Does Terrorism Succeed? Media Coverage of Terrorism’s Effect on State Legitimacy

• In Event: Dynamics of Terrorism

Abstract

If a terrorist attack occurs and is not widely publicized, does it really constitute terrorism? The dearth of scholarly literature addressing the relationship between media coverage of terrorism and the institutional legitimacy of the state makes it difficult to suggest a conclusive answer to this question.
The communication and media studies literatures tend to focus on the role that media coverage plays in connection with public opinion, emphasizing the role of propaganda (propagande par le fait) as a form of deliberate control of narrative and the proliferation of information. To that end, what has been termed the ‘symbiosis between terrorism and media coverage’ is framed as perpetrated with an eye to short term goals (as the focus of the objectives of insurgents). Scholarship conceived of from this perspective tends to overlook the long-term damage that terrorism does to state interests as an element in the trajectory of the state’s history and the state’s history with politically-motivated violence.
Expanding on Daniel Masters and Patricia Hoen’s 2012 research, which generated results that empirically support the hypothesis that “low legitimacy states” experience higher levels of domestic terrorist activity than “high legitimacy states,” this paper uses quantitative analysis to indicate the scale and strength of any possible causal correlation between the media coverage and framing of terrorism and state legitimacy. As such, it establishes covariation and suggests the magnitude of relations between the independent variables of terrorist activity (I1) and media coverage of terrorism (I2), and the dependent variable state legitimacy (D0). This analysis consists of a four-factor multivariate data analysis (MVA), which involves two simple linear regressions (between I1 and D0, and I2 and D0), three Spearman correlations (two of which are to be run concurrent to the simple linear regressions, using the same variables; the third Spearman correlation will be conducted in connection with I1 and I2), an χ2 test (to determine whether D0 is normally distributed), and the calculation of the R2 of the simple linear regression conducted in connection with I2 and D0.
Ultimately, this paper employs quantitative methodology to suggest that media coverage of terrorist incidents negatively affects the legitimacy of the state as an institution.

Author

• Eliana Glogauer, Royal Military College of Canada