The analysis thus far compares the effect of exposure to two types of terrorism stories to exposure to a nonterrorism story. Yet 26 million Americans a night watch news that consistently features threatening terrorism stories. To the extent that watchers are exposed to threatening stories, we may wonder how presentational features of these terrorism stories matter. The previous analyses found that television news exposure had the largest impact on respondents already concerned about terrorism. To test whether frightening imagery by itself affects foreign policy attitudes, Figure 5 presents the difference in average foreign policy attitudes between high-threat respondents (those whose pretest results showed a level of threat above the mean) in, respectively, the scary visuals condition and the neutral visuals condition. Average scores above zero indicate that the scary visuals condition moved attitudes toward the hawkish end more than the neutral visuals condition, while negative scores indicate that the neutral visuals condition caused more hawkishness among respondents than the scary visuals condition.

The figure demonstrates that exposure to the scary visuals condition made high-threat Democrats prefer significantly more militant policies than did exposure to the neutral visuals condition. This finding is particularly remarkable, given that the Democrats in this sample seemed particularly unlikely to be moved by terrorism cues: Prior to the experiment, only 6 percent said they voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, 89 percent strongly disapproved of the president, and 55 percent wanted to decrease the defense budget. The combination of the strong message and the evocative images of the scary visuals story, however, induced Democrats concerned about terrorism to adopt a more hawkish policy than only the cue in the neutral visuals condition that terrorism was likely in the near future. The effect of the scary visuals condition on Democrats is a testament to the indelible emotional mark left on Americans by the images associated with 9/11.

In contrast to Democrats, Independents and Republicans reacted to the neutral visuals condition and the scary visuals condition by the same magnitude. Republican attitudes were unmoved by any of the experimental stories. As noted before, Independents’ attitudes reacted to the threatening content in the neutral visuals condition more than the threatening imagery offered by the scary visuals condition. Since Independents in this sample were less politically knowledgeable than both Democrats and Republicans, their attitudes were most affected by the information common to the neutral visuals and scary visuals story. Overall, this figure demonstrates that the presentation of threatening news does matter in shaping public opinion on foreign policy, but that it matters by convincing Democrats to support more militant types of foreign policy.

Terrorism is newsworthy because it is timely, sensational, and novel, and it is covered extensively by the news media. In the years following the 9/11 attacks, television broadcasts increasingly focused on terrorism and war-related stories, and the stories themselves focused on the threatening aspects of events more than the reassuring ones. In combination with findings of the larger study of which it is a part, this experiment demonstrates that sensationalistic news coverage moves the American public in a more hawkish direction—increasing support for aggressive foreign policy, up to and including war.

More than five years after the 9/11 attacks, exposure to a single terrorism story led experiment subjects to prefer more aggressive types of foreign policy when the story presented both a threatening message and threatening visuals. What makes this finding especially striking is that in the years since 9/11, American citizens saw frequent news stories about terrorism and presumably had stored knowledge and beliefs about counterterrorism policy. Equally remarkable is the fact that even though the public is both interested and knowledgeable about terrorism—according to a 2005 Pew Research Center poll, 88 percent claimed to pay close or very close attention to news coverage of the July 7, 2005, London terrorist bombing—watching one more frightening terrorism story significantly influenced attitudes, particularly among Democrats.

Politicians who invoke terrorism or 9/11 to promote foreign policies run the risk of appearing manipulative to the public, particularly to members of the opposing party. During the 2004 presidential campaign, the Bush campaign was criticized for running ads that used visuals of the wreckage of the Twin Towers. Critics objected to the use of the images for political gain, calling them, as the Associated Press did, “unconscionable,” and in poor taste. Yet these findings suggest that there is a political payoff for reminding citizens of terrorism through threatening news stories and frightening visual imagery. These types of stories may successfully persuade citizens, especially Democrats, to adopt foreign policy positions they would not normally prefer.

In Toward Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant argues that once elites need the consent of the governed to engage in war, war should be less likely. This thesis does not account for the ability of institutions like the media to create or heighten a sense of vulnerability and thus increase support for war among the citizenry. If the media can activate citizens’ sense of impending danger and thereby increase support for punitive policies, my findings imply that when political leaders use the right images and trumpet the right threatening message, war may be quite likely in a republic, even when a fully informed citizenry might have chosen otherwise.