The Threat of International Terrorism after 9/11: News Coverage and Public Perceptions

By Brigitte L. Nacos, Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, and Robert Y. Shapiro

On May 20, 2003, CBS led its evening news with the report that President George W. Bush had approved raising the national terror alert from yellow, meaning an elevated risk of a terror attack, to orange, meaning the United States was at high risk. Three and a half minutes of air time, several interviews with officials and Washington correspondents, and 642 words were devoted to this alarming news.

Ten days later, when the alert level was lowered once again to yellow, the CBS Evening News used forty-three words in two sentences in a nonlead segment to inform the audience that there was less reason to worry about a terrorist attack. Similar scenarios played out on the newscasts of the other two major networks.

Terrorists, decision-makers in targeted countries, and students of terrorism have long assumed that not only terrorist attacks but serious threats of such strikes can and do increase targeted publics’ fears and anxieties. We conducted a study to test this conventional wisdom by examining the actual threat communications by Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda figures, the terror alerts and threat assessments by President Bush and members of his administration, and the TV network coverage of these threat pronouncements, and comparing them with trends in the American public’s perceptions of threat in the post-9/11 era.

Since television news reported by the three major broadcast networks is the most important source of information for the majority of the public, we chose the early evening newscasts of ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News for our content analysis of terror-threat news. Using coded abstracts available from Vanderbilt University’s Television News Archive, we searched for segments that contained the terms threat(s), alert(s), or warning(s) in the context of terrorism for the thirty-nine-month period from October 1, 2001, to December 31, 2004. We also searched for reports that mentioned messages, statements, or tapes and bin Laden or al-Qaeda, literally all of which contained threats or warnings of future terrorist attacks. We retrieved a total of 373 relevant story abstracts, plus a small number of newscast transcripts from the Lexis/Nexis news archives for a qualitative analysis of pertinent segments.

To evaluate public opinion, we retrieved survey questions about Americans’ fears, concerns, worries, and assessments of the terrorist threat, as well as on President Bush’s overall and terrorism-specific approval ratings, from September 11, 2001, to December 31, 2004. The search word “terrorism” produced 3,235 survey items from the iPOLL archive of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. We selected identical questions, preferably asked by the same survey organizations and repeated over time, in order to determine short- and long-term trends from iPOLL, the “Polling the Nations” archive, the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, and several other polling institutions. The portion of our analysis presented here focused on seven of these questions.

Unsurprisingly, the public’s perception of terrorism as the most important issue facing the country today has decreased markedly since 9/11, a trend that correlates significantly with those of the questions dealing with concern about terrorist attacks. Comparisons with Bush’s approval ratings, in general and with regard to terrorism, similarly indicate a systematic drop every year since 9/11.

Going beyond these general observations, we compared the trends in responses to each of our public opinion questions with, respectively, trends in media (television) reporting on threats and alerts, and trends in public threat assessments and terrorist alerts by U.S. administration officials. In one instance (see Figure 4, below), we included the timeline for the actual video- and audio-taped communications by bin Laden during the thirty-nine-month period studied. To rule out confusion between the threats and alerts that were covered in the news and the actual al-Qaeda threats and alerts by administration officials, we refer to news coverage as "mediated reality" and to official and terrorist pronouncements as “actual” or “original” statements.