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.
Using a statistical procedure called multiple regression analysis, we first examined the extent to which the news media’s coverage of terrorism is related to public perceptions of the gravity of the terrorist threat to the United States. One might expect the total volume of mass-mediated threat messages to have an effect on perceptions of terrorism as the most important national problem, but this is not the case. We found that it is not the volume of threat messages that matters, but who conveys such messages.
As we see in Figure 1, all the variables show decreases over time in the same direction, with increases during some of the same short-term periods. While some of the smaller short-term changes and others cited below might not appear significant by themselves, they are compelling in
their consistency with the overall patterns of statistical relationships.
When Bush’s reactions to and comments about terrorist threats are reported in television news and when administration officials make these statements, the public is more likely to perceive terrorism as most important. This happened at several points: In June 2002 the peak in the public’s threat perception followed several terrorism alerts in the previous months, when administration officials initiated a heightened state of alert for railroads and other transit systems and warned of a special threat against the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. Moreover, in early June, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft made the dramatic announcement that Jose Pardilla, a U.S. citizen and al-Qaeda associate, had been arrested before he could acquire and explode a “dirty bomb” in an American city. As television news covered these threat announcements heavily, the public’s view of terrorism as a major problem for the country increased from 22 percent in May to 33 percent in June.
Figure 1
It is noteworthy that there was a dearth of mass-mediated threat messages and actual threat and alert statements in the preceding period. In February 2003, a month before the invasion of Iraq, President Bush’s relevant statements were reported on TV three times, and there were five original statements by administration officials. The following month, we see a slight increase in the public’s perception of terrorism (from 10 percent to 13 percent) after a decrease in the previous months (from 18 percent to 10 percent).
In December 2003, when Saddam Hussein was captured, the same pattern occurred. One might think that this success would lead to a decreased level of threat (no correlation was found between these types of messages with responses to any of our survey questions), and a smaller percentage of people thinking that terrorism is the most important issue facing the country. But two heavily covered domestic events could have affected the public: First, the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean, said publicly that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented. Three days later, Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge raised the terror-threat alert for the upcoming holidays.
Finally, in the months before the presidential elections, the pattern occurred again: From June 2004 (or even earlier) the public’s perceptions regarding terrorism as a major problem strengthened steadily, with a peaking in September-October 2004 to the same level it reached in November 2002 (when the American-led coalition had made progress in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban).
We next looked at the public’s concern about more major terrorist attacks occurring in the United States. In this case, we found that the media had the only apparent influence on people’s perceptions, with several concurrent peaks appearing in the trend: When media professionals talked about terrorism threats or increased levels of alert, the public became more concerned. This occurred particularly around February/March 2003, with 27-29 percent of the public very concerned about another major attack occurring (rising from 22 percent in previous opinion polls). In February, network TV mentioned the threat of terrorism twenty-five times and increased levels of official alerts, followed up by six messages in March, when the Iraq invasion was launched. The threat messages reached a peak of fifty-five in August 2004, and, a month later, 25 percent of the public was very concerned about another attack in the United States.
When pollsters mentioned a particular timeframe, asking respondents whether they worried that another terrorist attack would occur “soon,” we found that the actual statements by U.S. administration officials alerting the public to specific terrorist threats or speaking in more general terms about the threat had the strongest impact on public opinion. The public’s perceptions fluctuated noticeably, while the same basic pattern occurred with respect to the original statements by officials. In June 2002, when there were more official statements about the terrorist threat and the increase in the alert level, the public reacted with a sharp increase (from 20 percent in January, the last time the question was asked, to 32 percent) in the level of worry. In February 2003, several actual statements by officials followed a couple of quiet months and were followed by a sharp increase in the percentage of the Americans revealing that they were very worried about a terrorist attack occurring soon—with the percentage nearly doubling from 18 percent in January 2003 to 34 percent in February.
Focusing next on the issue of the likelihood of another terrorist attack in the United States within a “few months,” we found an apparent impact of both the media’s coverage of President Bush’s comments and assessments concerning the terrorist threat, as well as of actual statements by U.S. administration officials alerting the public to specific terror threats or speaking in more general terms.
It is interesting to note in Figure 2 the corresponding high and low levels in all three variables. In June 2002 more people—36 percent compared to 29 percent in May—believed it “very likely” that another terrorist attack would happen within the next few months. In the same month, there were seven original statements by officials about the terrorist threat and higher alert level (as opposed to an average of three or four in the previous months), and television news reported one pertinent comment by President Bush. Another peak occurred in October-November 2002, with 27 percent of the public responding that a terrorist attack was “very likely” in the next few months; this coincided with two actual statements by officials in October, followed by six such pronouncements in November.
Figure 2
In February 2003, 29 percent of the public, up from 14 percent in January, believed an attack was very likely to happen within the next few months. During that time, television news carried three threat messages by President Bush, and officials made five actual threat statements. Not surprisingly, from July to September 2004, during the buildup to the final phase of the presidential election campaign, 19 percent of the public, up from 12 percent in April, thought it very likely that another attack would happen within a few months. During this time, television news frequently carried threat and alert messages by President Bush, and administration officials just as often made similar pronouncements.
Looking at perceived threats at the personal level, as shown in Figure 3, we find a slightly different picture. When it came to the public’s own deepest concerns, perceptions about Osama bin Laden may have mattered most. Specifically, the variables were those related to public officials’ (including President Bush’s) comments on TV about bin Laden or the al-Qaeda threat; news anchors, correspondents or reporters describing bin Laden or the al-Qaeda threats; the actual warnings or threats of more terrorist attacks by bin Laden and his al-Qaeda associates themselves; and U.S. officials’ actual statements about the threat of terrorism.
Figure 3
Figure 3 shows that, even as time passed, a relatively high percentage of the public continued to say they were very or somewhat worried that they and their loved ones would be affected personally by a terrorist attack. Though we see spikes in the trend, the overall pattern is fairly steady. It is interesting to note that in this case, unlike the others, just mentioning bin Laden or al-Qaeda in TV news, or the appearance of bin Laden or al-Qaeda in tapes, seemed to matter.
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.
Wordings for Survey Questions Used in the Analysis
1. What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?—Terrorism
2. How concerned are you about the possibility there will be more major terrorist attacks in the United States? Is that something that worries you a great deal, somewhat, not too much, or not at all?
3. How worried are you that there will soon be another terrorist attack in the United States—very worried, somewhat worried, not too worried, or not at all worried?
4. How likely do you think it is that there will be another terrorist attack in the United States within the next few months—very likely, somewhat likely, not very likely, or not at all likely?
5. 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 worried at all?
6. Do you approve or disapprove of the way Bush is handling the U.S. campaign against terrorism?
7. Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?
Additional Reading
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