only 10 percent of their votes less than a year earlier, responded
in public opinion polls that 75 percent were now supportive of him.”

25

As shown in Figure 3, Bush’s approval rating did not return to its pre-9/11 level
for roughly two years or more (Ladd 2007). A number of researchers were surprised by
the staying power of this rally (Eichenberg, Stoll, and Lebo 2006). For instance, Gaines
(2002, p. 531) referred to it as “exceptional in magnitude and duration,” while Collins
(2004, p. 54) called it “unusually prolonged.” While the ratings of other major ﬁgures
returned to baseline levels relatively quickly, Bush’s post-9/11 boost held at 50 percent or
higher well into 2005, which, according to some observers, accounted for his victory in
the 2004 presidential election (Landau et al. 2004; Gailliot, Schmeichel, and Baumeister

2006; Abramson et al. 2007).

Trust in Government

Americans also united in support of the United States government as a whole.
According to national polls, the public’s “trust in government” more than doubled after
9/11, rising from 29 percent in March 2001 to 64 percent in late September 2001
(Chanley 2002; Putnam 2002; Skocpol 2002; Smith, Rasinski, and Toce 2001). The
number of Americans who were conﬁdent in the federal govemment’s handling of both

international and domestic problems rose by 15 percent and 17 percent, respectively.10

 

10. The Gallup Organization asked respondents, “How much trust and conﬁdence do you have in our
federal govemment in Washington when it comes to handling [‘intemational problems’ / ‘domestic
problems’] -- a great deal, a fair amount, not very much, or none at all?” In the September 7-10, 2001
survey, 68 percent of respondents said a great deal or a fair amount on international problems, 60 percent
on domestic problems. These numbers rose to 83 percent and 77 percent, respectively, in the October 11-14
survey (Gallup Organization, Gallup’s Pulse of Democracy (accessed online August 17, 2007 at:
http://www.galluppoll.com/content/default.aspx?ci=27286&pg=1 ).

26

Ford et al. (2003) found that the elevated trust in government extended to the state and
local levels as well.'1

While the post-9/11 increases in public trust and conﬁdence in government were
signiﬁcant and remained high for three to ﬁve months, levels of trust faded faster than
presidential approval, returning to pre-9/11 levels in about one year (Brewer, Aday, and
Gross 2003, 2005; Hetherington and Nelson 2003; Rasinski et al. 2002; Burke 2005;

Perrin and Smolek 2007).

Patriotism

The outpouring of support for individual leaders and government institutions
coincided with a rise in national pride, along with various patriotic feelings, rituals and
acts (Moskalenko, Clark, and Rozin 2006). There were dramatic increases in the
percentage of people who reported being “very proud” of America for its advancements
in “science and technology” (an increase of 26 percent), the “armed forces” (32 percent),
“American history” (21 percent), “economic achievements” (32 percent) and “the way
democracy works” (34 percent) (Smith, Rasinski, and Toce 2001). These elevated levels
of pride were resilient for one year, if not longer (Rasinski et al. 2002).

According to at least two national surveys, a great majority of Americans (74
percent) said that they displayed an American ﬂag on their home, car or person as a result

of 9/11 (Skitka 2005; Moore 2003). Flag display was equally prevalent in all regions of

 

11. Based on data collected in 23 focus groups, Greenberg (2001) suggested that 9/11 stimulated public
preferences for a greater government role in society. Among other things, he found that people wanted to
delay the Bush Administration’s proposed tax cuts in order to “fund Social Security, rebuild after the
terrorist attacks, help the unemployed, and increase support for education” (Greenberg 2001, p.26).
Greenberg, however, did not determ ine whether this attitude change was long-lasting. Data collection took
place within the ﬁrst two months after 9/11, which only represents the public’s immediate reaction.

27

the country, though less so among blacks, as well as among younger and more educated

people (Skitka 2005). A study by Collins (2004) conﬁrmed the high incidence of ﬂag

display after 9/11 with direct measures of this behavior.12

 

Figure 4: Presidential Approval and Government Trust
Before and After 9I11

 

Presidential Presidential Trust in Trust in
Approval Before Approval After Government Before Government Alter

 

See footnote for notes on the source of this data. ’3

 

12. Collins also identiﬁed four distinct stages of ﬂag display and other patriotic gestures: “(1) an initial,
few days of shock and idiosyncratic individual reactions to attack; (2) one to two weeks of establishing
standardized displays of solidarity symbols; (3) two to three months of high solidarity plateau; and (4)
gradual decline toward normalcy in six to nine months” (Collins 2004, p. 53).

13. Presidential approval rating data are from the Gallup Organization (percentage who “approved" of
George W. Bush’s work as president; polls conducted in early September 2001 and September 21-22,
2001). Trust in government data are from Los Angeles Times and Washington Post Polls (percentage who
“rust the government in Washington to do what is right”; polls conducted in March 2001 and September
25-27, 2001).

28

Pro-social Tendencies
Helping Behavior

Americans also rallied around each other after 9/1 1. According to a survey of
3,512 residents of Connecticut, New Jersey and New York, 50 percent of the respondents
attended a funeral or memorial service in the wake of the attacks (Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention 2002). Cash and other gifts, estimated to be worth $1.4 billion,
were donated to the victims of 9/11 and their families (9/11 by the Numbers 2002;
Independent Sector 2001).

Americans were more likely to volunteer in the post-9/11 period as well (Skocpol
2002, p. 537; Putnam 2002). A study by Penner et al. (2005) conﬁrmed that volunteering
rates increased dramatically after 9/11 and ﬁrrther suggested that volunteering rose
signiﬁcantly for all types of charities, not only 9/11-re1ated ones, and that the increase
lasted about three weeks. 14

Other studies showed that after 9/11 people were more likely to perform altruistic
behavior (Yum and Schenck-Hamlin 2005) and show kindness, love or friendship toward
others (Mikulincer, Florian, and Hirschberger 2003; Peterson and Seligman 2003). There
was also a slight increase (4 percent) in the percentage of Americans who believed that
“There is much goodness in the world which hints at God’s goodness” (Smith, Rasinski,

and Toce 2001).

 

l4. Putnam (2002) also found that volunteering lasted around three weeks. However, according to a two-
wave panel study conducted right after 9/11 and then in March-April 2002, 39 percent of respondents
indicated that they had done some volunteer work ‘in the past month’ at both time periods, indicating that
volunteer rates may have remained steady for up to six months (Traugott et al. 2002).

29

Social Trust

According to national surveys, the number of respondents who thought that “most
people are helpﬁrl” and that “most people try to be fair” rose by 21 percent and 12
percent, respectively (Smith, Rasinski, and Toce 2001). A study by Putnam (2002)
showed similar increases in various forms of “social trust,” including trust in “people
running my community” (8 percent increase), “neighbors” (7 percent), “local news
media” (7 percent) and “friends” (8 percent). Americans were also more conﬁdent that
their fellow community members would cooperate in collective actions, such as efforts to
conserve energy or water (Putnam 2002).

While the increased level of social trust was shown to remain steady for several
months (Rasinski et al. 2002; Traugott et al. 2002; Burke 2005), there was a gradual
return to pre-9/11 levels after roughly one year (Etzioni and Mead 2003; Gross, Aday,

and Brewer 2004; Brewer, Aday, and Gross 2005).

Civic Engagement and Collectivism

The outpouring of support for the president, government and one’s fellow citizens
led some researchers to suppose that 9/11 would stimulate a new era of civic engagement
and citizen action, as seen in public responses to major conﬂicts throughout history, such
as the American revolutionary struggle and World War II. In fact, only one year before
the attacks, Putnam (2000) predicted that such a civic revitalization could be stimulated
by a serious national crisis, such as war or natural disaster. After the attacks, Sander and
Putnam (2002) reported that 9/11 had indeed “dramatically led us to rediscover ﬁiends,

neighbors, public institutions, and a shared fate.”

30

While Putnam’s pre-post 9/11 study (2002) conﬁrmed the increases in
government trust, social trust and other pro-social tendencies discussed above, it also
conceded that these attitudinal changes did not always result in behavioral changes. The
events of 9/11 did not, for instance, increase church attendance or membership levels in
community organizations and clubs. After 9/11, Americans were actually slightly less
likely to have friends over to visit and more likely to watch television (Putnam 2002).
Ford et al. (2003) also found no signiﬁcant pre-post 9/11 differences in people’s contact
with ﬁiends.

Using Putnam’s data, Skocpol (2002) made this point even stronger, showing that
the average net increase in “civic attitudes” was 15 percent, while the average net
increase in “civic behavior” was only 4 percent. Drawing on panel data collected roughly
a month after 9/11 and again ﬁve months later, Schmierbach, Boyle and McLeod (2005,
p. 341) argued that the “civic surge” after 9/11 had been “temporary and superﬁcial.”

Other measures of civic engagement place the “resurgence” ﬁrrther in question.
As Althaus (2002) suggested, if Americans were more involved in civic life after 9/11,
they did not show it by paying more attention to current events. For instance, judging by
the size of the TV news audience, the honeymoon of civic revitalization lasted less than
one week.15 A similar trend was seen in newspaper readership. In fact, according to some

estimates, readership actually declined slightly in the ﬁrst six months after the attacks

 

15. After the attacks, the size of the evening news audience more than doubled, from 13 percent of
American adults in early September 2001 to more than 26 percent in the ﬁrst ﬁve days following 9/11.
Nielsen Media Research reported that 79.5 million people watched the news on the night of the attacks; to
put this number in perspective, roughly the same number of viewers watched the January 2001 Super Bowl
(De Moraes 2001). Within one week, however, the evening news audience returned to near pre-9/1 1 levels
(15 percent) and never rose more than 1.5 percent in the next seven months (Althaus 2002).

31

(Althaus 2002, p. 519).16 However, in spite of the lackluster increases in news
consumption, people did report being more “interested” in various news stories and may
have managed to learn more about national and international issues, particularly those
related to 9/11 (Prior 2002; German Marshall Fund 2002).17

Akin to civic engagement is the idea of collectivism. Some researchers suggested
that 9/11 would soften the individualism of many Americans and encourage them to see
themselves as part of a common U.S. collective (Greenberg 2001). This conventional
wisdom, however, was not conﬁrmed by empirical research. A study based on surveys
conducted before and after 9/11 (March and October 2001) found that the level of
“collectivism” was slightly lower in the post-9/11 period (Olivas-Lujan, Harzing, and
McCoy 2004). The same study found that “cosmopolitanism” (a value orientation that
suggests that all human beings belong to a single community) declined signiﬁcantly
between March 2001 and October 2001 and stayed at the same level until at least April
2002. These ﬁndings, as discussed below, may reﬂect the relative strength of other,
contradictory effects of 9/11 that led people to circurnscribe their social identities and

limit their collectivistic orientations.

 

16. Other studies showed that any increase in newspaper readership after 9/1 1 was quite modest—3
percent, according to Putnam (2002).

17. In the wake of the attacks, for instance, 90 percent of Americans knew which type of anthrax is more
difﬁcult to treat (“the kind that is inhaled into the lungs,” not “the kind that appears on the skin”). Related
to the “war on terror,” 85 percent of respondents correctly answered “Pakistan” when asked “which of the
following countries shares a border with Afghanistan (Russia/Pakistan/lraq/ Kazakhstan)” (Prior 2002, p.
525). Respondents did much worse, however, on open-ended knowledge questions (only 34 percent could
name the current Secretary of Defense and only 2 percent knew the name of the Prime Minister of Canada)
and questions not directly related to 9/11 (responding to a question with two alternatives, only about one
half knew that the Republicans, not the Democrats, held the majority of members in House of
Representative in Washington).

32

Authoritarian Tendencies

If numerous studies explored rally effects and pro-social tendencies after 9/11, an
even greater share examined the public’s increased desire for security and a new
harshness in the American mindset. I use the term “authoritarian tendencies” here to
loosely categorize a variety of social psychological changes after 9/11, including general
shifts in culture and values, as well as speciﬁc changes in public opinion, such as greater
support for military actions and less favorable attitudes toward ethnic minorities and

immigrants.

Culture and Values

Changes in culture and values are generally thought to occur gradually. However,
some researchers have argued that large-scale, traumatic events can cause sudden shifts
in values and cultural orientations (Ladd and Cairns 1996; Raviv et al. 2000). For
example, the Japanese and German cultures were thought to have shifted rather quickly in
the aftermath of World War II toward a rejection of dictatorship and militarism.

Several post-9/11 studies greatly advanced this line of thinking. Based on a
content analysis of letters to the editor—a sort of mass-mediated sphere of political
culture—Perrin (2005) showed that the number of “authoritarian” (Adomo et al. 1950)
cultural scripts in U.S. newspapers increased after 9/11. The letters revealed a greater
willingness to punish others who violated conventional values, a greater preoccupation
with power and toughness and a greater certainty that the world was a dangerous place.

National polls provided only modest support for these ﬁndings. For instance,

there were small to moderate increases in the percentage of Americans who believed that

33

the “world is ﬁlled with evil and sin” (3 percent) and “human nature is fundamentally
perverse” (9 percent) (Smith, Rasinski, and Toce 2001).

A shift in values was also discovered in studies on the electorate’s evaluation of
political candidates. After 9/11, voters grew more receptive to leaders who emphasized
the greatness of the nation, proclaimed their resolve to ﬁght terrorism and win a victory
over “evil” (Pyszczynski, Greenberg and Solomon 2003; Cohen et al. 2004; Gaines
2002). In an experimental study, Landau et al. (2004) showed that reminding subjects
about the events of 9/11 increased their support for Bush and decreased their support for
presidential candidate John Kerry. '8 This ﬁnding suggested that Bush’s patriotic rhetoric
and emphasis on “ridding the world of evil” may have given him an advantage with
voters in the 2004 presidential election (see also Gailliot, Schmeichel, and Baumeister
2006; Gordijn and Stapel 2006; Abramson et al. 2007).

Studies also found that the percentage of Americans who thought that “a woman
president would do a better job” dropped from 25 percent in January 2000 to 15 percent
in September 2003 (Falk and Kenski 2006). Lawless (2004) uncovered a similar pre-post
9/11 trend using several different survey questions related to women and leadership. The
permanence of this trend, however, remains unclear.

Among other cultural shifts, “safety, order and stability in society” were valued
more after than before 9/11, while the need for “excitement, novelty and a challenge in

life” declined signiﬁcantly following the attacks (Verkasalo, Goodwin, and Bezrnenova

 

18. The dependent variable (support for either Bush or Kerry) was based on a composite index that
included four survey questions, including one that asked the subjects about their intention to vote for the
given candidate in the 2004 presidential election. The increased appeal of Bush, and not Kerry, was “not at
all limited to conservative individuals and was not the result of an increase in political conservativism”
(Landau et al. 2004, p. 1146). The data collection in the Landau et al. study (2004) was conducted between
October 2003 and May 2004, indicating that the perceived threat of terrorism may have enduring effects on
political attitudes.

34

2006; see Schwartz, Bardi, and Bianchi 2000). These changes held for roughly ﬁve
months before returning to near pre-9/11 levels.19

There was also a shift in the way Americans valued equality. In the context of
organizations, people tended to perceive the difference in power between employees and
bosses as more acceptable after 9/1 l—a tendency that lasted at least six months (Olivas-
Lujan, Harzing, and McCoy 2004).20 Several other studies offered interesting and
important insights on 9/11’s effect on American culture and values, authoritarian values
in particular, though few of them offered pre-post 9/11 data to support their assumptions
(Skitka, Bauman, and Mullen 2004; Pyszczynski et al. 2006; Hastings and Shaffer 2005;

Crowson, Debacker, and Thoma 2006; Jarymowicz and Bar-Ta] 2006).

Military Actions
Several speciﬁc changes in public opinion paralleled these general shifts in
values. The most apparent among them was the country’s nearly unanimous call for

military reprisals.21 Public approval of using “military action against terrorism” hovered

 

19. It should be noted that the study by Verkasalo, Goodwin, and Bezrnenova (2006) was based on
respondents from Finland. On one hand, these results do not directly inform our understanding of 9/11
effects on America. On the other hand, as the authors contend, the study “suggests that even within a
relatively ‘remote’ culture such as Finland, large-scale terrorist attacks may have a signiﬁcant impact on
individual values” (p. 158).

20. According to a study that collected data before 9/11 (March 2001) and at two time points after the
attacks (October 2001 and April 2002), this change was signiﬁcant, substantial and persistent (Olivas-
Lujan, Harzing, and McCoy 2004). Several questions were used to measure “acceptance of hierarchy” in
organizations; the items that showed the greatest increases in support were: “A hierarchy of authority is the
best form of organization” and “The hierarchy of groups in a society should remain consistent over time”
(Olivas-Lujan, Harzing, and McCoy 2004, p. 219).

21. Three days after 9/11, the U.S. Congress approved a resolution authorizing the president to take
military action. This decision was unanimous in the Senate. Among the 420 representatives in the House,
there was only one dissenting voice. A few weeks later, when the bombs began dropping in Afghanistan, a
special joint statement was issued by a bipartisan group of Republican and Democratic leaders who
commended Bush for his decision and assured him that “We stand united with the president and with our
troops.” One year later, congressional support for the administration’s “solution” persisted as Congress

35

around 90 percent for no less than six months after the attacks (Huddy, Khatib, and
Capelos 2002). According to a Gallup poll conducted in November 2001, 62 percent of
Americans advocated the start of a “long-term war” and 31 percent of respondents
backed “the punishment of speciﬁc terrorists”; only 5 percent said that the U.S. “should
not take military actions” (Gallup Organization 2001b). A great majority of Americans
(65-71 percent) approved a military response even if it resulted in “civilian causalities”

and the use of “ground troops” (Huddy, Khatib, and Capelos 2002).

Figure 5: Support for War in Iraq and Harsh Anti-
Terrorism Tactics

%
90 '
80
70
60 ,
50
4O
30
20
10

    

Support military Support military Support Support
actions in Iraq actions in Iraq assassination of assassination of
before 9/11 after 9/1 1 terrorists before terrorists after
9/ 11 9/ 1 1 ‘1

 

 

Notes: Iraq data from Everts and Isemia, 2002; before = February 2001, after = October
2001. Assassination data from Huddy, Khatib and Capelos, 2002; before = late 1998;

after = October 2001.

 

authorized the war in Iraq (the Senate by a vote of 77 to 23 and the House, 296 to 133). The president
responded to the vote by declaring that “America speaks with one voice.”

36

Although a call to war had followed previous terrorist attacks, 9/11 proved to be a
special case. Responding to comparable survey questions, 60 percent of the public
supported a military response to the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
in August 1998, while 80 percent supported a military response to 9/11 (Huddy, Khatib,
and Capelos 2002).

National pollsters also found broad public support for war in the speciﬁc cases of
Afghanistan and Iraq. Between September 11, 2001 and March 2002, approval of the war
in Afghanistan ranged from 65 percent to 77 percent, even when questions mentioned
military operations on the ground and potential causalities of American troops and
innocent civilians (Huddy, Khatib, and Capelos 2002). Other sources of public opinion
data showed that a wide majority of Americans backed the Afghan war for at least ﬁve
years after 9/11. Asked whether they thought the military actions in Afghanistan were a
“mistake,” 89 percent said “no” in November 2001; this number rose to 93 percent in
January 2002 and remained at 70 percent or higher until August 2007 (Carroll, 2007a).

Given the longstanding conﬂict between the U.S. and Iraq, much is known about
public attitudes on this issue. In the decade prior to 9/11, aside from a few, brief spikes in
approval, only slight majorities of Americans supported war with Iraq (Everts and Isemia
2005).22 In February 2001, just seven months before the attacks, only 52 percent of
Americans were in favor military actions. One month after 9/11, however, the number
jumped to 81 percent. Approval ratings ﬂuctuated in the next months and years, but
remained in the high 608 and 708 until June 2004, when it dropped to 5 6 percent, still

four points above the pre-9/11 level (Everts and Isemia 2002).

 

22. These ratings were based on general polling questions with dichotomous alternatives, such as “should”
or “should not,” “favor” or “oppose” and so forth.

37

The attacks on 9/11 also brought an increase in public support for the
assassination of terrorist leaders. Based on roughly comparable survey questions, the
number of Americans who approved the assassination of “known terrorists” or
“individual terrorist leaders” rose from 54 percent in late 1998 to 77 percent in October
2001 (Huddy, Khatib, and Capelos 2002; German Marshall Fund 2002).

In addition to the increased support for harsh anti-terrorism tactics and the use of
military force in the “war on terror,” Americans also shifted their views on U.S. defense
spending. During much of the 19803 and 19903, a plurality of Americans thought that
“too much” was being spent on defense. After 9/11—and for the next ﬁve years—a
plurality believed that the government was spending “about the right amount” (Carroll
2007b). It was not until February 2007 that public sentiment shifted again, returning to
the notion that “too much” was being spent. Meanwhile, between 2001 and 2003, U.S.
defense expenditures increased by 26 percent from $335.9 billion to $422.5 billion (in
constant 2005 dollars) (Pena 2005). By 2007, the defense budget reached $481.4 billion,
levels not seen since the Reagan-era buildup of the 19803 (Tyson 2007; Rosenberg 2006).
Between 2001 and 2007 an additional $661 billion was spent on supplemental emergency

funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Civil Liberties, Privacy and Security

Another important 9/11 effect surfaced a3 policymakers struggled to balance the
country’s security concerns with the need to preserve the rights and liberties of the
American people. In October 2001, the Bush Administration, led by Attorney General

John Ashcroft, introduced the USA Patriot Act, which passed in the Senate by a vote of

38

98 to l and by 357 to 66 in the House. Although the legislation enjoyed strong
presidential and congressional support and was renewed by Congress in March 2006, the
bill has generated a great deal of controversy among scholars, civil rights advocates and
ordinary people.23

As a result, much research was conducted to gauge public attitudes toward civil
liberties after 9/11. While less data is available from the pre-9/11 period, a clear pre-post
comparison can be made. The most common national polling question asked Americans
about their willingness to “give up some civil liberties” in order to “curb terrorism.” Two
variants of this general tradeoff question measured the public’s willingness to give up
“personal freedoms” or “privacy” to ﬁght terrorism. Each of these tradeoff measures
increased considerably after 9/11.

Although a similar trend was seen in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing in
1995, the post-9/11 change was much greater. Willingness to make the civil-liberties
tradeoff stood at 49 percent after the bombing in Oklahoma. Two years later, as the
salience of terrorism diminished, the indicator dropped to 29 percent. After 9/11, public
willingness to trade their liberties for security reached 69 percent (or even higher
according to some national polls) (Huddy, Khatib, and Capelos 2002; see Huddy et al.
2005; Greenberg, Craighill, and Greenberg 2004).24 Signiﬁcant increases were seen in the

public’s response to the “security-freedoms” tradeoff and the “security-privacy” tradeoff

 

23. Three of the act’s provisions proved to be particularly contentious: one allowed law-enforcement
agencies to search private residences without informing the owners (known as “sneak-and-peak” searches);
the second gave federal authorities the right to access the library and bookstore records of anyone
connected to a terrorism investigation; and the third permitted the detention and deportation of non-citizens
without due process. For more about the Patriot Act, see Cole and Dempsey 2006; Chesney 2005.

24. This ﬁgure (69 percent) represents an average across six national polls that used comparable questions;

the ﬁndings from the individual polls included 74, 61, 55, 63, 79 and 79 percent (Huddy, Khatib, and
Capelos 2002).

39

(Best, Krueger, and Ladewig 2006). The public also became less “concerned” that the
government’s measures to combat terrorism would negatively affect civil liberties; such
concern dropped from 65 percent before 9/11 to 56 percent after it (Best, Krueger, and
Ladewig 2006).

The public’s elevated tradeoff willingness was quite stable over time, even if it
gradually decreased. For instance, as late as July 2005, the public’s willingness to make
the civil-liberties tradeoff stood at 11 percent above the pre-9/11 level (29 percent in
April 1997 versus 40 percent in July 2005) (Best, Krueger, and Ladewig 2006).25
“Concern” about the effects of anti-terrorism measures on civil liberties remained below
the pre-9/1l levels through February 2006 (Best, Krueger, and Ladewig 2006).

Based on a series of nationally representative panel surveys, Davis (2007)
provided further evidence that the public’s tradeoff willingness remained mostly stable
over time. Public responses on seven of Davis’ nine civil-liberties tradeoff measures
changed by no more than 5 percent over a three year period. The public’s views on such
matters as requiring people to carry a national identity card at all times, racial proﬁling,
warrant-less search and seizures, wiretapping and making it a crime to belong to any
organization that supports terrorism remained quite high and stable from November 2001
to November 2004 (Davis, 2007, 119). The two measures that showed an “exception”—
one regarding the indeﬁnite imprisonment of non-citizen terror suspects and the other on
whether teachers should be allowed to criticize the government—shifted in the pro-civil

liberties direction by only 10 percent and 15 percent, respectively. Further evidence on

 

25. Support for the personal-freedoms tradeoff dropped only 6 percent in the eight months after the attacks
and held just above the pre-9/11 level, ﬂuctuating between 61 and 64 percent, until May 2006 (Best,
Krueger, and Ladewig 2006).

40

the stability of the public’s tradeoff willingness was provided by Greenberg, Craighill

and Greenberg (2004).

Arabs and Muslims

The events of 9/11 had a number of short and long-term effects on Arabs and
Muslims living in the United States. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI), the number of hate crimes against Muslims rose substantially from 33 in 2000 to
546 in 2001 (FBI Hate Crime Statistics 2000-2006).26 During the immediate backlash,
there were four murders, 49 assaults and 109 attacks on Mosques (Human Rights Watch
2002). Another source estimated the number of violent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim actions
in the weeks following 9/11 at 520 (American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
2001). In 2002, according to the FBI, anti-Islamic hate crime dropped considerably to
170 occurrences, but remained well above the pre-9/11 level for at least the next four
years. There were 191 offenses in 2006, exceeding the pre-9/ 11 level by six times (FBI
Hate Crime Statistics 2000-2006).

In spite of the Administration’s efforts to curb these negative impulses and
sentiments, according to numerous national surveys compiled and analyzed by
Panagopoulos (2006), the image of Arabs and Muslims in the public eye declined
considerably in the years after 9/11. For instance, in January 2002, 14 percent of
Americans thought that “mainstream Islam encourages violence against non-Muslims”;

roughly two years later the percentage of Americans holding this belief had more than

 

26. For FBI hate crime statistics, see the online source: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm#hate; for a study of
hate crime in the wake of 9/1 1, see Byers and Jones 2007.

41

doubled (34 percent). This ﬁgure remained stable until the latest available survey in
March 2006 (33 percent).

According to a poll conducted in June 2002, a similar proportion of Americans
(39 percent) believed that “the attacks on America represent the true teachings of Islam.”
Although the trends seen in other related polls varied somewhat, the public’s self-
reported animosity toward Arabs and Muslims was remarkably high in the years
following 9/11, especially for a country that prides itself on racial and religious tolerance

(Yum and Schenck-Hamlin 2005).

Immigration

Public attitudes toward immigrants and immigration also hardened after 9/11.
According to national polls, the percentage of Americans who believed that “immigration
should be decreased” rose from 41 percent in June 2001 to 58 percent in October 2001.27
This seventeen point backlash is signiﬁcant, given the steadiness of this indicator over the
two years prior to the attacks.28 Other polling questions produced similar results. The
percentage of Americans who thought that “immigration is a bad thing for this country”
increased from 31 percent in June 2001 to 42 percent in October of the same year.29 Both
indicators remained above the pre-9/11 level until June 2006, after which both fell below

this level. Data from multiple polling ﬁrms and individual researchers illustrate a similar

 

27. Gallup Organization, Gallup’s Pulse of Democracy: Immigration, accessed online on October 5, 2007
at www.2alluppoll.com.

28. The indicator dropped six points between February 1999 and September 2000, rose ﬁve points in
March 2001 and dropped again by only two points in June 2001 (Gallup Organization, Gallup’s Pulse of
Democracy: Immigration, accessed online on October 5, 2007 at www.2alluppoll.com).

29. Gallup Organization, Gallup’s Pulse of Democracy: Immigration, accessed online on October 5, 2007
at www.2alluppoll.com.

42

mild-to-mediurn backlash against immigration in the post-9/11 period (Pew Research
Center 2006; Newport 2007; Jones 2007; Moore 2002; Panagopoulos 2006; Esses,

Dovidio, and Hodson 2002; Nagel 2002).

Summary of 9/11 Effects

This review covered four changes in the public mindset and behavior after 9/11.
First, numerous empirical studies showed that the attacks had a signiﬁcant effect on the
public’s psychological wellbeing, particularly in people living closest to New York City,
as well as children and those who had experienced traumatic events in the past. Although
most of the overt symptoms of PTSD and other psychological harms declined
substantially within six months of the attacks, social scientists should bear in mind the
possible long-term and latent effects of this trauma as they continue unpacking the social
psychological effects of 9/11.

Second, the events of 9/11 spurred a strong rally effect. In the immediate
aftermath, President George W. Bush received a record-high approval rating of 90
percent, a signiﬁcant boost in popularity that ﬂooded the Bush Administration with
political capital. Although rally effects are nothing new to political scientists and other
researchers, many observers saw the post-9/11 rally around the president as unique in
both its strength and longevity. The president’s rating remained elevated for roughly two
years. Other rally effects included increased levels of public trust in local, state and
federal governments and a rise in various patriotic feelings, rituals and acts. The
empirical measures of these two variables, however, returned to pre-9/11 levels within a

shorter time frame of about nine months to one year.

43

Third, Americans, though to a lesser extent, also rallied around each other after
the attacks. In the ﬁrst weeks after 9/11, they showed increased kindness and support for
their friends, families and fellow citizens. The public attended countless funerals and
memorial services for the 9/11 victims, donated more money to charities and served as
volunteers more often. For roughly one year, people also reported that they trusted each
other more and felt greater conﬁdence in their communities as sources of support and
cooperation.

Although the evidence is mixed, 9/11 also brought a brief renewal in the public’s
civic engagement. People reported being more interested in politics and more connected
to their communities. There were also slight increases in various “civic behaviors,” such
as attending political meetings and reading newspapers. Overall, however, these changes
were the weakest and least permanent. Even the most optimistic data estimated the
longevity of these effects at no more than three to six months.

A loose category, labeled here as authoritarian tendencies, represents the fourth
and also one of the most prominent 9/ 11 effects. Researchers working in the aftermath of
9/11 discovered general shifts in American values, as well as speciﬁc manifestations of
these effects in public opinion. Americans showed a greater willingness to punish those
who violate conventional values and were more attracted to leaders who displayed power,
toughness and an iron determination to confront the enemy. The public also placed a
greater emphasis on the value of security, while tempering their need for novelty and
innovation and yielding to hierarchical authority.

Preoccupied with the threat of terrorism, Americans stood behind their leaders

and supported the military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the escalation in

44

defense spending. Backing for the war in Iraq did not return to pre-9/1 1 levels until June
2004, but even then it enjoyed a favorable rating from a majority of Americans. After
9/11, harsh anti-terrorism tactics, such as torture and assassination, as well as more
aggressive law-enforcement procedures to ﬁght terrorism no longer seemed as
unacceptable to many people. While popular support for the USA Patriot Act diminished
over time, the public’s willingness to make the civil-liberties-security tradeoff stood at 11
percent above the pre-9/11 level as late as July 2005.

After a brief honeymoon of favorable sentiments toward Arabs and Muslims,
American attitudes toward these groups cooled uniformly. The number of people who
accepted negative stereotypes of “mainstream Islam” doubled in the ﬁrst four years after
the attacks. This growing intolerance also involved public views on immigration. The
percentage of Americans who believed immigration was a “bad thing” and “should be

reduced” remained above the pre-9/11 level until June 2006.

Discussion

In the aftermath of 9/11, many editorialists, pundits and scholars argued that the
attacks fundamentally changed the United States (Smelser 2004). Years later, however,
some observers suggested that the rush to identify 9/11 as a turning point in American
history was “born out of shock” and that very little has changed since the attacks (Dobson
2006, p. 22). Drawing on a broad examination of pre-post 9/11 research, this review
generally supports the former argument. The aptness of this conclusion is most
convincing when one ponders the massive scope and variety of small-to-moderate 9/11

effects, rather than the strength of any one change in the public mindset. Many of these

45

changes persisted for one or more years, particularly rally effects and authoritarian
tendencies.

There are several reasons to further emphasize the impact of 9/11 on American
society. First, even though the goal of this review was to accentuate the diversity of these
changes, I have merely scratched the surface. Given the space constraints, I did not
review the literature that showed how 9/11 (or the increase in perceived terrorism threat)
may have affected travel, tourism and other consumer behaviors (Chen and Chen 2003;
Carter 2004; Gigerenzer 2006, 2004; Makinen 2002), the housing slump and mortgage
mess (Burns, 2008), job performance and career choices (Wrzesniewski 2002; Burke
2005), healthcare concerns (Blendon et al. 2001), low birth weights (Eskenazi et al.
2007), the fear of crime (Altheide 2004), food safety concerns (Kaplowitz and Ten Eyck
2006), moods and self-efﬁcacy (Fischer et al. 2007) and even mundane matters such as
restaurant tipping (Seiter and Gass 2005) and Halloween trick-or-treating (Jones 2001).

Also neglected were the post-9/11 shifts in public attitudes toward global
warming (N isbet and Myers 2007), alternative energy sources and green technology
(Friedman 2007; Nisbet 2006; Kennedy 2001), biotechnology (Lundy and Irani 2006),
environmental groups and social movements (Green and Grifﬁth 2002; Maney, Woehrle,
and Coy 2005; Barcott 2002;), gun control (Altheide 2004; Smith 2007), police and law
enforcement agencies (Sunshine and Tyler 2003), border security (Coleman 2005;
Ackleson 2003), missile defense (Eichenberg 2003) and many others.

Although I brieﬂy addressed social attitudes toward Arabs, Muslims and
immigrants in the United States, I did not consider how 9/11 inﬂuenced views toward

other racial and ethnic groups (Davis 2007), foreign countries or international

46

organizations (Brewer, Aday, and Gross 2005). This review only covered shifts in public
opinion on the most glaring foreign policy issues involving Iraq and Afghanistan, yet the
terrorist threat is clearly relevant to public attitudes on ntunerous other aspects of
international relations (German Marshall Fund 2002).

Given my focus on national issues, I also ignored how 9/11 affected public
thinking at the local level, particularly local politics and security concerns involving the
regional infrastructure, from the Mackinaw Bridge in Michigan to the New Mexico
border. While some of these issues were trivial—for instance, the crusade by ofﬁcials in
Dover, New Jersey to strengthen the city’s gumball machines against the terrorist
threat—others were taken quite seriously by local populations (Fahim 2007).

Finally, this review also failed to consider how the events of 9/ 11 displaced other
social problems in the public mindset. According to the Gallup Organization, as the threat
of terrorism shot to the top of America’s list of “most important problems,” other issues,
which had been gradually rising in importance, were suddenly disregarded. For instance,
“education,” which was mentioned as the most important problem by 16 percent of
respondents in March 2000, dropped to 3 percent after 9/11; in the next three years, the
importance of education would never rise above 6 percent (Saad 2000; Gillespie 2001;
Gallup Organization 2004). Similar trends were seen in the cases of “Medicare” and
“social security.” Future studies should consider not only what terrorism makes us think
and feel, but also what it makes us forget.

In closing, I turn now to the possible implications of 9/11 effects and make a case
for a new direction in terrorism research. Considering the strength, longevity and range of

these changes, I suggest that people’s perceptions of terrorism in the post-9/11 era should

47

not be seen as a temporary response to an isolated danger, but rather as an organizing
force that helps them quickly make sense of their political and social worlds.

In many respects, the perceived threat of terrorism is similar to the core element
of an ideology or belief system. First, as mentioned, this concern remained stable over
time. Nearly half the population was still worried about terrorism as late as the summer of
2007. Second, as emphasized in this review, the perceived threat of terrorism exhibited
both “consistency” (interrelationships with other attitudes and beliefs) and
“instrumentality” (behavioral effects) (Cobb 1973). Third, it had the potential to polarize
the population’s political and social views. While many Americans were “very
concerned” about the threat, many others were “not at all concerned.” The effects of
perceived threat may only be relevant to the former segment of the population, which
would thereby diverge, systematically, from the latter.

The perceived threat of terrorism may, under some conditions, be even more
powerful than some older ideological dimensions such as the liberal-conservative
continuum. For one thing, as Converse (1964) suggests, the development of a
liberal/conservative ideological framework requires an education, an understanding of
complex issues and a willingness to spend the cognitive effort to attain this knowledge.
An understanding of the terrorist threat, in contrast, can be attained with far less cognitive
exercise, and, in most cases, its relationship to other social issues is neither complicated,
nor subtle.

As numerous communication scholars have shown, these links are vividly and
continually underscored in the mass media (e. g., Norris, Kern, and Just 2003). In fact,

some connections between the threat of terrorism and key political issues appear in media

48

and exist in the public mind as familiar catchphrases, such as the “war on terror” or “We
ﬁght them over there, so we don’t have to ﬁght them here.”

The perceived threat of terrorism is an easy-to-use, multifunctional tool for
differentiating and evaluating domestic and international policies and political leaders. A
sort of cotton-candy ideology, it is widely available to the public, affordable, attractive,
stimulating and often distributed in the context of entertainment, from Hollywood movies
to sensationalized TV news programs.

As a second advantage over conventional ideological dimensions, the perceived
threat of terrorism comprises both a cognitive and an affective component. The idea that
emotions play a systematic role in people’s judgments and decision making represents a
relatively new trend in the social and psychological sciences. While the cognitive
framework has been dominant since the 19503, researchers are now paying greater
attention to the inﬂuence of emotions on the way people process and store information,
evaluate their environments and make decisions (Finucane et al. 2000, Zajonc 1980;
Damasio 1994; Epstein 1994).

Expanding on this reasoning, the perceived threat of terrorism may be best
understood as an affective ideology or organizing force, comprising both cognitive and
emotional components, which helps people quickly make sense of the complex world and
draw conclusions about a range of political and social problems. Such an organizing force
would rely more on the intensity of emotional states and be less responsive to new
information, empirical justiﬁcations, expert assessments and “central-route”

communications (Petty and Cacioppo 1986).

49

Meanwhile, emotional reactions to terrorism can be primed by mass mediated
news and images, political rhetoric and any number of related cultural artifacts and social
interactions. A heavy dose of these reminders may act as a sort of emotional booster shot
that reinforces the perceived threat of terrorism, along with its ideological links to other
issues. Further research is needed to expand this perspective and explain the potential role
of emotion, the fear of terrorism in particular, in the development, integration and

maintenance of ideological formations.

50

CHAPTER 3

Framing Terror: What Scares us Most about Terrorism

Introduction

In the previous chapter, the goal was to show how 9/11, and the perceived threat
of terrorism in particular, inﬂuenced a variety of important social attitudes, beliefs and
behaviors. In this chapter, I move one step backward to investigate the origins of people’s
worries and beliefs about terrorism. There are many antecedents one might consider, such
as people’s socio-cultural and economic backgrounds, personal experiences, geographical
vicinity to big cities or high-proﬁle terrorist targets, knowledge about international
relations, perceived self-efﬁcacy and numerous others. Interpersonal communication
about terrorism between family members, friends and colleagues, and face-to-face
encounters with experts, teachers and politicians may also explain at least some of the
variance in public threat perceptions.

While these factors are important, this chapter focuses on the mass media as a
determinant of these concerns. After 9/11, in addition to the ﬂood of survey research
discussed in Chapter 2, many researchers converged on the topic of the media, its affects
on public perceptions of terrorism and the role of this threat in political communication
(Norris, Kern and Just, 2003; Fried, 2005; Entman, 2003, 2004; Moeller, 2004). In most
of these studies, however, the threat of terrorism was conceptualized and operationalized
as a one-dimensional danger. We know much, for instance, about people’s responses to
“the terrorist threat,” or how “the war on terror” became the dominant frame used by

American politicians and journalists to make sense of international security issues.

51

The aim of this chapter, in contrast, is to investigate whether people’s perceptions
of terrorism depend in part on the type of terrorist threat they consider. I argue that the
news media uses several different portrayals, or “frames,” in its coverage of terrorism and
that each of these frames may evoke varying levels of perceived threat.

As previously discussed, I use “perceived threat” as an umbrella term for a range
of cognitive and affective responses to danger. This chapter focuses on three of these
distinct, yet related responses: dread, worry and risk judgment. “Dread” is deﬁned as
people’s beliefs about the catastrophic potential of a terrorist attack”; “worry” refers to
an emotional response to this hazard; and “risk judgments” are beliefs about the
probability or likelihood of an attack occurring over a speciﬁed period of time.

I begin this chapter by deﬁning “news frames” and reviewing the strengths and
weakness of this concept in the literature. Second, I discuss the general debate over the
effects of news frames on public perceptions. Next, using an exploratory, framing effects
experiment, I test whether subjects perceive some terrorism frames as more threatening
than others. Finally, building on the ﬁndings in Chapter 2, I examine the relationship
between perceived threat and two important social attitudes: support for the Iraq War and
willingness to give up civil liberties in order to reduce the threat of terrorism. The social
and political implications of this study, as well as its importance to future research on the

perceived threat of terrorism, are discussed.

 

30. In the risk perception literature, Slovic (2004, 225) introduced “dread,” or dread risk, as a factor
comprised of multiple, highly correlated risk characteristics, including “perceived lack of control, dread,
catastrophic potential, fatal consequences and the inequitable distribution of risks and beneﬁts.” The
conceptualization of dread used in this analysis is relevant to only part of this factor—namely catastrophic
potential and fatal consequences (the number of people who would die if an attack took place).

52

The News Frame as a Concept

Concepts represent the building blocks of social scientiﬁc research. Drawing on
Weber’s notion of “ideal types,” a concept can be deﬁned as a summary of more complex
ideas that generally correspond to various aspects of concrete reality but never replicate
them precisely. Concepts aid the advancement of social science by allowing scholars to
quickly understand complicated ideas and apply them in various studies. Clearly deﬁned
concepts also guide the operationalization of variables, promote the internal logic of

individual studies and make it easier for future scholars to replicate research.

Criticisms of the concept of news frames

Despite the importance of these functions, several scholars have described the
concept of “news frames” as vague and undeveloped and pointed to a number of speciﬁc
weaknesses in the literature. In this section, I consider four of these conceptual problems:
1) undeﬁned or ambiguous conceptualizations, 2) conceptual fragmentation, 3) concept-
theory overlaps and 4) terminological disagreement.

Beginning with the ﬁrst issue, a review of numerous studies shows that the task of
deﬁning news frames is sometimes neglected all together. Similar to the treatment of
concepts such as “values” or “trust,” some scholars assume that the meaning of the term
“frame” is widely understood and leave it undeﬁned. Other scholars deﬁne the concept,
but without serious rigor. A3 Entrnan (1993, 52) noted, the concept is “often deﬁned
casually, with much left to an assumed tacit understanding of reader and researcher.”

The second problem in the literature relates to the multifaceted nature of news

frame research and the fragmentation of the concept itself. Scholars have formulated

53

numerous specialized concepts to examine media coverage of various issues and events.
Many of these frames are issue-speciﬁc and cannot be easily applied to other research
topics. Instead of building on previous conceptualizations, scholars often invent their own
concepts even when studying the same topics. For instance, a study of media coverage of
the terrorist attacks on 9/11 (Li and Izard, 2003) introduced seven distinct news frames.
Meanwhile, a study by Lee (2003) addressed the same topic using twelve frames and yet
none of them matched the concepts in the Li and Izard study.

On one hand, this problem is difﬁcult to avoid. In many cases, new concepts are
needed for studying the framing of new social trends, technological advances and the
ever-changing political discourse. On the other hand, it is often quite possible to use or
adapt previously developed concepts for current use and the failure to do so explains, in
part, why news frame research is still considered a “fractured paradigm” (Entman, 1993).

A third problem can be seen in studies that do not clearly distinguish between the
concept of news frames (deﬁnitions) and framing theories (assumptions about the origins
or effects of news frames). In many cases, scholars weave their conceptualization into a
theory of framing. Consider, for example, Gitlin’s (1980, 7) widely cited deﬁnition of
frames as “persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of election,
emphasis, and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse.” This
deﬁnition contains a tenuous theoretical assumption about the process through which
frames are created (i.e., “symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse”). This is a
common conceptual weakness in the literature. Scholars regularly deﬁne news frames by
explaining their origins or effects, rather than explaining what they consist of or how they

can be identiﬁed in communication content. To consider a few more examples, Norris,

54

Kern and Just (2003, 10) suggest that “the idea of ‘news frames’ refers to interpretive
structures that journalists use to set particular events within their broader context.” In a
study by Terkildsen and Schnell (1997, 881), news frames are deﬁned as “the ‘maps’ or
internal story patterns reporters and editors draw for their readers.”3 1 The concept-theory
overlap in these deﬁnitions advances the untested claim that news frames, by deﬁnition,
are the result of intentional journalistic biases. By equating the term “news frame” with
“bias,” these authors imply that the causal link between a journalist’s intentions and the
creation of frames is unproblematic. This deﬁnition encourages researchers to simply
accept this assmnption rather than testing it. As a matter of fact, in some cases,
communicators Lurintentionally create news frames. In other cases, news frames are
produced within rigid institutional settings where a journalist’s choices are restricted, or
at least guided by strong organizational roles and norms or ideological parameters.

An analogous conceptual problem arose over the deﬁnition of “attitude” in the
social psychological literature. Scholars debated whether the concept could be properly
deﬁned as an “intention to act.” This deﬁnition, some argued, implied a theory of
behavior, which, in turn, diminished the concept’s clarity and led to one-sided theorizing
on the link between attitudes and behavior. The “theory of reasoned action,” meanwhile,
advanced the literature in part by clearly distinguishing between “beliefs,” “attitudes,”
“intentions” and “behavior” and only then drawing assumptions about the causal
relationship between them (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975). Drawing a clearer distinction

9, ‘6

between the “antecedents, contents” and “effects” of frames may have a similar

beneﬁcial effect on news frame research.

 

31. For other examples of concept-theory overlaps, see Bronstein, 2005, 785; Lepre, Walsh-Childers and
Chance, 2003.

55

The fourth conceptual weakness lies in the fact that the term itself, even when
clearly deﬁned, means entirely different things to different scholars. Outside the context
of mass media research, “frames” are often understood as internal structures of the mind
(Mccombs, Shaw and Weaver, 1997; Hamill and Lodge, 1986; Scheufele, 1999). For
instance, Lakoff (2004, xv) deﬁnes frames as the “mental structures that shape the way
we see the world.” This deﬁnition is almost synonymous with the deﬁnition of “schema”
found in social psychological textbooks (Michener, DeLamater and Myers, 2004). Some
scholars use the term to simultaneously represent both cognitive elements and aspects of
mediated discourse. As mentioned, Gitlin (1980, 7) deﬁned news frames as both patterns
of cognition and aspects of mediated presentation: “Media frames organize the world
both for journalists who report it and, in some important degree, for us who rely on their
reports.” Given the problems of conceptual ambiguity--and to avoid concept-theory
overlaps-~3everal scholars have stressed the need for drawing a terminological distinction
between aspects of communication content and the structures of the human mind.
Scheufele (1999) suggested, for instance, using the term “media frames” to represent
content characteristics and “individual frames” to represent internal cognitive structures.
A similar suggestion was made by Entrnan (1991, 7) who differentiated between

“information-processing schemata” and the “attributes of the news itself.”

Best practices in conceptualizing news ﬁ'ames
Reﬂecting on the problems discussed above, there are three essential criteria for
establishing news frames as consistent concepts in communication research. News frames

should be 1) deﬁned as identiﬁable characteristics of content, 2) differentiated from other

56

similar concepts and 3) distinguished from theories of framing. Though several scholars
have addressed each of these criteria, the present study draws most directly on Entman’s
conceptualization of news frames. Entrnan (1993, 52) satisﬁed the ﬁrst criteria with his
generic deﬁnition of news frames as “the presence or absence of certain keywords, stock
phrases, stereotyped images, sources of information, and sentences that provide
thematically reinforcing clusters of facts or judgments.” Addressing the other two
criteria, Entrnan also distinguished new frames from cognitive structures and drew a clear
line between the theory and concept of frames. The fulﬁllment of these criteria may
explain, in part, why Entman’s conceptualization has been used in so many other news
frame studies (e. g., Chyi and McCombs, 2004; Valkenburg, Semetko and De Vreese,

1999; Noakes and Wilkins, 2002).

The Effects of News Frames: Strong or Weak?

The idea that the framing of messages affects people’s thoughts and behavior has
generated a great deal of debate among scholars. Though most researchers concede that
media messages or frames have some effect on audiences, disagreement is rife when it

comes to determining the extent and conditions under which these effects occur.

Strong Effects

Much of the evidence that supports framing effects has come from experimental
studies that control for the inﬂuence of other factors and offer precise measurements of
the effects. A classic study by Kahneman and Tversky (1984; see McNeil et al., 1982),

for instance, found that people’s preferences for or against undergoing a medical

57

procedure depended on how the potential outcomes of the procedure were presented to
them. When the treatment outcomes were framed in terms of survival rather than
mortality, the subjects reported being more favorable toward undergoing the procedure
(in this case, a hypothetical surgery for lung cancer). More speciﬁcally, the subjects were
much more willing to consider the surgery when told that “95 percent of patients live,” as
opposed to “5 percent of patients die.” In this case, the researchers showed that they
could inﬂuence people’s perceptions without changing the statistical information about
the risk of having the surgery.

The theory of framing has been applied in numerous ﬁelds throughout the social
and cognitive sciences. As Druckman (2001, 226) suggested, it has been used by
“scholars of social movements, bargaining behavior, foreign policy decision making, jury
decision making, media effects, political psychology, public opinion and voting,
campaigns, and many others.” Some authors contend that, in some areas of research,
there is little contention or debate over the strong effects of framing. As Sniderman and
Theriault (2004, 136) wrote, “Based on the last decade of research on framing effects on
public opinion, there now is a consensus that the way an issue is framed matters for how
citizens think about political issues.” To offer a few more examples, a study by Nelson
and Kinder (1996) showed that the framing of public policy outcomes in favor (or
against) of certain social groups inﬂuenced the subjects’ level of acceptance of the policy.
Zaller (1992) found that public attitudes toward oil drilling depended on whether the
issue was discussed in the context of national security, economic consequences or

environmental risks.

58

Researchers have shown that framing can inﬂuence people’s views even when
they hold attitudes in the opposite direction. One example of this can be seen in
Sniderman and Theriault’s “rally” experiment (2004). The researchers began by assessing
the attitudes of their subjects toward the need for “law and order in society” versus the
need to “guarantee individual freedoms.” Next they asked them whether a group with
“very extreme political views” should be allowed to hold a public demonstration. Under
one condition, the question began with the phrase, “Given the importance of free speech
...” Under a second condition, it began, “Given the risk of violence ...” The results of the
study showed that the subjects were swayed by the phrasing of the question (“free
speech” versus “risk of violence”) regardless of their deeper political attitudes.

A great deal of research has showed the even slight alterations in the framing of
survey questions can inﬂuence respondents’ answers to them. For instance, Hurwitz and
Pefﬂey (2005) found that certain racially coded words (“inner city”) affect people’s
attitudes toward funding prisons.

The wealth of evidence from these and other experimental framing studies is
directly relevant to media effects research, because media organizations, as in the
experiments, routinely organize, describe or frame the possible outcomes and
consequences of important local, national and international policies. The media’s framing
of key issues, including the risk of terrorism, may indeed inﬂuence people’s attitudes and

beliefs about them.

59

Weak Eﬂects

However, when drawing conclusions about the link between mediated messages
and public perceptions, it is important to appreciate the differences between a “clean”
laboratory experiment and the far more complicated, real-life conditions under which
media organizations produce and disseminate the news and audiences receive and process
these messages. With these distinctions in mind, Gans (1993) strongly critiqued the
framing effects literature, the studies on media effects in particular. He argued that the
effects are probably relatively weak and that most studies neglect other important factors
related to attitude change. Much of his critique was aimed at the experimental literature’s
failure to appreciate “how people use, and live with, the mass media” (1993, 34). He
suggested that viewers “tune out much, if not all, undesired content--and perhaps
potential effects” (1993, 31). Gans portrayed media consumers as generally apathetic and
reluctant to change their views. The audience, according to Gans, does not have a strong
need for national news, bases its understanding of broad social trends on individual cases
from everyday life, screens out unpleasant or contradictory information and does not
change its attitudes or behavior unless “unusual incentives or intense economic or social

pressures force them to change their ways involuntarily” (1993, 33).

A Middle Ground

Although Gans poses his argument as a strong refutation against quantitative and
experimental studies, it may be more constructively understood as a guide for improving
this brand of research. Consider, for instance, his view that media or framing effects are

limited because people develop their views based on their own personal experiences.

60

Rather than a fatal ﬂaw, this point could be used to reﬁne the theory of framing by
elucidating one of the conditions under which frames may have less inﬂuence on public
perceptions. It seems plausible that personal experiences do inﬂuence attitudes and
perceptions on some social issues, especially those which impact everyday life, such as
unemployment, health care and local political campaigns, but have less effect on remote
or distant topics, such as foreign policy issues and international conﬂicts (Gamson,
1992)

Although the attacks on 9/11 resulted in catastrophic human and material loses,
these experiences were felt directly by only a small proportion of the population. For this
reason, drawing in part on Gans’ logic, the media’s framing of terrorism risk may indeed
be expected to have signiﬁcant effects on public perceptions of the danger.

In some ways, Gans’ portrayal of the average citizen can be used to question his
central argument. Contrary to his assertion, an apathetic or uninformed audience—one
that is “not interested in national news stories”—may actually be more susceptible to the
media’s framing of social and political issues than people who are well-informed or hold
energetic views on the issues. Traces of this argument can be seen in classic public
opinion studies, including Lippmann’s (1922) famous critique of the basis of public
opinion, Converse’s (1974) noted discussion of “non attitudes,” the experimental studies
discussed above, as well as in research that supports the elaboration likelihood model
(Petty and Cacioppo, 1986; Lavine et al., 1998).

Right or wrong, however, Gans’ weak effects argument brings home the

important point that studies of the media should not assume that particular messages have

61

effects; rather, studies should empirically test the extent and conditions under which these

effects occur.

Framing Terror

The next task is to explain why some terror frames may elevate threat perceptions
more than others. The explanation developed here is supported in part by the
psychometric paradigm, a leading perspective in risk perception research (Fischhoff et al.
1978; Sjoberg 2005; Covello 1992; Slovic 2004). The model draws in part on cognitive
scales and multiple regression methods to identify the qualitative characteristics of
hazards that affect the way people perceive them. For instance, dangers perceived as high
in “dread” (extent of catastrophic potential), “hard to control,” or “new” are known to
elevate risk judgments (Fischhoff et al. 1978; Slovic 2004). Such hazards are also thought
to engage people’s emotions, which may affect the cognitive processing of these threats
(Slovic et al., 2002; Finucane et al., 2000; Johnson & Tversky, 1983; Sunstein 2003).

While many studies have shown that hazards produce both cognitive and
emotional response, it is not clear which occurs ﬁrst (Peters and Slovic, 1996; Peters,
Burraston and Mertz, 2004). In fact, as some scholars argue, when people ﬁnd
themselves in a risky situation, their emotions may precede their cognitive processing of
the danger (Slovic et al., 2002). Any attempt to establish the time ordering of the three
factors of perceived threat—risk judgment, dread and worry—goes beyond the scope of
this study. The aim here is simply to test whether certain experimentally manipulated
terror news frames affect any or all three of the variables. An analysis is also conducted

to assess the relationship between these variables.

62

Hypotheses

As discussed in Chapter 1, the news media covers many different aspects of the
nation’s vulnerability to terrorism and a variety of different modes for carrying out
attacks. Given the great number and variety of terrorism news frames, a comprehensive
analysis is not possible. I have chosen three frames to test as case studies based on their
relevance to the ongoing public debate and scholarly research on the relationship between

terrorism, the media, politics and public opinion.

Terrorism Frame

The ﬁrst frame I consider is the term “terrorism” itself. The use of this term in
public discourse has generated a great deal of interest and contention among researchers,
journalists and politicians. Some regard the term as a political tool, because the simple act
of labeling an act of violence “terrorism” can inﬂuence people’s attributions of the
behavior, as well as their assumptions about what should be done to stop it (Cooper,
2001)

After 9/11, public ofﬁcials increasingly identiﬁed terrorism as a new and serious
social problem. Given the term’s constant association with harm and danger, I suggest
that the mere mentioning of it may produce thoughts and feelings of dread and worry,
which, as mentioned, are known to be positively correlated with risk judgment. In other
words, the terrorism frame may act as a peripheral cue for danger, a conditioned response
that evokes higher levels of perceived threat when mentally processed. Speciﬁcally, I test

the following:

63

Hypothesis 1: Treatments containing the term terrorism will evoke higher levels

of perceived threat (risk judgment, dread, worry) than treatments with no mention

of this term.
Radical Islamic Frame

The term “Islam” has also been controversially linked to acts of violence. In the
post-9/11 period, many commentators and public ofﬁcials labeled the perpetrators as
“Islamic extremists” or “radicals.” While the popular association between Islam and mass
violence certainly predates 9/11, as seen in media coverage of events ranging from the
Iranian hostage crisis in 1979-1981 to the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, this
association likely became more prominent in the public mind as media coverage of
terrorism risk greatly increased after 9/11 (N acos and Torres-Reyna 2003; Nacos 1994;
Traugott and Brader 2003).32

Radical Islam is now associated with one of the most dramatic and damaging
terrorist attacks in history, as well as other acts of violence across the world. Such a link
may directly evoke higher levels of perceived threat. Associating terrorism with religious
extremism may also suggest to some people that the violence has no logical basis and
therefore cannot be controlled. As mentioned, hazards perceived as uncontrollable may
increase perceptions of dread, worry and risk judgment.

In testing the effects of the radical Islamic frame, rather than merely excluding
any mention of it, I decided on the more conservative procedure of comparing it to an
alternative identity and motivation of terrorism—namely, “American citizens who view

their government as the enemy.” I test the following:

 

32. By the mid-20003, according to public opinion polls, the idea that Islam encouraged violence more than
other religions was supported by a large percentage of Americans (Panagopoulos, 2006; Yum and Schenck-
Hamlin, 2005).

64

Hypothesis 2: Treatments containing the radical Islamic frame will evoke higher
levels of perceived threat (risk judgment, dread, worry) than treatments with the
domestic threat frame.
Nuclear Frame
The third assumption I address examines whether people’s threat perceptions
depend in part on the type of terrorist attack they consider. As in the previous case, I
compare a theoretically high-threat frame (“nuclear”) to one that may be perceived as less
innocuous (“conventional explosives”). Given the known links between dread
perceptions (extent of catastrophic potential), worry and risk judgment, I offer the
following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 3: Treatments containing the nuclear frame will evoke higher levels of
perceived threat (risk judgment, dread, worry) than treatments with the
conventional explosives frame.
Pretest Measure
Previous research has shown that people’s risk perceptions tend to vary rather
dramatically on a range of different hazards. Much of this variance, however, goes
unexplained, even in studies with a great number of strong predictors (Sjoberg 1998, 2000).
The covariate in this analysis (a pretest measure for risk judgment) is designed to account

for these preexisting differences in perceived threat. Controlling for the subjects’ pretest

risk judgments of terrorism will isolate the unique effects of the three frames.

65

Figure 6: Additive Effects of Frames

 

Treatment 1: No Threatening Frames Treatment 2: Terrorism Only

 

Treatment 3: Nuclear Only Treatment 4: Radical Islamic Only

 

 

 

:urlulziur n» Eigiawiri-HJII ('xllx:lil:.;1 micmlin

Treatment 8: Terrorism, Nuclear & Radical
Islamic

 

Note: Treatments that are shaded darker are hypothesized to evoke higher levels of perceived
threat.
Additive versus Interaction Eﬁects

A 2 X 2 X 2 complete factorial design is used to test the three hypotheses stated
above. Such a design takes into account all the possible interactions between these
frames. This portion of the analysis is exploratory in nature. There is little previous
evidence to suppose that combining any two or more hypothetically threatening frames in
a single test article will produce interaction effects. Rather, it may be more reasonable to
suppose, as illustrated in Figure 6, that combining the frames will produce additive
effects on the subjects’ threat perceptions. In other words, each additional frame may
further increase the subjects’ risk judgments, dread perceptions and worry. I address these

issues as general research inquires, rather than speciﬁc hypotheses.

Eﬂects of Perceived Threat
Researchers are ultimately interested in people’s perceptions of the terrorist

threat, because these psychological reactions are known to inﬂuence a wide range of

66

other social attitudes and behaviors. According to inter-group conﬂict theory, higher
levels of perceived threat are associated with increased out-group bashing (Tajfel and
Turner 1979), stereotyping and attribution errors (Brewer 1993). Perceived threat may
also activate authoritarian tendencies, such as greater adherence to conventional values,
submissiveness to moral authorities, identiﬁcation with powerful ﬁgures and rejection of
outsiders (Adomo et al. 1950; Doty, Peterson, and Winter 1991; Duckitt 1989; F eldman
2003)

Other researchers offer different psychological explanations of how people
process threat, but make similar predictions about its effects. According to terror
management theory (Greenberg et al. 1990), violent attacks, such as those seen on 9/11,
heighten people’s awareness of “the inevitability and potential ﬁnality of death”
(Pyszczynski et al. 2006, p. 526). This heightened “mortality salience,” in turn, is known
to increase authoritarian tendencies and out-group derogation, as discussed above
(Greenberg, Solomon, and Pyszczynski, 1997).

Drawing on these theoretical traditions, a number of researchers found that public
willingness to tradeoff certain privacy protections and personal freedoms to reduce the
threat of terrorism increased substantially after 9/11 (Huddy, Khatib, and Capelos 2002;
Huddy et al. 2005; Greenberg, Craighill, and Greenberg 2004; Best, Krueger, and
Ladewig 2006; Davis 2007). Popular support for using military force to combat terrorism
also escalated following the attacks (Gallup Organization 2001b; Carroll, 2007a; Everts
and Isemia 2005; Huddy, Khatib, and Capelos 2002). Some researchers were able to

isolate worry and risk judgment of terrorism as the determinants of the post-9/11 surge in

67

civil liberties tradeoff willingness and support for war. In an effort to conﬁrm these
ﬁndings and link them to framing effects, I offer the following:

Hypothesis 4 .' Subjects who report higher levels of perceived threat (risk

judgment, dread, worry) will show greater support for the Iraq war than subjects

who report lower levels of perceived threat.

Hypothesis 5: Subjects who report higher levels of perceived threat (risk

judgment, dread, worry) will show greater willingness to trade their civil liberties

for security than subjects who report lower levels of perceived threat.
Confounding Variables

While examining the relationship between the three components of perceived
threat and the effects of these components on other social attitudes, this analysis controls
for four potential confounding variables: sex, race, political ideology and age. My
primary objective here is not to develop the theories related to these variables, even if
such a task is worthwhile. Rather, I wish to substantiate my claims about the direct
relationship between worry, risk judgment and dread and the inﬂuence of these variables
on people’s attitudes toward war and civil liberties. For this reason, the discussion here is
brief and atheoretical.

First, the sex of the subjects will be taken into account. Many studies have shown
that women tend to judge a variety of dangers as more likely to cause harm than do men
(Rovira et al., 2000; Marshall, 2004; Hollander, 2001; Wulfhorst, 2000), even if some
studies question this claim (El-Zein et al., 2006; Lundborg and Lindgren, 2002; Reid and
Konrad, 2004). Although the difference between men and women’s willingness to trade

civil liberties for security is negligible (Davis, 2007), women tend to be less inclined to

support the use of military force (N incic and Nincic, 2002; Conover and Sapiro, 1993).

68

Second, research demonstrates that non-white respondents rate many risks higher
than do whites (Adeola, 2004; Johnson, 2006; Kanan & Pruitt, 2002; Marshall, 2004).
Race and ethnicity also explain a great deal of variance in people’s willingness to
compromise their civil liberties (Davis, 2007) and support war (N incic and Nincic, 2002).

The third confounding variable is political ideology. People who do not identify
with a political party or ideology tend to be more affected by framing effects than those
with strong political beliefs (Durfee, 2006). Moreover, if the terrorist threat is perceived
as a false justiﬁcation for politically conservative foreign policies, liberal-minded
individuals may be more likely than conservatives to dismiss or downgrade the threat.
There are also strong links between political ideology and attitudes toward both civil
liberties and war (Davis, 2007).

Finally, research on the relationship between age and risk perception has
produced mixed results. Some studies show that older people tend to give higher risk
estimates than younger people (e. g., Lai and Tao, 2003). Others have demonstrated the
opposite tendency (e. g., Floyd and Pennington-Gray, 2004), while still others have found
no relationship between age and risk perception (e.g., Hellesoy, Gronhaug, and
Kvitastein, 1998). Ambivalence also characterizes the possible effects of age on civil
liberties tradeoff willingness. In contrast, numerous studies have linked age or cohort
experiences to attitudes toward war (Schuman and Coming, 2006; Gartner, Segura and
Wilkening, 1997). Although I believe it is important to control for age in the present
study, I concede that the subj ects—undergraduate college students—do not vary greatly

in this respect and that any ﬁndings would be merely suggestive.

69

Method
Treatments

As mentioned, an experimental framing effects design was used to test the
hypotheses. The experiment manipulates three frames (terrorism, radical Islamic, nuclear)
in a test article about a federal commission’s report about security threats to American
cities. The test article draws on news content from the Associated Press and was designed
to resemble the layout and formatting of an actual newspaper article. The independent
variable is the presence or absence of each frame in the given treatment of the article. The
dependent variable is the subjects’ level of perceived threat (risk judgment, dread or
worry) after reading the treatment.

As illustrated in Figure 6, treatment 1 was designed to be the least threatening. It
contains no high-threat frames. The term terrorism is never used, the sources refer to the
threat of “explosives,” as opposed to “nuclear weapons,” and the most likely perpetrators
are referred to as “homegrown militants,” as opposed to “radical Islamic groups.”
Treatments 2, 3 and 4 each contain one high-threat frame. Treatments 5, 6 and 7 contain
two of these frames and treatment 8 includes all three of them. A representation of all

eight variations of the test article appears in Appendix A.

Subjects

A total of 176 subjects took part in the study. The experimental treatments and
questionnaires were distributed in social science courses during class time at a large
Midwestern university in 2007 and early 2008. The subjects were divided evenly and

randomly assigned to read one of the eight treatments. More than half of the subjects

70

were women (60 percent). Ages ranged between 18 and 50, though most (83 percent)
subjects were 18 to 22. The majority (70 percent) identiﬁed their race/ethnicity as White;
Black, 17 percent; Hispanic, 6 percent; Asian, 5 percent; Other, 2 percent. Their
anonymity was maintained and informed consent was received. All subjects were given a
small incentive, in the form of extra credit, for participating. Less than 2 percent declined
participation. This study was approved by a university human subjects review board.

Issues involving representativeness inevitably arise when student samples are
used in research. In such cases, a strong argument for external validity can never be
made. At best, these ﬁndings can be generalized to the wider student body at the
university where the study was conducted. These data are, nevertheless, meaningful and
interesting for at least three reasons. First, it should be noted that the perceived threat of
terrorism is known as a rather universal psychological response within the context of the
United States. For instance, while Republicans and Democrats disagree about how the
country should respond to terrorism, they do not differ in their risk judgments of the
threat (Carrol, 2007).

Second, while the sample is clearly younger than the population at large, it does
not differ greatly by race/ethnicity. This sample comes from a large state university
(43,784 students enrolled in Spring 2008), which is likely to service students whose
socio-economic class and background are closer to that of most Americans than a
smaller, elite or highly specialized school. In 2007, according to data from the
university’s ofﬁce of the registrar, roughly three quarters of the student population was
Caucasian, with Black (8 percent), International (8 percent), Asian (5 percent),

Hispanic/Chicano (3 percent) and other minority students making up a quarter of the

71

student body. The gender mix was 55 percent women, 45 percent men. Again, the age of
the university’s student population was much lower than the population as a whole (23

percent were over the age of 24; 77 percent were under 24).

Survey and Administration

Before reading the article, the subjects were asked two pretest risk judgment
questions aimed at measuring their general beliefs about the likelihood of a terrorist
attack occurring in the next 12 months. The questions were based on two different scales:
one Likert-type word scale, ranging from 1 (Extremely unlikely) to 7 (Extremely likely)
and one scale where subjects were asked to give a number rating of the risk between 0
percent and 100 percent. These two questions were scaled together, with an alpha
reliability of .96.

Table l: Manipulation Check for Radical Islamic Frame33

 

Religion of perpetrator?

 

Buddhist Jewish Islamic Religion Not Total

Mentioned
Non-Religious 2 0 2 83 87
Frame Included 2.3% 0% 2.3% 95.4% 100%
Radical Islamic 0 1 82 4 87
Frame Included 0% 1.1% 94.3% 4.6% 100%

 

 

33. In addition to Buddhist, Jewish and Islamic, the alternative Catholic was also included in the question,
but no respondents selected it. For this reason, it does not appear in the table.

72

The subjects were then asked to read the article and answer a series of additional
questions without referring back to the article (the complete wording of all questions
appears in Appendix B). First, the subjects were asked again about the likelihood of an
attack. Two risk judgment questions, which were identical to those asked before the
reading of the article, were used and scaled together with an alpha reliability of .96.
Worry was measured in a similar fashion. Subjects were asked to report their “level of
worry” using two scales: one seven-point word scale (“not worried at all” to “extremely
worried”) and one number scale, ranging from 0 to 100. The questions were combined
with an alpha reliability of .97. The variable dread was measured with one question
asking the subjects how many people would likely be killed if an attack actually took
place (the seven-point scale ranged from “fewer than 10” to “more than 1,000,000”).

Next, the subjects were asked three manipulation check questions to assess
whether the subjects noticed the three news frames as they read the article. The results
strongly supported two of the framing manipulations. As shown in Table 1, the great
majority of subjects correctly identiﬁed whether the radical Islamic frame appeared in the
article. When the frame was present, 94 percent of subjects accurately recognized it.
When the Islamic radical frame was replaced with a secular terrorist motive, 95 percent
of subjects responded that the religion of the potential attackers was not mentioned.34 A

similar result was found in the case of weaponry. When the nuclear frame was present, 91

 

34. For this manipulation check, Larnba, a proportional reduction in error measure, was equal to .93 (p <
.001). The lambda statistic refers to the proportion by which the error in predicting the dependent variable
can be reduced by knowing the value of the independent variable (NoruSis, 2000, 356). In other words,
knowing that the radical Islamic frame was used in the treatment reduces the error of guessing the result of
the manipulation check by 93 percent.

73

percent of subjects correctly identiﬁed it, and 85 percent accurately noticed when the

alternative frame (conventional weapons) was used.35

Table 2: Manipulation Check for Nuclear F rame36

 

 

Type of Weapon?
Biological Conventional Nuclear None of the Total
Explosives above

Conventional 1 75 2 1 0 88

Explosives Frame 1.1% 85.2% 2.3% 11.4% 100%
Included

Nuclear Frame 4 1 78 3 86

Included 4.6% 1.2% 90.7% 3.5% 100%

 

The manipulation of the terrorism frame received less support. Among the 88
subjects whose test article included the terrorism frame, 98 percent correctly reported that
the term was used at least once. However, among the 86 subjects whose test article did
not include any mention of “terrorism,” only 57 percent responded correctly that the term
was not used. Although there was statistical support for this manipulation (r = .56, p <
.001), caution will be used when discussing its effect on the subjects.

Following the manipulation check questions, the subjects answered background

questions, assessing their sex, race/ethnicity, age, political ideology and level of media

 

35. For this manipulation check, Larnba, a proportional reduction in error measure, was equal to .77 (p <
.001). Knowing that the nuclear frame was used in the treatment reduces the error of guessing the result of
the manipulation check by 77 percent.

36. In addition to biological, conventional explosives, nuclear and none of the above, the alternative poison

gas was also included in the question, but no respondents selected it. For this reason, it does not appear in
the table.

74

consumption, as well as two questions measuring their civil-liberties tradeoff willingness
and two questions measuring their support for the Iraq war. All questions were modeled
after questions previously asked in national or state-level polls.

Table 3: Manipulation Check for Terrorism Frame37

 

Was terrorism mentioned?

 

Yes No Total
Terrorism Frame 37 49 86
Not Included 43% 57% 100%
Terrorism Frame 86 2 88
Included 97.7% 2.3% 100%

 

Results
Effects of Frames on Perceived Threat

A three-way, between-groups analysis of covariance was conducted to assess the
effect of the framing treatments on the subjects’ perceptions of the terrorist threat (risk
judgments, dread and worry). The subjects’ pretest risk judgments were used as the
covariate in this analysis. Diagnostic checks were conducted to ensure that there was no
substantial violation of the assumptions of normality, linearity, homogeneity of variances
and homogeneity of regression slopes and efforts were taken to measure the covariate

reliably. Starting with risk judgment38 as the dependent variable, the pretest measure of

 

37. Afﬁrmative responses to the manipulation check ranged from 1 to 12 mentions of the term terrorism.

75

perceived threat produced the greatest effect [F (1,165) = 62.57, p < .001]. As shown in
Table 4, it explained roughly 28 percent of the variance in posttest risk judgment.
However, after adjusting for the pretest measure, there was also a signiﬁcant main effect
of the radical Islamic frame [F (1,165) = 16.38, p < .05], which explained 3.5 percent of
the variance in subjects’ risk judgments. These data show modest support for Hypothesis
2. Treatments containing the radical Islamic frame evoked signiﬁcantly higher judgments
of terrorism risk than treatments that did not contain this frame. Hypotheses 1 and 3,
however, were not supported. There were no signiﬁcant main effects of the nuclear and

terrorism frames on subjects’ risk judgments.39

Table 4: Framing Effects on Risk Judgment

 

 

 

Variance Source df MS F P Partial Eta
Squared

Pretest Measure of Risk l 170.10 62.57 .000 .275

Judgment (Covariate)

Terrorism Frame 1 3.86 1.42 .235 .009

Radical Islamic Frame 1 16.38 6.02 .015 .035

Nuclear Frame 1 .011 .004 .949 0

Error 165 2.72

 

R Squared = .328 (Adjusted R Squared = .295)

 

38. Risk judgments, as previously deﬁned, are beliefs about the probability or likelihood of an attack
occurring over a speciﬁed period of time.

39. In the case of risk judgment, two very small, but signiﬁcant interactions were found (nuclear x radical
Islamic and radical Islamic x Terrorism). These ﬁndings were difﬁcult to interpret and not seen as
meaningful. Moreover, identical analyses of the other two indicators of perceived threat (dread and wow)
did not uncover any interactions.

76

The ﬁndings were similar when worry was the dependent variable. Once again,
the pretest measure was signiﬁcant and explained approximately 27 percent the variance
[F (1,165) = 59.76, p < .001]. Controlling for this measure, the data also showed that only
the radical Islamic frame produced a signiﬁcant main effect on worry [F (1,165) = 4.08, p
< .05]. These data supported Hypothesis 2, but failed to support Hypotheses 1 and 3
regarding the suggested main effects of the nuclear and terrorism frames.

Finally, using dread as the dependent variable, the pretest measure still produced a
signiﬁcant effect, but explained a much smaller amount of the variance at around 4
percent [F (1,165) = 7.63, p < .01]. After controlling for the pretest measure, there were
signiﬁcant effects of both the radical Islamic [F (1,165) = 10.84, p < .01] and nuclear
frames [F (1,165) = 34.79, p < .001] on dread; the former explained just over 6 percent of
the variance, while the latter explained more than 17 percent (see Table 5). These data
support both Hypotheses 2 and 3, but failed to support Hypothesis 1. Treatments
containing the radical Islamic frame evoked signiﬁcantly higher dread than articles that
did not contain this frame. The same was true about the effects of the nuclear ﬂame.

The data showed no signiﬁcant interaction effects, which indicates that the frames
had an additive effect on dread. In other words, the effect of the treatment containing
both the radical Islamic and nuclear ﬂames was greater than the effect of either one on its
own, and it was approximately equal to the sum of the effects of each variable

individually.

77

Table 5: Framing Effects on Dread

 

 

 

Variance Source df MS F P Partial Eta
Squared

Pretest Measure of Risk 1 12.88 7.63 .006 .044

Judgment (Covariate)

Terrorism Frame 1 .005 .003 .958 .000

Radical Islamic Frame 1 18.29 10.84 .001 .062

Nuclear Frame 1 58.72 34.79 .000 .174

Error 165 1.69

 

R Squared = .266 (Adjusted R Squared = .230)

Relationship between Risk Judgment, Dread and Worry

The data showed that the ﬂaming manipulations had a somewhat greater effect on

dread and risk judgment than on worry. One possible explanation for this is that the terror

news ﬂames tested here have direct effects on dread and risk judgment and an indirect

effect on worry. While this analysis cannot ascertain the time ordering of these variables,

the statistical relationship between them is worth considering. As shown in Table 6,

based on a regression model, both dread (Beta = .243, p < .001) and risk judgment (Beta

= .485, p < .001) are strong and signiﬁcant predictors of worry. None of the confounding

variables, including political ideology, has a signiﬁcant effect. Subjects who perceived

the likelihood of an attack as being high tended to worry more. Subjects who believed

that the number of causalities in such an attack would be high also reported higher levels

of worry.

78

Table 6: Regression Model Showing Standardized Coefficients for Predictors of
Worry about Terrorism

 

 

 

 

Independent Variables Dependent Variables

Worry

(Beta)
Risk Judgment .485M
Dread .243**
Sex (M=1/F=2) .041
Race/Ethnicity (W = l / Non W = 2) -.028
Age .004
Political Ideology (Con = 1. / Lib = 7) -.113
R Square .381
** = p < .001

Effects of Worry on Social Attitudes

The importance of these ﬁndings comes to light when examining the effects of
worry on other social and political attitudes. As illustrated in Table 7, only worry had a
signiﬁcant affect on these attitudes. People with greater worries about terrorism were

more willing to tradeoff some civil liberties for added protection against terrorism (Beta

=.351,p<.001).

79

Table 7: Regression Models Showing Standardized Coefﬁcients for Predictors of
Willingness to Give Up Civil Liberties and Support the Iraq War

 

 

 

Independent Variables Dependent Variables
Willingness to Give Support for
Up Civil Liberties Iraq War

(Beta) (Beta)
Risk Judgment .013 .091
Dread -.008 .046
Worry .351** .156*
Sex (M = 1 /F = 2) .083 -.128*
Race/Ethnicity (W = 1 / Non W = 2) -.045 .000
Age -.065 -.004
Political Ideology (Con = 1 / Lib = 7) -.343** -.523**
R Square .279 .336

 

*=p<.05;**=p<.001

The strength of worry as a predictor was even greater than the effect of political
ideology (Beta = -.343, p < .001), which has been shown to explain this and other
political attitudes. However, in the case of support for war, the signiﬁcant effect of
political ideology was much greater than worry. Sex is also a signiﬁcant predictor in this
model. Women showed less support for the Iraq War than men, conﬁrming pervious

studies.

Discussion
9

The data indicated that ﬂaming violent acts as “terrorism” did not affect subjects

levels of worry, risk judgment or dread. The lack of supporting evidence may, however,

80

be explained in part by the given characteristics of the experimental treatments. The test
article offered a rather typical portrayal of the threat. It may be that any article that offers
a detailed discussion on the danger of organized groups carrying out violent acts on
American cities will be contextualized by audiences as “terrorism” whether the term is
used copiously or not at all.

The results ﬂom the manipulation checks corresponded with this assumption. As
mentioned, many subjects reported that the term terrorism appeared in the treatment
when, in fact, it was never mentioned. Future research should investigate the possible
interaction between the context of news articles and the use of this ﬂame. The terrorism
ﬂame may have an effect within a more ambiguous thematic ﬂamework, such as a story
about the danger of school shootings or the aggressive protest activities of radical
environmental groups.

The nuclear ﬂame had a signiﬁcant main effect on dread, but no effect on risk
judgment or worry. As expected, subjects who received the nuclear ﬂame estimated the
number of potential casualties as signiﬁcantly higher than those who received the
conventional explosives ﬂame. It appears, contrary to previous research, that prompting
the subjects to think about a catastrophic loss of human life, which would inevitably
result ﬂom a nuclear attack on an American city, did not elevate their judgments of the
likelihood of such an attack, nor their worries about it.

The data demonstrated that the radical Islamic ﬂame produced the greatest
inﬂuence on the subjects’ perceptions of the terrorist threat. It had a signiﬁcant main
effect on all three indicators—risk judgment, dread and worry. The subjects who read

about potential attacks carried out by small groups “motivated by Islamic extremism,” as

81

opposed to “American citizens who view their own government as the enemy,” reported
higher risk judgments, dread and worry.

Mirroring previous research, the three indicators of perceived threat were strongly
correlated. However, only worry was shown to be a signiﬁcant predictor of the subjects’
willingness to give up civil liberties to curb terrorism and support the war in Iraq.

These ﬁndings have important implications for the methods used to study public
perceptions of terrorism, as well as some social and political ramiﬁcations. The data
suggest that not all terror ﬂames produce equal effects on public worries, risk judgments
and dread. When pollsters ask about the threat of terrorism, it is conceivable that some
respondents may be thinking of radical Islamic terrorists ﬂom foreign lands, while others
contemplate the threats posed by homegrown terrorism or other similar threats, such as
school shootings. If true, the variance between such respondents could be misunderstood
as a difference in general levels of perceived threat, when it should be attributed to a
systematic tendency to think either about radical Islamic or homegrown terrorism. This
potential problem could be remedied by developing measures that offer greater detail on
the threat and explicitly ﬂame the speciﬁc type of terrorism under study.

The results of this study, particularly the ﬁndings related to the radical Islamic
ﬂame, are also relevant to a growing scholarly debate over the causes of terrorism and the
proposed strategies for responding to it. On one side, some authors argue that the
religious character of terrorism is indisputable, that culture matters most in international
conﬂicts and that appreciating this fact is crucial to the proper formulation of U.S. foreign
policies (Huntington, 2003). Other authors claim that the supposed religious motive of

terrorism is dubious, that placing the emphasis on this motive distracts policymakers

82

ﬂom the real causes of terrorism and that the perpetuation of this stereotype is
counterproductive to the struggle against it (Pape 2005).

Previous communication research demonstrated that the ﬁrst argument was highly
available in the U.S. press in the ﬁrst four years after 9/11. For instance, based on a large
sample of articles ﬂom the opinion-leading press, one study found that 20 percent of
articles on the subject of terrorism associated this threat with religion and that the great
majority of these references were to Islam (Woods, 2007). This study suggests that, right
or wrong, such an argument elevates subjects’ threat perceptions.

The data also have implications for political communication and the ofﬁcial
discourse on Iraq in particular. Within a year of 9/11, the U.S. Administration justiﬁed its
call for a preemptive strike against Iraq by regularly linking the terrorist threat to both the
Iraqi government and its possession of weapons of mass destruction. Media scholars
showed how the “triple threat” (the dictator Saddam Hussein, his links to al Qaeda and
access to Weapons of Mass Destruction) became engrained in news coverage running up
to the war in Iraq (Fried, 2005; Entman, 2004; Moeller, 2004; Gershkoff and Kushner,
2005). In fact, some news organizations would later criticize their own coverage and
apologize for printing ﬂawed intelligence and relying too heavily on unscrupulous
sources (New York Times, 2004).

The potentially severe consequences of a “nuclear Iraq,” given its supposed links
to terrorist organizations, were thought to worry many Americans and thereby convince
them that the use of preemptive military force was warranted. The data ﬂom this study
provided some support for this claim, demonstrating that 1) the nuclear ﬂame produced

higher levels of dread than an alternative ﬂame, 2) that dread substantially predicted

83

worry, controlling for other variables, and 3) that worry was a signiﬁcant, positive
predictor of the subjects’ support for the Iraq war. These results urge ﬁrrther research on
the messages produced by the U.S. Administration and disseminated by media in the run

up to the Iraq war in early 2003.

84

CHAPTER 4
Elite Press Coverage of Terrorism: What We Talk about when we Talk about

Terrorism40

Introduction

The previous chapter offered empirical support for the claim that some news
portrayals of terrorism are more likely to increase people’s threat perceptions than others.
The central aim of this chapter, in short, is to explain when and under what circumstances
these fear-inducing news ﬂames appear in the elite press in the United States. I begin by
discussing the general relationship between the mass media and society. Reﬂecting on the
ﬁndings ﬂom Chapter 3, I then further deﬁne the dimensions of “high-threat” versus
“low-threat” press content. Next, I move to a speciﬁc explanation of the factors that
predict the level of threat portrayed in newspaper articles. Finally, I describe how these
dimensions changed over an eight-year period centered around the attacks on 9/11 and
explain how these portrayals were associated with other important news topics, including
the use of military force, the protection of civil liberties and the image of the Muslim

religion.

Media and Society
Researchers have long understood that the political and economic forces in
society greatly inﬂuence mass media content (Gamson et al., 1992, 2). In a classic book

on this subject, entitled Four Theories of the Press, Siebert et al. (1956) contend that

 

40. A version of this chapter ﬁrst appeared in the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 12(3): 3-
20.

85

media content is ultimately determined by where a given society falls on a political
continuum. The authors position a centralized authoritarian society on one side (the
“authoritarian” model) and a ﬂee and democratic power on the other side (the “social
responsibility” model). Countries closer to the latter model are more likely to exhibit
greater diversity on important social issues, “see that all sides are fairly presented” and
make sure “the public has enough information to decide” how to respond to problems
(1956, 5) than countries nearer to the authoritarian model.

In the half century since the publication of Four Theories of the Press, media
scholars have criticized the book ﬂom all directions. Some see it as nothing more than a
Cold War artifact, an international media theory based solely on the ideologized models
that existed in the Soviet Union and the United States at mid-century. However, in spite
of its rhetorical and normative character, the book remains inﬂuential as a broad
ﬂarnework for understanding the macro-social factors, ideology in particular, that
inﬂuence media content in a given society (Hallin & Mancini, 2004, 7).

In fact, it is difﬁcult to ﬁnd a macro-analytical model that does not exhibit some
similarities to Siebert’s classic example. For instance, by opposing the “dominance
model” to the “pluralist model,” McQuail (2000) offers a similar dichotomy for
comparing media systems. In the dominance model, the media is controlled by a small
group of powerful individuals and media content is “selective and decided from ‘above”’
(McQuail, 2000, 70). In contrast, the pluralist model assumes that power is disseminated
among diverse groups in a ﬂee society. People who hold mutually exclusive goals are
allowed access to the media, resulting in a plurality of views in the various media outlets.

Drawing on the normative logic of Siebert et al. (1956), the pluralist model has been

86

associated with the free-market democracies of the West, while the dominance model has
been linked to authoritarian nations such as Russia or China.

If Siebert’s social responsibility model (or McQuail’s pluralist model) ﬁt the case
of the United States, the framing of terrorism would reﬂect the diversity of the nation’s
groups and institutions—ﬂom the Administration of George W. Bush to privacy and civil
liberties groups and the antiwar community—all of whom have a stake in deﬁning this
crucial social problem.

There are many reasons, however, to question this assumption. For critical
scholars, “media content is seen as both expressing and furthering the power of elites or
propertied classes” (Shoemaker & Reese, 1996, 228).41 Theorists ﬂom this tradition
argue that the scope of political and social debate in any society usually comprises an
innocuous set of views, none of which question the prevailing ideology established by the
powerful elites (Molotch & Lester, 1974; Bachrach & Baratz, 1962; Altschull, 1995).

Ideological forces may play an especially important role in news coverage of
terrorism, particularly after 9/11, because the threat itself was intertwined with a number
of divisive social issues, such as the use of military force, the preservation of civil
liberties and the funding of new security and defense measures. For instance, a study of
international press content (Woods, 2007a; see Shlapentokh, Woods, Shiraev, 2005)
showed how ideological forces strongly inﬂuenced press coverage of 9/11 in seven
foreign countries. Although disagreements on the issues surrounding 9/11 in the United

States have not been as deep as in the international context, the debates have polarized

 

41. Many of the authors who support this position draw on the Marxist tradition. A3 Parenti wrote, citing
Marx directly, “those who control the material means of production also control the mental means of
production” (1986, 32).

87

the American political landscape, pitting the political establishment against a less
powerful oppositional force.

Donohue, Tichenor and Olien (1995) use the “guard-dog” metaphor to explain
this relationship between media content and the dominant power structure in society.
They argue that unlike a “watchdog,” the media function as a guard dog that helps
maintain the status quo and protect the existing system. If the press acts like a guard dog,
which is directly opposed to the social responsibility model, the ﬂaming of the terrorist
threat would likely reﬂect the views and interests of the dominant groups in society.
Moreover, it is well known, as described below, that even in democracies, the media
usually report on foreign affairs ﬂom the perspective of their government. I now move to
a speciﬁc discussion on how the media’s portrayal, or framing, of the terrorist threat may

be inﬂuenced by the political establishment and other sociological variables.

Story Elements as Indicators of Terrorism Threat

As discussed in Chapter 3, I use the psychometric paradigm as a tool to identify
“high threat” story elements in newspaper articles (Fischhoff et al. 1978; Sjoberg 2005;
Covello 1992; Slovic 2004). The model draws on cognitive scales and multiple
regression methods to identify the qualitative characteristics of hazards that affect the
way people perceive them. Two dimensions in particular—“newness” and “dread”——are
thought to inﬂuence public threat perceptions (Fischhoff et al. 1978). Dangers perceived
as being new are judged as more risky than dangers perceived as old, even when the old
danger has a greater statistical probability of causing harm. Dreaded dangers--that is,
hazards that could harm many people, cause catastrophic damage, or have lasting effects

on society or the environment--are also known to inﬂate risk judgments. As discussed in

88

detail later, both of these dimensions represent common story elements in news coverage
of terrorism.

Previous studies have also shown that the salience (or “cognitive availability”) of
a hazard increases people’s judgments of its likelihood of causing harm (Slovic 2004).
When people lack information about a given danger, they tend to assess its likelihood of
causing harm by whether an example of the danger easily comes to mind (Tversky and
Kahneman 1974). As explained by Sunstein (2004:121), “In the aftermath of a terrorist
act, and for a period thereafter, that act is likely to be both available and salient, and thus
to make people think that another such act is likely, whether or not it is in fact.” In this
way, news organizations may increase threat perceptions not only by describing the threat
as something “new” or “dreaded,” but also by making it widely available in the public
mind.

The salience dimension may be conceptualized as the number of stories that
mention the threat of terrorism over a given time period, or as the centrality of this topic
within a given article. This distinction is important because, while it is apparent that the
general level of news coverage of terrorism rose dramatically after 9/11, it is not clear
whether the salience within articles also increased. In fact, the level of within-article
salience may have declined after 9/11, because the risk was increasingly linked to
extraneous news topics such as the stock market, travel and politics.

While high levels of dread, newness and salience may amplify worries and risk
judgments of terrorism, other news elements may moderate these responses. One of the
basic precepts of “good journalism” is to offer balanced accounts of important social

issues (Bunton 1998). There are at least two reasons to assume that balanced portrayals of

89

terrorism—that is, messages that supply a rationale for questioning the risk of
terrorism—would tend to diminish worries and risk judgments.

First and foremost, a balanced account directly questions some aspect of the risk
itself. A message containing counterarguments or contrasting information about the risk
would likely decrease the target’s perceived susceptibility by countering the effect of the
threatening message. This assumption is consistent with the literature on fear appeals. A
meta-analysis by Witte and Allen (2000), for instance, demonstrated that strong fear
appeals (unbalanced messages) produced higher levels of perceived susceptibility than
low or weak fear appeals (balanced messages).

Second, research also shows that people desire a sense of control over their lives
when facing uncertainty or potential danger (Brown and Siegel 1988). A balanced
account may help people rationalize their low levels of perceived susceptibility and their
high levels of perceived control. An unbalanced portrayal, on the other hand, would
likely only increase public worries about the danger.

As discussed in the measurement section, I used the four dimensions discussed
above-newness, dread, salience and unbalanced portrayals--as the theoretical basis for
identifying speciﬁc aspects of newspaper content that are likely to increase public
perceptions of terrorism. While each of these dimensions will be operationalized
separately as a quantitative variable, I will also combine these measures in a single index

to indicate the overall level of terrorism threat in articles.

Factors Related to the Threat Level in Newspaper Articles
A well-established ﬁnding in media research is that journalists rely heavily on

ofﬁcial sources for ﬂaming the content of stories (Gans 1979; Cohen 1963). According to

90

Bennett (1994:23), “The dominance of ofﬁcial, particularly executive branch, sources is
even more pronounced in national security stories than for the news as a whole.” In the
case of 9/11 coverage, Li and Izard (2003) found that newspapers and television networks
relied more on government sources than other sources during the crisis. A report by the
Project for Excellence in Journalism (200222) showed that government ofﬁcials were not
only commonly used as information sources, but that “the press heavily favored pro-
Administration and ofﬁcial U.S. viewpoints—as high as 71% early on.” Other studies of
9/11 coverage have made similar claims (Entman, 2003; Traugott and Brader, 2003;
Norris, Kern and Just, 2003).

Meanwhile, following the attacks on 9/11, the Bush Administration made it clear
to the nation and to Congress that the United States would respond to the threat using
military force. The heightened threat of terrorism was used, directly or indirectly, by
numerous government ofﬁcials, as well as a host of pundits and commentators, to justify
the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq (National Security Strategy 2002;

Daalder et al. 2002). Based on this research and reasoning, I offer two hypotheses:

Hypothesis 6: Articles that used more government sources than nongovernmental
sources will have higher threat level than articles that used more nongovernmental

SOLII'CCS.

Hypothesis 7: Articles that favored a military response will have higher threat

levels than articles that did not favor a military response.

In addition to using military actions as a means for controlling terrorism, the Bush

Administration introduced several security measures known as the USA Patriot Act that

91

increased law enforcement powers, reduced the ﬂee ﬂow of information and limited
other civil liberties. The new laws gained a great deal of attention ﬂom politicians,
scholars, media and the public (e.g., Leone and Anrig 2003; Baker and Stack 2006; Cole
and Dempsey 2006; Graber 2003). Some authors argued that an unjustiﬁed or
exaggerated level of public concern about terrorism had pushed ofﬁcials to support the
intrusions on civil liberties and that the media played an important role in creating and
sustaining these concerns (Sunstein 2003, 2004; Huddy et al. 2003). I therefore offer the

following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 8: Articles that supported the Patriot Act (or similar measures that
reduced civil liberties) will have higher threat levels than articles that did not
support the Patriot Act.

In the ﬁrst days after the 9/11 attacks, many commentators and public ofﬁcials
ﬂamed the conﬂict in religious terms or referred to the perpetrators as Islamic extremists
or Muslim radicals. By the mid—20003, according to public opinion polls, the idea that
Islam encouraged violence more than other religions was supported by a large percentage
of Americans.42 While the popular association between Islam and terrorist violence is
likely rooted in a long series of past events, ﬂom the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979-1981
to the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, this association likely became more prominent
in the public mind as media coverage of terrorism greatly increased after 9/11 (Nacos and

Torres-Reyna 2003; Nacos 1994; Traugott and Brader 2003).

 

42. See a survey by the Pew Research Center (2004), which found that “A plurality of Americans (46
percent) believes that Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence among its believers.”
See also a Gallup Poll report that 51 percent of Americans perceive “Islamic Fundamentalism” as a
“critical threat” to the “vital interests of the United States” (D.W. Moore, “Terrorism, Spread of Weapons
of Mass Destruction Most Critical Threats. Few Partisan and Socioeconomic Differences on Rankings of
Threats,” Gallup News Service, March 8, 2004).

92

The prediction here is not that the press used negative or stereotypical news
frames to describe Muslim Americans or Islamic groups within the United States, but that
the topic of religion, Islam in particular, often emerged in articles that discussed the
identity of the terrorists, the cause of 9/11, or the possible motivation for terrorist attacks

in the future. Speciﬁcally, I offer the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 9: Articles that mentioned the suspected terrorists’ religion will
have higher threat levels than articles that did not mention the terrorists’

religion.

Another factor that may be associated with the level of threat portrayed in the
press is the nearness of the given newspaper to high-proﬁle targets, the sites of the 9/11
attacks in particular. Given the previous research on this topic, the effect of proximity is
unclear. On one hand, a study by F ischhoff et al. (2003) found that judgments of
terrorism risk were higher among people living within 100 miles of the World Trade
Center than among those living farther away. These results were replicated, in part, in a
study by Woods et al. (2008).

If this tendency held for editors and journalists as well, I expect that newspapers
located in New York City and Washington DC (the sites of the 9/11 attacks) would
produce articles with higher risk levels than newspapers ﬂom geographically remote
cities (I used the Anchorage Daily News in Alaska and the Lincoln Journal Star in
Nebraska for the comparison). On the other hand, the acts of 9/11 were widely covered in
the local press via wire services, which may have homogenized the imagery and ﬂaming
of the attacks across the nation. Moreover, as described by Traugott and Brader

(2003: 183), “conventional media models” and “the standard criteria of newsworthiness

93

are thought to apply to a news story about terrorism,” which may have also diminished
differences in coverage between newspapers located near and far ﬂom the sites of the
9/11 attacks. Given these opposing rationales, I examine the inﬂuence of proximity ﬂom

an exploratory perspective with the following research question:

Research Question 1: Is the level of terrorism threat greater in articles published
in the Washington Post and New York Times than in the Anchorage Daily News

and Lincoln Journal Star?

Method

The aim of this study was to measure portrayals of terrorism in the “elite press” in
the United States. Based on previous studies (Ten Eyck and Williment 2003; Horvit
2003; Swain 2003; Hertog 2000), I chose the New York Times and Washington Post as
indicators of the elite press.43 These newspapers are known for playing key roles in
national decision-making (Gitlin 1980; Gans 1979). Moreover, the two papers were used
in a similar study of terrorism coverage (Li and Izard 2003), which may offer an
opportunity for cross-study comparisons. In addition, I analyzed the Anchorage Daily

News and the Lincoln Journal Star to test the relationship between geography and the

 

43. According to 2006 data ﬂom the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the New York Times is the largest
metropolitan newspaper in the United States. It is owned by The New York Times Company, which is a
publically traded company controlled by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. The Washington Post is owned by The
Washington Post Company, another publically traded company, whose major shareholders include
Katharine Graham and Berkshire Hathaway. Both newspapers ofﬁcially endorsed John Kerry in the 2004
election.

94

level of terrorism threat in articles.44 These newspapers are located in remote cities in two
of the least populated states in the nation.45
The unit of analysis was the article. The electronic archive Lexis-Nexis was used
to select all the related articles published between September 11, 1997 and September 11,
2005.46 Articles that contained one of seven different search terms were collected and
categorized.47 In most cases, the entire population of relevant articles was included in the
sample. A systematic random sample was taken for the New York Times and Washington
Post during the post-9/11 period, because the number of relevant articles was exceedingly

high (the sample included roughly 200 articles ﬂom each newspaper). The total sample

included 753 articles.

Measurement
Dependent variables

As discussed, there are certain abstract dimensions of the threat—newness, dread,
salience and unbalance portrayals—that are likely to increase concerns about the danger.
In this section, I describe how these dimensions were identiﬁed in newspaper content and
operationalized as quantitative variables. Starting with the newness dimension, I found

that some articles portrayed the threat as something new to the United States, increasing,

 

44. The Lincoln Journal Star is owned by Lee Enterprises, and the Anchorage Daily News is owned by The
McClatchy Company; both are publicly traded companies. The former backed John Kerry, while the latter
supported George W. Bush in the 2004 election.

45. According to census data from 2000, the Alaskan population was 626,932 (third smallest) and Nebraska
was 1,711,263 (tenth smallest).

46. This period of coverage represents the largest symmetrical time ﬂame (i.e., four years before and after
9/1 1) that could be constructed when the collection of data began.

47. The search terms included: threat of terror!, terror! threat, terror! alert, terror! warning, risk of terror!,

terror! risk and war on terror! The exclamation point represents a wildcard function that allows the search
engine to ﬁnd all variations of the term “terror,” including terrorism, terrorist and terrorists.

95

elevated, worsening, or suggested that the nation’s ability to defend itself against
terrorism had weakened. Articles that included these or similar descriptors were coded as
1; articles without these descriptors were coded as 0.

I measured the dread dimension using three components. One component was

99 66

found in articles that speculated about “nuclear, chemical” or “biological” attacks being
carried out in the United States. The second component of dread was seen in articles that
described the terrorists as “suicide bombers” or discussed their willingness to die in order
to harm others. The third component consisted of a pooled category that included several
other dread-related words and phrases, such as “potentially catastrophic,”
“uncontrollable,” “severe,” “high,” and “real.” When used to describe the threat, these
three components—nuclear etc., suicide and other dread-related words—are all likely to
increase public risk judgments and concerns as a function of the dread dimension.

However, I separated the components in order to account for their unique and
substantively interesting characteristics. I also wished to draw a quantitative distinction
between articles that contained zero, one, two or all three of these distinct components.
Articles containing none of these components were coded as 0; articles containing 1, 2, or
3 of the components were scored as l, 2 and 3, respectively. For example, an article that
discussed the “high” risk of “nuclear” attacks by “suicidal” terrorists would receive a
score of 3 on the dread dimension.

I measured the salience dimension with two components. For the ﬁrst component,

I determined whether more than 50 percent of the paragraphs in the given article

mentioned the terrorist threat to the United States (if yes, 1; if no, 0).48 Second, I counted

 

48. If there was an equal number of “on topic” and “off topic” paragraphs, the decision was based on the
number of sentences. It should also be noted that the optimal measure of this component would have been a

96

99 66

the number of times the article used the words “terror, terrorist,” or “terrorism”; this
component was then scored based on a scale ranging ﬂom 0.1 (one occurrence) to 1.0
(ten or more occurrences). Combining the two components, the highest score on the
salience dimension would be 2, in which case more than half the article would be on-
topic and the term terrorism would be mentioned 10 or more times.

The unbalanced portrayals dimension, like the newness dimension, was measured
with a simple dichotomous variable. I found that some articles questioned the scope or
intensity of the threat or balanced high risk assessments with low risk accounts, while
others did not. Articles ﬂom the ﬁrst category were coded as 0, ﬂom the second as l.

The ﬁnal component was based on a qualitative assessment of the articles. In pre-
testing the protocol, 1 came to believe that the seven manifest components described
above may not account for all aspects of terrorism risk in articles. Much of the
commentary on this topic contains subtle details, nuances, stylistic elements and a
particular tone that cannot be gauged by a rigid quantitative scale. In our attempt to
account for these subtleties, as well as to substantiate the validity of the index (as
discussed later), I included the coder’s overall subjective judgment of each article based
on a scale ranging ﬂom 0 to 1. It should be noted, especially for those concerned about
including a qualitative component in a quantitative index, that the relative weight of this
component in the overall index was quite small and that the results of this study would
not change signiﬁcantly if I took the qualitative component out of the index.

To summarize, this study was designed to measure four abstract dimensions of

terrorism—newness, dread, salience and unbalanced portrayals. The newness and

 

percentage of on topic versus off topic paragraphs. This procedure, however, would have been very time
consuming.

97

unbalanced dimensions were each based on one component of newspaper content, while
dread and salience were based on three and two components, respectively. These seven
components were measured using a quantitative content analysis. An eighth component
was developed using a qualitative assessment of the articles. Combining these
components in a single index, each article was rated on a scale between 0.1 and 8 (the
higher the rating, the greater the threat). In order to offer both a speciﬁc and general
assessment of terrorism risk in newspaper content, I will report the results for each of the

four dimensions, as well as the overall index.

Independent variables

All the independent variables were dichotomous--that is, the article either
included the given content characteristic or did not. If the article associated the terrorist
threat with the Muslim religion in any way, I coded it as 1 (if not, 0). If a military
response to terrorism was advocated in more than half of the article’s relevant
paragraphs, it was coded as 1 (if not, 0). If the Patriot Act (or similar measures) was
supported in more than half of the article’s relevant paragraphs, it was coded as 1 (if not,
0). If the article described the threat using more government sources than non
government sources, it was coded as 1 (if not, 0). Finally, articles from the New York
Times and Washington Post (newspapers located near the 9/11 sites) were coded as 1;
articles ﬂom the remote newspapers, the Anchorage Daily News and the Lincoln Journal
Star, were coded as 0. The complete codebook and protocol used in this study appear in

Appendix C.

98

Validity

The validity of this terrorism threat index was supported by a comparison between
two operationally distinct measures. As discussed, the index comprised seven manifest
characteristics of content and one qualitative assessment made by the coders. The ﬁrst type
of measure assumed that speciﬁc words and phrases, such as “dirty bomb” or
“bioterrorism,” captured a particular dimension of terrorism that tends to increase public
perceptions of the danger. The second measure was based on the common sense
assumption that people can use their own personal judgments and interpretations to rate the
level of danger portrayed in articles. Given the universal nature of risk, I also supposed that
most people would offer similar ratings of the risk (this assumption was supported by an
inter-coder reliability test, as noted below).

Though conceptually and operationally distinct, the two measures were essentially
intended for the same purpose: to indicate the level of threat in articles. To explore this
assumption empirically, I tested the association between each of the seven manifest
components and the coder’s overall assessment.49 Based on a multiple regression analysis,
in which the coder’s evaluation was treated as the dependent variable and the manifest
components as predictors, our assumption was strongly conﬁrmed. Each manifest
characteristic had a signiﬁcantly high, independent, positive association with the coder’s
subjective evaluation of the articles. This ﬁnding supports the validity of both measures.
Also worth noting is the high R Square value (.760; p < .001), which indicates that the

manifest components represent a strong set of explanatory variables.

 

49. It should be noted that the same coder produced both the quantitative (manifest components) and
qualitative (overall assessment) measurements of the content.

99

Reliability

Moving to the issue of reliability, inter-coder agreement tests were conducted on all
the variables using 8 percent of the total articles in the sample (a systematic random sample
was used for choosing the test articles). A correlation analysis was used to measure the
inter-coder reliability of the terrorism threat index; I found that the correlation between
coders was sufﬁciently high (r = .87). The percentage of agreement on the ﬁve independent
variables ranged ﬂom 89 percent to 100 percent. Scott’s Pi, which corrects for chance

agreement, ranged ﬂom .77 to 1.0 on these variables.

Analysis

Our analysis consists of four parts. I begin with a brief review of the study’s
descriptive statistics. Next, I describe how the threat level in the press ﬂuctuated over time.
Third, I use Pearson correlation coefﬁcients to determine the strength of the relationship
between the ﬁve independent variables (published near 9/11 sites, government source
dominant, supports military response, supports liberties reduction, religion associated with
terrorism) and each of the four dependent variables (newness, dread, salience and
unbalanced portrayals), as well as the combined index. The fourth section includes a
multiple regression analysis that tests the inﬂuence of each independent variable, while

controlling for the other variables.

Descriptive statistics

A total of 753 articles were analyzed in this study. Three quarters of the articles

were published in the post-9/11 period, one quarter during the pre-9/11 period. Articles

100

from the New York Times and Washington Post comprised 73 percent of the sample, while
27 percent came ﬂom the Anchorage Daily News and the Lincoln Journal Star.
Government ofﬁcials were the most prevalent sources in 47 percent of the articles;
nongovernmental sources were dominant in 53 percent of the articles. One in ﬁve articles
(20 percent) associated the threat of terrorism with religion and the great majority were
references to Islam. Roughly the same percentage of articles was mostly in favor of a
military response to terrorism (1 9 percent), while the number of articles that supported the

Patriot Act or similar security measures was much smaller at 5 percent.

The terrorist threat over time

As expected, the number of articles on terrorism increased dramatically after 9/11.50
The Washington Post and New York Times, for instance, published roughly three times
more articles on this topic in the ﬁrst three months following 9/11 than in the four
preceding years. However, while the level of terrorism threat in articles also spiked after
9/11, it declined rather quickly and generally ﬂuctuated over the eight-year period (see
Figure 7).5 ' Overall, the average threat level was slightly higher in the pre-9/11 period
(3.44) than after the attacks (3.09). The same results were found for three of the four
dimensions of terrorism risk (newness, dread and salience). Unbalanced portrayals,

however, were more common in the post-9/11 period (59 percent of pre-9/1 1 articles

compared to 64 percent of post-9/1 1 articles were unbalanced).

 

50. For a detailed analysis of the trends in media coverage of terrorism, see Kern, Just and Norris 2003.
51. Based on the combined index, the average terrorism risk level in articles published between September

11, 1997 and December 31, 1998 was 4.07. After a 1-point decline in 1999, the average increased each year
until 2002 when it reversed course and trended downward.

101

Figure 7: Average Terrorism Risk Level in the
Press from 1997 to 2005

 

 

 

l 09/11l97- 1999 2000 01/01/01— 09/12/01- 2002 2003 2004 01/01/05-
‘ 12/31/98 09/11/01 12/31/01 09/11l05

 

Correlation analysis

Newspapers located near the sites of 9/11 (Washington Post and New York Times)
tended to publish articles with higher levels of newness, dread and salience than the remote
newspapers (Anchorage Daily News and Lincoln Journal Star). However, nearness to the
9/11 sites was not associated with the level of unbalanced portrayals. As shown in Table 8,
there was a signiﬁcant positive correlation between nearness to the 9/11 sites and three of
the four dimensions of terrorism threat, as well as the combined index (r = .114; p < .01).
Given the relative weakness of these correlations, however, I considered these results as

more illustrative than deﬁnitive.

102

Table 8: Correlations Between Terrorism Threat and Other Variables in Newspaper
Articles

 

Pearson Correlation Coefficients

 

Independent Variables Newness Dread No Salience Overall
Balance Index
Published near 9/11 sites .099** .102** .016 .080* .l 13**
Government source dominant . 194* * . 166* * .012 .1 19* * 208* *
Supports military response . 137* * .248* * .243 * * . 166* * .327* *
Supports liberties reduction .03 3 .122* * . 107* * . 150* * .175 * *
Religion associated w/ terrorism .079* .171 * * -.052 .287* "‘ .221 * *

 

Notes: * = p < .05; ** = p < .01.

The results found in the case of government source dominance were more decisive.
I should ﬁrst note that the social actors categorized as “government sources” offered
similar portrayals of the threat, regardless of their particular occupation or political
afﬁliation. As shown in Table 9, the mean threat levels for almost all types of government
ofﬁcials (Clinton Administration, Bush Administration, Republicans, Democrats and other
ofﬁcials) were greater than the mean for nongovernmental sources, with one exception
found in the relatively few articles dominated by Senator John Kerry. There was a
signiﬁcant positive relationship between government source dominance and three of the

four threat dimensions, as well as the combined index (r = .208; p < .01).

103

Table 9: Mean Terrorism Threat Level by Source Dominance

 

 

 

Mean N Standard

Dominant Source Deviation
Bush Administration 4.22 77 1.54
Clinton Administration 4.20 22 1.99
Senator John Kerry 2.47 12 1.98
Other ofﬁcials identiﬁed as Democrats 2.83 26 1.82
Other ofﬁcials identiﬁed as Republicans 3.13 13 1.59
Other ofﬁcials (no political afﬁliation 3.47 204 1.78

mentioned)
Nongovernmental sources (newspaper 2.78 389 1.82
staff, ordinary people, others)

Foreign sources 4.02 10 1.97
Total 3.18 753 1.85

 

An even stronger relationship was seen in the case of articles that favored a military
response. This variable was strongly and signiﬁcantly correlated with all four dimensions
of the threat and the combined index (r = .327; p < .01). Support for measures that reduced
civil liberties was signiﬁcantly correlated with three of the four dimensions and the
combined index (r = .17 5; p < .01). Finally, articles that associated terrorism with Islam
had greater threat levels than articles that did not. Again, as shown in Table 8, this variable
was signiﬁcantly correlated with three of the four dimensions and the combined index (r =

.221;p<.01).

104

Multiple regression analysis

To answer Research Question 1 and test the four hypotheses stated above, I
conducted a multiple regression analysis. Terrorism threat, as measured by the combined
index, was the dependent variable. The ﬁve theoretically relevant aspects of newspaper
content were treated as independent variables. In constructing the model, the basic
assumptions and potential shortcomings of regression modeling were considered and found

to be unproblematic.52

Table 10: Regression Model Showing Standardized Regression Coefficients for Five
Predictors of Terrorism Threat in Newspaper Articles (all newspapers combined)

 

 

 

Independent variables Standardized Regression Coefficients
Published near 9/11 sites .076*

Government source dominant .163***

Supports military response .278***

Supports liberties reduction ,137* r at

Religion associated with terrorism ,131***

R Square .jggaru

 

Notes: * = p < .05; *** = p < .001; Published near 9/11 sites was scored as follows: 0 =
articles ﬂom the Anchorage Daily News and Lincoln Journal Star and l = articles ﬂom
the New York Times and Washington Post; Government source dominant was 0 =
nongovernmental source and 1 = government source; Supports military response was 0 =
military response not unsupported and 1 = military response supported; Supports liberties
reduction was 0 = liberties reduction not supported and 1 = liberties reduction supported;

 

52. The dependent variable was normally distributed; we also checked for multicollinearity (i.e., when the
independent variables are highly correlated and have little unique explanatory power) and found that the
four signiﬁcant predictors in the model had relatively weak correlations with each other and strong
correlations with the dependent variable terrorism risk. By adding these variables into the model one at a
time, we also found that each increased R Square substantially.

105

Religion associated with terrorism was 0 = religion not associated with terrorism and l =
religion associated with terrorism.

As shown in Table 10, all ﬁve variables contributed signiﬁcantly to the explained
variance of terrorism threat (R Square = .198; p < .001). Addressing Research Question 1, I
found that the nearness of a newspaper to the 9/11 sites was a weak but signiﬁcant
predictor in articles (beta = .076; p < .05). (Note that “beta” refers to standardized
regression coefﬁcients). Conﬁrming Hypotheses 6 through 9, the variables Government
source dominant (beta = .163; p < .001), Supports military response (beta = .278; p < .001),
Supports liberties reduction (beta = .137; p < .001) and Religion associated with terrorism
(beta = .181; p < .001) proved to be modest but signiﬁcant predictors. Each of these
characteristics increased the threat level in articles. As demonstrated in Table 11, almost all
of these relationships were also found when I split the sample of articles into two groups:
newspapers close to 9/11 sites (New York Times and Washington Post), and newspapers far

away from them (Lincoln Journal Star and the Anchorage Daily News).

106

Table 11: Regression Model Showing Standardized Regression Coefﬁcients for Four
Predictors of Terrorism Threat in Newspaper Articles (newspapers separated by
proximity to 9/11 sites)

 

Independent variables Standardized Regression Coefﬁcients

 

New York Times & Lincoln Journal Star
Washington Post & Anchorage Daily News

 

Government source dominant . 159* * * .183 * *
Supports military response .244*** .407***
Supports liberties reduction .159*** .040
Religion associated with terrorism _ .193 * "‘ * . 165*
R Square .169*** .258***

 

Notes: * = p < .05; ** = p < .01; *** = p < .001; Government source dominant was 0 =
nongovernmental source and 1 = government source; Supports military response was 0 =
military response not unsupported and 1 = military response supported; Supports liberties
reduction was 0 = liberties reduction not supported and 1 = liberties reduction supported;
Religion associated with terrorism was 0 = religion not associated with terrorism and 1 =
religion associated with terrorism.

Discussion

The issue of how and to what extent the United States is threatened by international
terrorism is deeply interwoven in other important news topics and social issues. In the wake
of 9/1 1, given the perceived increase in the risk, numerous politicians, experts and
commentators called for a swift and mighty response ﬂom the United States military. The
threat of terrorism was commonly used as a justiﬁcation for the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq, as well as the surge in American troop levels in Iraq in early 2007. As this study

showed, the elite press clearly reﬂected the strategic and rhetorical link between threat and

107

war. Articles that made a case for a military response tended to contain higher levels of
terrorism threat than articles that did not. The same association was found between the
threat and the need for enhanced homeland security measures, such as the USA Patriot Act,
which effectively degraded some of the freedoms and civil liberties enjoyed by Americans.

A strong relationship also existed between source selection and press portrayals of
the risk. Supporting the ﬁndings of Bennett (1994) and others, the journalists in our sample
relied heavily on ofﬁcial sources when describing the threat of terrorism. Nearly half the
articles in the sample (47 percent) included more government sources than
nongovernmental sources. Our study also showed that government ofﬁcials, Administration
ofﬁcials in particular, tended to describe the risk of terrorism in more ominous and weighty
terms than nongovernmental officials. It should be noted, however, that I did not ﬁnd a
partisan bias in this respect. For example, as shown in Table 9, articles dominated by the
Clinton and Bush Administrations exhibited, on average, almost exactly the same level of
threat.

The subject of religion, Islam in particular, was another important issue that often
emerged in press portrayals of terrorism. In fact, every ﬁfth article in our sample
associated religion in one way or another with the threat. While previous studies have
shown that the media avoided making speciﬁc negative statements about Muslim
Americans and Islamic organizations in the United States, there was still a tendency to
link Islam in general to some of the scariest accounts of the terrorist threat.

This ﬁnding is relevant to a growing debate over the causes of terrorism and the
strategies proposed for responding to it. On one side, some authors argue that the

religious character of terrorism is indisputable, that culture matters most in international

108

conﬂicts and that appreciating this fact is crucial to the proper formulation of U.S. foreign
policies. Other authors claim that the supposed religious motive of terrorism is dubious,
that placing the emphasis on this motive distracts policymakers ﬂom the real causes of
terrorism and that the perpetuation of this stereotype is counterproductive to the struggle
against it (Pape 2005). While this study cannot speak to the cause of terrorism itself, I can
conclude that the former argument prevailed in the elite press and that religious identities
and motives were often associated with the most ﬂightening portrayals of terrorism in the
United States.

Our study revealed a weaker relationship between the closeness of a newspaper to
the sites of 9/11 and the level of terrorism threat in articles. On one hand, given the
enormous scope and intensity of the 9/11 events, it was not surprising that the level in the
New York Times and Washington Post exceeded that of the geographically remote
newspapers ﬂom Nebraska (Lincoln Journal Star) and Alaska (Anchorage Daily News).
On the other hand, the statistical signiﬁcance of this relationship was not strong enough
to warrant a decisive conclusion on the effects of proximity. While I found these data
interesting, further research is needed, especially studies that take into account a larger
sample of newspapers from across the country, to develop this perspective.

One of this project’s most surprising ﬁndings was that, while the level of
terrorism threat indicated in the mass media spiked after 9/11, it leveled off and declined
rather quickly. The average threat level in articles published in 2002 was roughly
equivalent to the level in 2000. In fact, the average level in pre-9/11 articles was slightly
higher than in post-9/11 articles. One possible explanation is that pre-9/11 articles were

generally more focused on the risk itself, whereas after 9/11 the issue often played a

109

secondary role in a wider range of news topics, which would have moderated the average
level of terrorism threat during this period.

The events of 9/11 transformed the way Americans think and talk about terrorism.
In the years following the attacks, references to and speculation about this strategic
danger were offered by all spectrums of society, ﬂom government ofﬁcials, military
leaders and terrorism experts to political pundits, private security companies, religious
leaders, artists, writers and athletes. Once a unique national security issue, discussed
primarily by politicians and security ofﬁcials, the threat of terrorism now ranks among
the most important social problems of the twenty-ﬁrst century—one with numerous links

to other public issues and personal relevance to almost everyone.

110

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: Strengths and Weaknesses of the Study

Summary

How did the events of September 11, 2001, and the perceived threat of terrorism in
particular, change American society? This is a complicated question and one that cuts
across different academic terrains. To answer it, an investigator must take into account
psychological processes (attitudes, beliefs, emotions and so forth) of individuals, as well as
the macro-social structures (private and public organizations, political institutions and
economic forces) that shape these experiences.

The aim of this dissertation was to investigate and report on some of these social
and psychological processes. I attempted to show that l) macro-social and organizational
factors explain the characteristics of terrorism news coverage, 2) these massages affect
people’s worries about the danger, 3) concerns about terrorism are associated with a
range of in-group and out-group processes and orientations, such as patriotism, trust in
government and willingness to use harsh military tactics, and 4) these public attitudes
were consonant with the Bush Administration’s aggressive foreign and domestic policies.

In order to emphasize the real-life implications of this dissertation, I told the story
of 9/11 in reverse. I began with a discussion on the policy changes in the post-9/l 1
period, which included the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the massive increases in federal
defense spending, upgraded security measures in all areas of the critical inﬂastructure,

reductions in civil liberties and shifts in immigration policy.

111

These historic political events would not have been possible without broad public
support for the Bush Administration and numerous aspects of the “War on Terror.”
Chapter 2 reviewed the evidence for this broad support and considered how it may be
related to people’s worries about terrorism. I suggested that, after 9/11, public concerns
about the danger functioned as an “organizing force,” not unlike an ideological
dimension or belief system, which shaped the way they thought about a variety of
political and social issues. The horriﬁc events of 9/ 11 should not be treated as an isolated
incident, but rather as a cultural trauma that transformed the American mindset.

Moving one step back in the causal chain, I then investigated the underlying
determinants of these worries and fears. Unlike many hazards of everyday life, such as
car accidents and the common cold, very few Americans have experienced terrorism ﬁrst
hand. For this reason, people’s thoughts and feelings about the danger are strongly
inﬂuenced by mass mediated information and images, ﬂom Hollywood movies and
sensationalized news broadcasts to televised political debates and reports in the opinion-
leading press.

Chapter 3 employed an experimental research design to determine whether certain
qualitative variations in the latter might inﬂuence people’s perceptions of the threat.
Although the term “terrorism” itself did not seem to directly effect the subjects’
perceptions, the terms “nuclear” and “radical Islam” did. Based on the evidence, I can
only speculate about the intentions of the Bush Administration, but I can suggest that its
decision to link Saddam Hussein to international terrorist organizations and stress the

dangers of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” was an effective tool in convincing

112

much of Congress and the American people to go along with its preemptive strike against
the regime of Saddam Hussein.

The evidence in Chapter 3 also revealed much about the relationship between
Islam and terrorism in the public mind. While I cannot remark on the cause of terrorism,
my ﬁndings suggest that Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis, which highlights
religion and culture as key sources of conﬂict, resonates with the public. News stories
that associate Islamic radicals with the terrorist threat, as opposed to homegrown
terrorists, elevate people’s worries, risk judgments and perceptions of the potential
consequences of an attack.

These ﬁndings have important implications for the lives of Arabs and Muslims
living in the United States. Given the salience of the Islam-terrorism link in the public
mind, the persistence of negative attitudes and the high level of hate crimes aimed at
these groups, government efforts to defuse negative stereotypes, combat hate crime and
further protect American civil liberties are in great demand.

In the previous chapter of this dissertation, I investigated the conditions under
which “high threat” portrayals of terrorism appear in the press. I found that the public
discussion of this threat is deeply intertwined with a number of other important social
issues, including the use of military force, the protection of civil liberties and the image
of the Muslim religion.

In this chapter, I showed that the Bush Administration’s emphasis on the threat of
terrorism as a justiﬁcation for war was reﬂected in the elite press. Articles that showed
support for going to war or increasing troop strength in Iraq and Afghanistan were much

more likely to offer highly threatening portrayals of terrorism than articles that did not

113

make this point. The same relationship held in the case of the USA Patriot Act and the
government’s call for giving up some civil liberties to curb the threat. Adding to the
normative concerns about the treatment of Arabs and Muslims, this chapter also showed
that the Islam-terrorism link appeared regularly in the elite press. Articles that associated
religion with terrorism were more frequently coupled with high threat characteristics,

such nuclear, chemical or biological attacks, than articles that never mentioned religion.

Strengths and Weaknesses

To begin with the strengths of this dissertation, the experimental study shows that
the perceived threat of terrorism is not, contrary to previous research and theorizing, one-
dimensional. Terrorism is a multidimensional hazard that evokes a range of thoughts and
feelings. In line with the psychometric paradigm, the qualitative characteristics of the threat
inﬂuence the way people perceive it. While the theoretical basis of this ﬁnding is not new,
no other empirical study, to my best knowledge, has defended this perspective in the case
of terrorism. Future studies—survey research in particular—should take these results into
account. While most measures of the perceived threat of terrorism carefully distinguish
between personal and collective (“sociotropic”) dangers, very few measures contextualize
the motive behind the threat, or the weaponry that could be used in an attack.

The content analysis portion of the dissertation also makes an important
contribution. This study offers a reliable and valid measure of the threat level in written
communication. While I used the “terrorism threat index” to examine newspaper content, it
could easily be applied to the study of television news transcripts, political speeches,

corporate marketing campaigns, transcriptions of interviews and other socially important

114

documents. The index also comprises both quantitative and qualitative components.
Content measures based on mixed methods increase the validity of the ﬁndings, but they
are relatively rare in the social and communication sciences.

The combination of the two studies represents a third strength of the dissertation.
This is the ﬁrst, terrorism-related study that brings together a news-frame experiment and a
content analysis. Most communication research on the threat of terrorism focuses either on
the effects of media content or the origins of the content, even though these two areas of
research are inextricably linked. The present study does both. It identiﬁes some of the
frames that elevate people’s threat perceptions and explains when and under what
circumstances these frames appear in the elite press in the United States.

The research presented here also has a number of limitations. First, the framing

” ‘6

effects experiment only tested three frames: “terrorism, radical Islam” and “nuclear.”
There may be several other characteristics of news coverage that have similar effects on
people’s thoughts and feelings. Does framing the threat as a local versus national problem
inﬂuence public perceptions? How might the perceived credibility of news sources affect
people’s thinking about terrorism? The present study measured subjects’ reactions to
terrorism motivated either by radical Islam or by homegrown militants who hate their
government. It may be worth considering whether other motives, such as mental illness,
severe developmental problems, or a young person’s anger toward bullies, yield different
results.

Second, as previously discussed, the external validity of the experiment is quite

weak. A broad generalization of these ﬁndings would require a more representative sample

than the one assembled for this study. A productive next step might include a similar

115

experiment embedded in a regional or national survey.

The content analysis had weaknesses as well. First, the number of newspapers
considered was small. To determine how a news organization’s proximity to a high-proﬁle
terrorist target affects its coverage, a much larger sample of newspapers must be drawn.
Second, given the decline of newspaper circulation and the increasing skepticism
surrounding the impact of this medium on public opinion, future research should move
beyond the press and consider other types of media, such as television, radio broadcasts

and online sources.

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APPENDIX A

Federal Commission Considers [<Terrorist> / <Security>]

Threat to Cities

BY KEVIN SHENON
Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Big cities remain
vulnerable to [<terrorist> / <delete>]
threats, a nonpartisan federal
commission suggested in a report
released today.

“I am very worried that [<terrorist>l
<some>] groups may use [<a nuclear
weapon> / <explosives>l to attack an
American city,” said Bernard Hamilton,
vice chairman of the commission.

Cities with high population densities are
“particularly vulnerable” to [<a nuclear
explosion,> / <an explosion,>l
Hamilton said.

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“New screening technologies and
portable [<radiation> / <bomb>]

detectors are needed to protect the
nation’s major urban centers against [<a
terrorist attack,”> / <an attack,”>]
said Dr. Kevin Wright, director of the
Emergency Response Institute.

[<Radical Islamic groups from foreign
countries> / <Homegrown militants>l
pose the most serious [<terrorist> I
<delete>] threat to Americans,
according to the report.

“The most likely perpetrators of new
[<terrorist> / <delete>] attacks are
small groups [<motivated by Islamic
extremism to commit violence against
Americans,”> / <of American citizens
who view their own government as the
enemy,”>] the report suggested.

APPENDIX B

Survey Questions by Variable

 

 

Variable Survey Question Scale / Answer Format
Pretest Risk How would you rate the likelihood of an organized 1 (Extremely Unlikely) to 7
Judgment group carrying out a violent attack on a major (Extremely Likely)
American city in the next 12 months?
Next, we would like to ask you the same question, but Please write in your answer
this time, please give us a number rating between 0% in the space provided:
and 100%. A rating of 0% means that there is no
chance that an attack will happen in the next 12
months. A rating of 100% means that an attack is
certain to happen.
Posttest Risk How would you rate the likelihood of such an attack, as 1 (Extremely Unlikely) to 7
Judgment described in the news article, occurring in the next 12 (Extremely Likely)
months?
Next, we would like to ask you the same question, but A % chance
this time, please give us a number rating between 0%
and 100%. A rating of 0% means that there is no
chance that an attack will happen in the next 12
months. A rating of 100% means that an attack is
certain to happen.
Worry To what extent are you worried about such an attack 1 (Not worried at all) to 7
occurring? (Extremely worried)
How would you rate your level of worry on a scale A rating of
from 0 to 100? A rating of 0 means that you are not at
all worried about an attack. A rating of 100 means that
you are extremely worried about it.
Dread How many people would likely be killed if such an A. Fewer than 10
attack took place? B. 11 to 100
C. 101 to 1,000
D. 1,001 to 10,000
E. 10,001 to 100,000
F. 100,001 to 1,000,000
G. More than 1,000,000
Manipulation What was the religious group afﬁliation of the potential A. Buddhist
check: Islam attackers described in the story? B. Catholic
C. Jewish
D. Islamic

Manipulation
check: Nuclear

What type of weapon was potentially going to be used
according to the story?

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E. The religion of the
potential attackers was not
mentioned

A. Biological weapons
B. Explosives (conventional

Manipulation
check:
Terrorism

Sex

Race/Ethnicity

Age

Political
Ideology

Civil Liberties

Iraq War

What is your recollection of the number of times that
the word “terrorist” was used in the news article that
you just read? Please write in your answer in the space
provided:

We have a few background questions. These are for
statistical analysis purposes only. First, are you male or
female?

What is your race/ethnicity?

How old are you?

How would you describe your political ideology?

How would you describe the level of national news
coverage of the terrorist threat to the United States over
the last 12 months?

To what extent would you support or oppose new laws
to strengthen security measures against terrorism, even
if that meant reducing privacy protections such as
limits on government searches?

To what extent would you be willing or unwilling to
give up some of your personal freedom in order to
reduce the threat of terrorism?

To what extent do you support or oppose the United
States having gone to war against Iraq?

To what extent do you support or oppose the United
States pulling the troops out of Iraq in the near ﬁiture?

bombs)

C. Nuclear weapons
D. Poisonous gas

E. None of the above

The term “terrorist” was used

__ times.

A. Male
B. Female

A. African American or
Black

B. Asian

C. Hispanic, Latino or
Spanish origin

D. White or Caucasian
B. Other

Please write in your answer
in the space
provided:

 

1 (Very conservative) to 7
(Very liberal)

1 (Very light) to 7 (Very
heavy)

I (Strongly oppose) to 7
(Strongly support)

1 (Very Unwilling) to 7
(Very willing)

l (Strongly oppose) to 7
(Strongly support)

1 (Strongly oppose) to 7
(Strongly support)

 

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APPENDIX C

Newspaper coverage of the terrorist threat: Codebook

V1. Story ID number
V2. Date (month/day/year)
V3. Newspaper name
1 = New York Times
2 = Washington Post
3 = Anchorage Daily News
4 = Lincoln Journal Star
V4. Section of newspaper
I = News sections
2 = Editorial/Opinion/Op-Ed
3 = Letters
4 = Interview
5 = Other
V5. Author/Reporter sex
1 = man 2 = woman 3 = can’t tell
Extent of threat
V6. Count occurrences of “terror,” “terrorism,” or “terrorist(s)”
V7. Threat salience: Terror against U.S. homeland only
1 = 51% or more paragraphs on terrorism against homeland (NOT overseas)
0 = 51% or more paragraphs NOT on terrorism against homeland
V8. Dynamics of threat
1 = Threat deemed new / changing / increasing / elevated / an alert, warning
0 = Threat NOT deemed new, etc.
V9. Magnitude of threat (and other worrisome modiﬁers)

1 = Threat deemed serious / major / real / high / ever-present / cause of worry, fear

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0 = Threat NOT deemed serious, etc.

V10. Nuclear threat

 

l = Threat deemed nuclear / biological / chemical / germs / anthrax / nerve gas /
weapons of mass destruction

0 = Threat NOT deemed nuclear, etc.
V11. Suicide threat

1 = Threat associated with suicide terrorists or bombers
0 = Threat NOT associated with suicide, etc.

V12. Speciﬁcity of threat

1 = Speciﬁc threat mentioned (to a particular person, place or thing)
0 = Speciﬁc threat NOT mentioned

V13. Threat questioned/balanced

l = Threat questioned/balanced
0 = Threat NOT questioned/balanced

V14. Overall rating of threat: Coder’s general interpretation

0 l 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Low Somewhat Low Moderate . Somewhat High High
Attribution of threat

V15. Religion

1 = Terrorism associated with Islam, Muslims, religion, ftmdamentalists, radicals
0 = Terrorism NOT associated with Islam, etc., or association refuted/rejected

Controlling the threat

V16. Military actions/spending

 

1 = Mostly/completely supports military actions/spending, war, ﬁghting terrorists
2 = Mixed/balanced/too difﬁcult to judge

3 = Mostly/completely against military actions/spending, war, ﬁghting terrorists
0 = Military actions, war, spending NOT discussed

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V17. Civil liberties tradeoff

1 = Mostly/completely supports/defends Patriot Act/proﬁling/reducing civil rights,
liberties/less privacy/abuse or torture of prisoners, or holding them too long

2 = Mixed/balanced/too difﬁcult to judge

3 = Mostly/completely against/critiques Patriot Act/proﬁling/reducing civil rights,
liberties/less privacy/abuse or torture of prisoners, or holding them too long

0 = Patriot Act/proﬁling/reducing civil liberties, etc., NOT discussed

V18. Source dominance (most frequent source)

Count the paragraphs in which a given source was used. To be counted, the author or
source must discuss the terrorist threat to U.S. or its interests overseas. Determine which
type of source is used in the most paragraphs. Sources can be identiﬁed when reporters use
attribution terms such a “said. ” If an author characterizes the threat, consider him or her
a source. If there is a tie between two diﬂerent sources, determine source dominance by
counting the number of sentences from each type.

1 = Bush Administration sources (all members)

2 = Clinton Administration sources (all member)

3 = John Kerry, John Edwards, or members of their 2004 campaign
4 = Sources identiﬁed as Democrats (not including any of above)

5 = Sources identiﬁed as Republicans (not including any of above)

6 = Other Government sources (not including any of above)
Examples:
Politicians/legislators (national, state, local; no political afﬁliation given)
Ofﬁcials/authorities (no political afﬁliation given)
Governors (no political afﬁliation given)
Mayors (no political afﬁliation given)
Judges (no political afﬁliation given)
FBI, CIA, intelligence ofﬁcials (all levels)
Military ofﬁcials/personnel (all levels)
Police/ﬁre ofﬁcials/personnel (all levels)

7 = Non-Govemment Sources
Examples of non-govemment sources:
Experts (government affiliation not mentioned)
Scholars, scientists, academics, professors
Business owners, employers, CEOs, business managers
Religious leaders of all ranks (priests, ministers, mullahs, pastors,
rabbis)
0 Writers, intellectuals, poets, artists, actors, ﬁlm makers

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o Letter-to-the-editor writers,
0 Citizens, Americans, ordinary people, students, readers, the public
0 Editors of newspapers, byline authors, reporters, columnists

8 = Sources from foreign countries (including the suspected terrorists themselves)
9 = Other

The Protocol: An Introduction

The main goal of this study is to measure the portrayal of the terrorist threat to the United
States in the press. Our basic assumption is that some articles frame the threat as high,
some frame the threat as low, and the difference between these frames can be reliably
measured using a quantitative scale.

We are also interested in what factors inﬂuence the threat level in articles to be high or low.
The factors considered include: I) the events of 9/1 1, 2) the geographical location of the
newspaper, 3) the type of story, 4) sex of reporter/author, 5) the sources used, 6) the
occurrence of frames that identify suspected terrorists’ religion, 7) frames that favor or
oppose military action in response to terrorist threat, 8) frames that favor or oppose the
Patriot Act or similar limitations on civil liberties and rights. Each of these factors is
represented by a variable in the coding protocol.

The unit of analysis is the article.
Article selection

The articles for this study were gathered using seven search terms in the Lexis Nexis
newspaper archive.53

 

53. The search terms include: threat of terror! / terror! threat/ terror! alert / terror! warning / risk of terror! /
terror! risk / war on terror! Articles were chosen for the study only if they explicitly mentioned the threat of
terrorism to the continental United States, including Alaska and Hawaii. The article may also discuss the
threat to U.S. interests overseas, but there must be at least some mention of the threat to the U.S. as well.
We carefully excluded articles about the threat of terrorism to foreign countries. We also excluded articles
covering criminal domestic disputes in which one person makes a “terroristic threat” against another. This
is a misdemeanor offense, almost always involves people who know each other (husband/wife,
student/teacher, etc.), and is not clearly related to our topic. If, by chance, you discover an article that does
not directly mention the threat of terrorism to the United States set it aside and show it to the project
coordinator. This coding scheme is used for analyzing articles. By article, we use the common sense
deﬁnition as written material in a newspaper, published on a particular date, which clearly has a beginning
and an ending and usually consists of multiple sentences. This study is intended to analyze several different
news frames. Frames perform several functions in newspaper articles. They deﬁne problems, explain why
problems occur, and offer solutions to problems. Drawing on this understanding of "frames," this study is
interested in how the threat of terrorism is deﬁned (high or low?), how the cause of terrorism is attributed
(Islamic fundamentalism?) and what should be done to control the threat (military actions, tradeoff on civil
liberties?) The procedures used for identifying and coding these frames are now discussed in detail, in
addition to the other substantive variables in the study.

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Variable deﬁnitions and coding information
V1. Story ID number54
V2. Date (month/day/year)

Record the date using numbers; for instance, an article published on September 11,
2001 should be coded as 9/11/2001.

V3. Newspaper name

1 = New York Times

2 = Washington Post

3 = Anchorage Daily News
4 = Lincoln Journal Star

V4. Section of newspaper

I = News sections
2 = Editorial/Opinion/Op-Ed

3 = Letters
4 = Interview
5=Omm

V5. Author sex
The sex of the author may be determined by the byline of the article. In the case of

multiple authors on the byline, code the sex of the ﬁrst author listed. In the case of
ambiguous names or when names do not appear, code as "can't tell."

Framing Variables
Extent of threat

,, 6‘

V6. Count occurrences of “terror, terrorism,” or “terrorist(s)”

All you have to do is count the number of occurrences of the words “terror,”
“terrorism,” or “terrorist(s)” and write that number down on the line.

V7. Threat salience: Terror against U.S. homeland only

This variable is intended to roughly measure the proportion of each article that deals

 

54. For the sake of organization, each article in the sample should be pasted into a Word ﬁle in chronological
order and given a unique, consecutive identiﬁcation number. Include the letter "x" alter the number (i.e., 1x,
2x, 3x, etc.). The "x" will allow you to perform a quick electronic search and ﬁnd any given article in the
Word ﬁle, when or if further analysis is required at a later date.

124

with the terrorist threat to the continental U.S., including Hawaii and Alaska
(“homeland”). A count of paragraphs will be used to make this measurement. The
number of “on topic” paragraphs should be divided by the total number of
paragraphs in the article. If the percentage is 51% or greater, code as 1. If not, code
as 0.

Deﬁnition of ”on topic. ”

Count any paragraph that includes an explicit mention (e. g., “the terrorist threat to
the United States”) or implicit mention (e.g., “we must deal with the terrorist
threat”) of the threat. Examples:
0 Threats to the country in general, an American city, or some other speciﬁc
American target
0 The vulnerability of homeland targets or a need for more protection against
terrorism
0 The destruction, in lives or infrastructure, to America caused by terrorist
attacks
0 The public’s perception of the terrorist threat
0 Discussions about terrorists, their abilities, how many terrorists exist, how
they operate, how they plan attacks, ﬁnd funding, gain intelligence (in the
context of the homeland, or in the case when there is no other mention of a
target overseas)
o The cause of terrorism against the homeland

NOTE 1: Many articles simply discuss the “terrorist threat” without specifying
whether this threat is against the homeland or U.S. interests overseas. Assume that
all mentions of the threat are against the homeland if a speciﬁc geographical
location outside the U.S. is not given.

NOTE 2: This variable is the only one that only considers the terrorist threat to the
homeland. All other variables consider both the threat to homeland as well as the
threat to U.S. interests overseas. (Of course, none of the variables consider the
threat to other countries).

NOTE 3: There is an inherent difﬁculty with articles about Saddam Hussein. Let
us count any paragraph that mentions the “threat” of Hussein as “on topic” unless
it explicitly mentions some other target besides the U.S. (for instance, the threat of
Hussein to Middle East stability, to Israel, or to his own people is “off topic”).
This runs from the logic that we are already counting general statements about the
“terrorist threat” as on topic (i.e., dangerous to homeland). The idea is that many
people may presume the threat is to America when there are no explicit details
citing other regions of the world.

The given “threat to homeland” can be up to 4 years in the past from the date of
publication. For instance, if an article published in 2003 says that the attacks on

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V8.

V9.

9/11 demonstrated the nation’s serious vulnerability to terrorism, this would be a
“magnitude mention” (V9).

Deﬁnition of “oﬂ topic ”

discussions on a completely different subject

the threat of terrorism to other countries

the threat to U.S. citizens living or traveling abroad

the threat to American soldiers or military installations overseas, U.S.
embassies and their personnel, etc.

0 Also, paragraphs that are devoted to debunking or questioning the terrorist
threat should NOT be counted.

Dynamics of threat

This variable measures whether the article modiﬁes the terrorist threat with various
adjectives related to the dynamics of the threat, that is, the change or grth of the
threat, including words such as new / changing / increasing / growing / elevated / an
alert / a warning / worsening.55 Instead of talking directly about the terrorists, the
article may also talk about an increasing vulnerability in the U.S., an increasing
fear or concern, or increasing security efforts. In all the cases stated above, code as
1. In all other cases, code as 0. If the article discusses a decline in the threat level
(even though it is technically a “change”), do not code it as l.

Magnitude of threat and other worrisome modiﬁers

This variable measure whether the article modiﬁes the threat with various adjectives
related to the magnitude of the threat, including words such as serious / large /
major / real / high / catastrophic / ever-present / scary / or a cause of concern,
worry, or fear. The article might also modify the magnitude of the terrorists’
determination, will, or ability to carry out attacks. Code these articles as 1. If the
article does not contain a magnitude modiﬁer, code as 0.56

V10. Nuclear threat

 

55. The author may explicitly mention the "new threat of terrorism" or the "increasing threat of terrorism,"
a "terrorism warning, " or “terror alert.” The Department of Homeland Security regularly issued such
warnings and alerts, urging various regions of the nation, or the country as a whole, to prepare for possible
terrorist attacks. Remember, there are many similar ways to elaborate on the dynamics or changing
character of the threat (although if the change relates to a decrease in the threat, do not, of course, use code

as 1).

56. It is often the case that a single phrase contains both a description of the dynamics of the threat (see
previous variable), as well as a magnitude modiﬁer. In this case, code both variables as 1. For instance:
“the high and increasing threat of terrorism,” or “Americans are becoming increasingly concerned about
the threat.”

126

V11.

V12.

V13.

Whenever the article associates the terrorist threat with a “nuclear,” “biological,”
“bioterrorist,” or “chemical,” attack, or relates it to “germs” or “anthrax,” code as 1.
Also code as 1 when an attack on a “nuclear” or “chemical” plant in the U.S. is
discussed. In all other cases, code as 0.

Suicide threat

Whenever the article associates the threat with a terrorist's willingness to end his or
her own life (sometimes referred to as “suicide bombers”), code as 1. In all other
cases, code as 0.

Speciﬁcity of threat

This variable is intended to determine whether the article referred to a terrorist
threat to a speciﬁc person, group, place or thing. For instance, when the article
describes a threat to the State of Michigan, New York City, the White House, the
Brooklyn bridge, the Fermi Nuclear Plant, the Alaskan pipeline, U.S. soldiers in
Iraq or Afghanistan, a speciﬁc military vessel, piece of equipment, or some other
speciﬁc target, code as 1 (“speciﬁc threat mentioned”). Every article in the sample
mentions some kind of threat, so if it is not a “speciﬁc” one, it will be a “gener ”
one by default.57 Code these articles as 0 (“speciﬁc threat NOT mentioned”).

Threat questioned/balanced

Many articles will describe the threat of terrorism without questioning whether it
actually exists, or without balancing high assessments of the threat with low
assessments. In this case, code as 0 ("threat not questioned").

In other cases, however, the article will question the extent of the threat or assess it
as low. There are many different possibilities for this to occur. In short, the article
might assess the vulnerability of a terrorist target as low, the consequences of an
attack as low, dispel a rumor about a threat, say that “no speciﬁc threat has been
detected,” or that the intelligence is incomplete, or that the people’s response is
exaggerated, or that certain social actors beneﬁt from people’s concern about the
threat (see endnote for more detail), or that the threat of terrorism is less than some
other danger, such as the danger of limiting civil liberties.58 Code these cases as 1

 

57. These “general” articles may simply mention the threat of terrorism, or talk about the threat to the U.S.,
America, the American people, the population, the American way of life, the American government,
western civilization, American democracy or some other vague target at the national level or higher.

58. For instance, an article may cover the debate among nuclear power experts over the vulnerability of
power plants to terrorism. One expert might portray the vulnerability as high, while the other says it's low.
There is a similar debate over the terrorists’ ability to gain access to nuclear, chemical, or biological
weapons. As another example, a reporter might cover several speciﬁc threats or vulnerabilities, describing
some as serious, while others as less serious. In a similar vein, the article might claim that while a particular
target is indeed vulnerable (e.g., the Alaskan pipeline), the consequences of an attack would not be great or
at least would not be as great as some expect (e.g., the Alaskan pipeline can be ﬁxed relatively easily). In

127

(“threat questioned”).
V14. Overall rating of threat: Coder’s general interpretation

You can think of all of the variables described above as “objective” or
“quantitative” indicators. In each case, you were asked whether or not an article
contained a speciﬁc piece of content. For the present variable, in contrast, we are
interested in your overall interpretation of the portrayal of the threat. Each article
should be rated on a lO-point scale. A rating of 10 indicates a “high” level of threat,
and 0 indicates a “low” level of threat. Considering all aspects of the article, judge
the article. If the threat seems more high than low, rate it between 6 and 10, and if it
seems more low than high, rate it between 0 and 4, depending on how clearly you
believe the extent of the threat was portrayed as high or low. Code articles as 5 if
the threat seems to be moderate (see endnote for more details).59 Remember, this is
your interpretation of what the article as a whole is saying about the seriousness of

the threat.
Attribution of terrorism
V15. Religion

If the article associates the terrorist threat with religion in any way, code as 1
(including references to Islamic fundamentalists or Muslim terrorists, or simply

 

some cases, you might ﬁnd an entire article devoted to questioning the threat of terrorism. For instance, a
popular rumor of a threat might be dispelled in a short news report (this oﬁen happened in the case of
stories on anthrax). The article might mention that “no speciﬁc threat has been detected,” or that the
intelligence is questionable or incomplete. Another example occurs when an author claims or implies that
the government or some other institution, group or individual beneﬁts from the public’s fear or concern
about terrorism. Although such a statement does not directly claim that the threat is “low” or “non
existent,” it certainly indicates the article’s skeptical perspective on the threat. In a similar case, the article
may directly claim or insinuate that the threat of terrorism has been exaggerated, or that ofﬁcials or the
public has overreacted to the threat. Finally, the article may argue that the warnings and alerts about the
threat are too vague or lack evidence, data and clear information.

59. We think coders have an almost natural ability to make such interpretations. As constant decision
makers, we judge threats and risks on an everyday basis. In many cases, we quickly make these judgments
based on a multitude of indicators, some of which are quite subtle (for instance, we might regard someone
as physically threatening based on their expression, demeanor, beauty, voice quality, smell, clothing, race,
and other factors). For this variable, we’d like you to rate each article based in part on the subtleties and
nuances of the article viewpoint. Perhaps there’s a particular style, tone or hint of sarcasm that indicates a
high or a low threat. Of course, your rating should take into account the quantitative variables (the
prominence, intensity, speciﬁcity and critiques of the threat), but you do not need to count or average these
variables to make your decision. Simply give your general impression. Remember, however, you will not
be judging whether you personally ﬁnd the article scary or threatening. Rather, we want you to judge
whether the author or source is portraying the terrorist threat as high, low or somewhere in the middle. Try
not to react to the type of author or the sources used in the articles. Treat the claims of all authors and
sources the same, whether it’s a presidential address or a letter-to-the-editor writer. As you read, place
yourself in the author's or source’s shoes. Given the focus or emphasis of the article, the word choices used,
as well as the tone and rhetorical style, does the article as a whole portray the threat as high, moderate or
low?

128

fundamentalists, extremists, radicals, the Muslim world, etc.). If religion is not
linked or associated with terrorism (or if the link is reﬁtted in the article),60 code as
0 (“Terrorism NOT associated with Islam/religion”).

Controlling terrorism

V16.

Military actions/spending

This variable is intended to measure whether the article as a whole showed support
or rejection of the use of military force or spending as a response to the threat of
terrorism. There are many different ways to advocate the use of military force,
including:
1) by explicitly stating support for the idea of going to war or conducting a
military strike in the future
2) by depicting an ongoing war using favorable phrases and terminology
3) arguing that an ongoing (or future) war decreases the risk of terrorism or
shows the terrorists that we will not back down
4) by arguing that war or military force will result (or already resulted) in
desirable outcomes for the United States, besides decreasing terrorism, such
as the promotion of democracy or simply “winning the war.”

Remember, people, including the president, sometimes talk about the need for
military actions using slang-type phrases, such as “go get ’em,” “take it to them,”
and “scare them out of their holes.”

There has also been lots of discussion about the need for a missile defense system,
which would be very costly and its ability to make us safer has been debated for
many years.

Most articles will clearly take a side and indicate either support or rejection of war
or military spending. In articles that consider both sides of the debate, count the
number of paragraphs in which support or rejection is made. If more paragraphs
support, as opposed to reject, code as 1. If more paragraphs reject, as opposed to
support, code as 3. Remember, any given paragraph could be counted as both
support and rejection of military force (though it will only rarely happen). Even
with the double counting, in most cases one side will receive more paragraphs than
the other. However, if there’s a tie, count sentences instead. If the issue is indeed
brought up in the article, but you are simply unsure whether to code it as a l or a 3,
code it as a 2 (“too difﬁcult to judge”).

As a rule, do not count paragraphs that simply give the “who-what-where-why-how
facts of journalism” about military actions or spending, unless it covers a viewpoint
or stance toward this issue.

 

60. In some cases, the article may dispute the link, criticize those who associate terrorism with Islam/religion,
or describe Islam as peaceful, tolerant or non-violent, or in some other way defend the religion’s image.
These articles should obviously be coded as 0 (“Terrorism NOT associated with Islam/religion”).

129

V17.

V18.

Civil liberties reduction/Patriot Act

This variable takes into account a rather wide array of issues related to civil
liberties. Many authors and politicians (especially after 9/11) have debated whether
ethnic proﬁling should be used in airport security, whether it is reasonable to give
up some of our privacy in order to ﬁght terrorism, and whether terrorism-related
prisoners should be held in the U.S. or in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for long periods
of time without a court trial. There have also been debates over the rights of
immigrants in America. Many of these debates will be centered on the Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act is a federal law with many aspects designed to curb terrorist
activities. Another issue is the mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq. Many authors have
also discussed their concerns about the rights and well being of Muslims and Arabs
living in America.

Although each of the issues discussed above is different, we believe that they share
a common theme and therefore placed them in the same category. Again, most
articles will clearly take a side and indicate either support or rejection on this issue.
In articles that consider both sides of the debate, follow the same rules as in
Variable 16 on military actions.

As a rule, do not count paragraphs that simply give the “who-what-where-why-how
facts of journalism” about issues related to civil liberties, unless it covers a
viewpoint or stance toward these issues.

I = Mostly/completely supports or defends proﬁling/reducing civil liberties/less
privacy/holding prisoners for long periods in U.S., or Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

2 = Mixed/balanced/too difﬁcult to judge

3 = Mostly/completely against proﬁling/reducing civil liberties/less privacy/
holding prisoners for long periods in U.S. or Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

0 = Proﬁling/reducing civil liberties etc, privacy NOT discussed

Source dominance (most frequent source)

This variable identiﬁes who talks most about the threat of threat of terrorism to U.S.
interests anywhere.6| Our main priority is to ﬁnd out whether government sources
dominated the public discussion on the threat of terrorism in the article. To make
this determination, identify all the paragraphs in which the given article discusses or
at least mentions 1) the threat of terrorism to the United States, 2) the capabilities of
the terrorists, 3) the nation’s vulnerability or 4) the need to defend against terrorism.
We will determine “source dominance” by counting up all the paragraphs in which

 

61. A source is a person or organization that gives information to a journalists, news reporters or
commentator. “A source is explicitly identiﬁed as such when news reporters and other commentators quote
or paraphrase information from him or her in stories" (F ico, "Fairness in Election Coverage"). Sources can
be identiﬁed when reporters or commentators use attribution words and phrases, such as “he said,” “as
suggested by so—and-so,” or “she stated in a press conference.”

130

the given source was used. A source can be counted only once per paragraph. If the
author talks about the threat without using a source in a given paragraph, count the
author as a source for that paragraph. For example, if the author talks about the
threat in 6 out of 10 paragraphs and cites a government source in 4 out of 10
paragraphs, the author is the “dominant source” in this article. If there is a tie
between two different sources, determine source dominance by counting the
number of sentences.

1 = Bush Administration sources (all members)
2 = Clinton Administration sources (all member)
3 = John Kerry, John Edwards, or members of their 2004 campaign
4 = Sources identiﬁed as Democrats (not including any of above)
5 = Sources identiﬁed as Republicans (not including any of above)
6 = Other Government sources (not including any of above)
Examples:
0 Politicians/legislators (national, state, local; no political afﬁliation given)
Ofﬁcials/authorities (no political afﬁliation given)
Governors (no political afﬁliation given)
Mayors (no political afﬁliation given)
Judges (no political afﬁliation given)
FBI, CIA, intelligence ofﬁcials (all levels)
Military ofﬁcials/personnel (all levels)
0 Police/ﬁre officials/personnel (all levels)
7 = Non-Govemment Sources
Examples of non-govemment sources:
0 Experts (government afﬁliation not mentioned)
Scholars, scientists, academics, professors
Business owners, employers, CEOs, business managers
Religious leaders of all ranks (priests, ministers, mullahs, pastors,
rabbis)
Writers, intellectuals, poets, artists, actors, ﬁlm makers
Letter-to-the-editor writers,
Citizens, Americans, ordinary people, students, readers, the public
0 Editors of newspapers, byline authors, reporters, columnists

8 = Sources from foreign countries (including the suspected terrorists themselves)
9=Omm

131

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