Terrorism Alerts, News Coverage, and Threat Perceptions By Brigitte Nacos et al. page4

How did all this affect President Bush’s approval ratings? While the general public approval of presidents is affected by all kinds of mass-mediated events and developments, it appears that both Bush's overall approval ratings and the public’s rating of his handling of terrorism were affected by news reports of his statements about the terrorist threat and increases in the alert level and administration officials’ public statements.

Figure 4

As we see in Figure 4, even though the general pattern is one of a gradual decrease in both approval ratings over our thirty-nine-month period, certain brief spikes occur roughly in tandem with increases in the number of administration statements and news reports citing President Bush on the terrorist threat. For example, in July 2002, we found one statement by Bush reported on television and seven actual public statements about the terrorist threat by administration officials coinciding with a four-point increase in the president’s rating on handling terrorism, to 83 percent. During September/October 2002, this approval declined to 74 percent. In September, there were three comments by President Bush reported on television, as were four public statements by administration officials emphasizing the terrorist threat. This was followed in October by two statements by officials and six more the following month, preceding a five-point increase in the public’s approval of Bush’s handling of terrorism in December 2002 (79 percent). During February 2003, three television-reported statements by Bush, along with five actual statements by officials, occurred in tandem with a slight increase of three points (to 74 percent) in Bush’s terrorism-specific approval. There had not been statements of this sort during the preceding months of December 2002 and January 2003, when the Bush rating dropped by eight points to 71 percent. By April 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, the approval rating for Bush’s handling of terrorism reached 79 percent. The same pattern occurred for Bush’s overall approval, as well.

Not surprisingly, we found no correlation between public perceptions of the terrorist threat and mass-mediated or actual statements about the lowering of terrorism alerts. Stories reporting the official lowering of the terror-alert levels were either not prominently covered or not covered at all.

Network TV newscasts have devoted generous airtime and prominent placements to attention-getting, disconcerting threats communicated by Osama bin Laden and his associates, or terrorism alerts issued by administration officials. By comparison, the nondramatic and presumably calming news of administration decisions to relax terror alerts have been undercovered, and thus minimized.

These coverage patterns have played into the hands of the al-Qaeda leadership, whose communications have left no doubt about its goal to strike fear into Americans. But President Bush, and others in the administration, too, have benefited from the generous coverage of their terror alerts and threat assessments. Bush himself told a White House reporter that he believed “his 2004 re-election victory over Sen. John Kerry was inadvertently aided by Osama bin Laden, who issued a taped diatribe against him the Friday before Americans went to the polls.” As the president put it, “I thought it was going to help. I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden does not want Bush to be president, something must be right with Bush.” Not surprisingly, Senator Kerry, too, told an interviewer soon after the election that he lost to Bush because of the bin Laden video.

After the end of the Cold War, some media scholars expected that the disappearance of the long Cold War consensus would free the media from presidents’ and administration officials’ dominance of security and foreign policy news. Since the predominant terrorist threat of our time has both international and domestic dimensions, our study offered a test of the hypothesis of the press’s liberation. If there was a short period in which the news media were independent of Washington’s decision-makers, it did not last past the events of 9/11. Instead, just as during the Cold War, authoritative sources (the president, other administration officials, members of Congress, state and local officials, former military and government figures) were the predominant news sources.

As our study shows, the relationships between mass-mediated terror alerts and threat messages and the public’s evaluation of terrorism as the country’s major problem are strong. But, contrary to previous research, we found that it was not the total volume of threat news but rather the influence of particular sources that moved public opinion. Here, the president and administration officials apparently had the greatest effects on Americans’ collective assessment of terrorism as the nation’s top problem.

Whereas bin Laden’s threat messages did not win (nor aim for) the sympathies of Americans, President Bush’s overall job performance and the public rating of the handling of terrorism improved as a result of official alerts or threat assessments and related press coverage. Perhaps some people in the administration were aware of these effects in the light of revelations by Tom Ridge, who resigned as secretary of homeland security in early 2005. In an effort to “debunk the myth” of his department’s responsibility for repeated terror alerts, Ridge said, “There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it [the color-coded terror alert level], and we said, ‘For what?’”

Brigitte L. Nacos is an adjunct professor of political science at Columbia University and publisher of the blog reflectivepundit. Yaeli Bloch-Elkon is senior instructor/assistant professor of political science and communications at Bar-Ilan University and a research associate at Columbia's Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. Robert Y. Shapiro is a professor of political science at Columbia University and a 2006-7 visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.