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Language
English (en)
Date of Award
3-1-2018
Author's Department
International and Area Studies
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts (A.B.)
Restricted/Unrestricted
Restricted
Abstract
The recent success of right-wing political campaigns in both the United States and Europe has drawn upon nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiments. At the same time, Isis continues to claim responsibility for a number of deadly attacks orchestrated by both singular actors and coordinated terror cells and gaining significant media coverage. This paper seeks to examine the relationship between successful right-wing politics and the reporting of “radical Islamic terrorism.” More specifically, I hope to understand if the Trump and Brexit campaigns of 2016 had an influence on the U.S. and U.K. newspaper coverage of terrorist attacks, resulting in more anti-Muslim rhetoric being disseminated through the news. Existing theories have proven the newsworthiness of both terrorist attacks and political campaigns, and I aim to analyze the relationship between the two. Using a dataset containing all terrorist attacks from 2014-2016 in addition to the number of news articles from six different newspapers coded as terrorism each week during the two years, I test various variables using a statistical model. I test existing theories related to the effect of attack number, size and location on news reporting, and I also test my new theory that the Trump and Brexit campaigns would result in an increase in terrorism reporting. I then perform a discourse analysis on the articles surrounding four attacks, looking at both American and European attacks, to determine if a change in framing occurred during the Trump and Brexit campaigns. The results of this study support the existing theory that Western events drive news coverage, and the qualitative analysis supports the hypothesis that the Trump campaign resulted in more anti-immigrant rhetoric in American press but reject the hypothesis that the Brexit campaign resulted in more support for closed door policies in U.K. terrorism reporting.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/pyp6-ec78
Mentor
Jeremy Caddel
Recommended Citation
Hermes, Abby, "Terrorism in the News: Exploring the Influence of the Trump and Brexit Campaigns on Print Media" (2018). Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses. 196.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/pyp6-ec78
Comments
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