The Lessons of Framing Terrorism

It is often difficult to disentangle how news frames shape the social construction of reality from the “actual” reality of events. It is like being surrounded by an endless hall of mirrors. This is especially true if a consensual interpretation predominates in any society so that one-sided frames become taken for granted uncritically by politicians, reporters, and the public. To understand this process further, news coverage of an event needs to be compared against an independent benchmark. In particular, evidence of trends in terrorist incidents is needed for comparison with how the news media reported the threat of terrorism, and how this coverage in turn led towards the widespread American perception that international threats to U.S. domestic security suddenly surged to unprecedented levels post-9/11. A similar approach would compare official police crime statistics against reporting of these incidents, or government measures of the proportion of population below the poverty level compared with news stories about poverty. Admittedly official statistics also provide a social construction of reality, and these can also be affected by the news media, for example if the publicity surrounding cases of violent rape deters or encourages other victims to come forward to report cases to the police. Yet official statistics provide an alternative way to calculate the statistical risk of terrorism, especially if their construction is relatively independent of the media. Attempts to monitor trends in the incidents of terrorism are often flawed and inconsistent, remaining heavily dependent upon the particular definition and classifications used by official agencies, and affected by the reliability of the record provided by the media’s reporting of these events. Estimates vary depending upon whether they count the frequency of terrorist events, or their effects in terms of the number of fatalities or wounded, or the costs of damage to property. It is difficult to compare cases since some types of terrorism are relatively common although they may involve only one or two victims in each event, exemplified by kidnappings in Colombia, while others may be rare but may involve many more victims when they occur, such as the airline bomb over Lockerbie. Different weightings of these factors can obviously generate alternative assessments of the statistical risks. It is also most difficult to compare