Campus Conversation: How has the internet changed how we understand news?
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In partnership with my colleague and longtime collaborator David Tewksbury, I was one of the early researchers into the ways that online news consumption might change how people learned about and made sense of the world.
Our research showed more than 20 years ago that differences in newspaper reading among print and online audiences were profound in terms of what people learned and which issues they perceived as important, but we had no way to anticipate back then that social media would soon be turning the world of news consumption upside down.
We never saw it coming. I'm still trying to wrap my head around how our information exchange system works today.
I have my hunches and I know the primary systems that move information around, but today's communication ecosystem is so varied, fragmented, organizationally complex, and difficult to study that it's still hard for scholars like me to trace something as simple as how a particular fact travels from one place to another.
It certainly remains the case today that how you hear about the news and whether you intentionally seek it out or merely let news come to you through your regular online activities will have profound influences on what you know (or think you know) and how you see the world.
The trend that keeps me up at night is the gradual disappearance of high-quality local news across the United States.
We need it to keep our local leaders accountable, to make sure voters are properly informed, and to understand the various problems that our communities are up against as well as which policies might have the best potential to solve them.
But high-quality local news is expensive to produce, and the advertising revenue isn't there like it used to be. The tendency across the country is for local news outlets to report fewer stories overall and increasingly to focus on national news stories that are reported by third-party services like the Associated Press.
This kind of news is cheap to acquire and will keep and hold local audience attention.
But an unfortunate result is that while our country is becoming more polarized and incensed about national issues than ever before in recent history, at the same time we're increasingly unaware about and often indifferent toward the pressing problems that affect the quality of life in our local communities, because local news isn't filling us in on those things like it used to.
And the bigger problem is that most of are so inundated with political information of one kind or another that we never notice what's missing in the mix.
I'm part of a research team at the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research along with scholars in Germany and the Netherlands who formed the Responsible Terrorism Coverage project. Before discussing how media organizations cover terrorist events it's important to start by defining what we mean by the word terrorism.
The Responsible Terrorism Coverage project defines terrorism as "a tactic chosen by non-state actors that uses violence to generate publicity in order to achieve political goals by exploiting fear and shaping the perceptions of multiple audiences."
There are a few key elements of this definition that are worth mentioning. First, terrorism is the use of violence in pursuit of political goals. So from this vantage point, the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 60 and wounded more than 400 people wasn't an act of terrorism, because it wasn't tied to any discernible political goal.
But the 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon that killed three people and injured hundreds was definitely a terrorist incident because it was carried out as a revenge attack for American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Second, while the primary target of terrorist attacks are the direct victims of terrorist violence, the ultimate reason for these attacks is the publicity that they generate for the terrorist organization.
These groups have decided that advancing their concerns through normal political channels is unlikely to achieve their goals, so their bet is that by generating a certain kind of news attention for their cause, they can improve their ability to raise money, recruit more volunteers, and ultimately pressure target governments to make concessions in order to get the attacks to stop.
So while the direct victims of violence are the primary targets, the secondary targets for terrorist attacks are social media users like you and me, as well as the professional news organizations who tell others when terrorist attacks occur.
It's the communication about the attacks that matters for terrorist groups. It's how they hope to get what they're after, and it's why they commit acts of violence in the first place.
One way that media organizations can be irresponsible in their coverage of terrorist attacks is to emphasize the scary and dramatic elements of an attack that keep and hold audience attention. This kind of news attention ultimately serves the goals of the terrorist organizations that foment these attacks.
Generating fear in a target population and making it seem that the group can inflict violence against a target population at any time is exactly the kind of news coverage that terrorists hope to generate with their violence.
Another way that media organizations can be irresponsible is to focus attention on the reasons why terrorist perpetrators committed their acts of violence. While news audiences might be curious about these topics, this kind of coverage highlights the grievances and demands of terrorists in ways that rewards their violence and that can help them recruit new cohorts of would-be terrorists.
A better approach for news organizations would be to focus mainly on what happened, when and where it happened, who committed the act, and who was victimized by the act. Reporting on these aspects of a terrorist attack in a dispassionate tone strikes a good balance between giving citizens the information they need without giving terrorists the coverage they want.
It's not just news organizations that stand in the gap between what terrorists do and what terrorists want. It's also social media users and the platforms that host information sharing in digital spaces.
The Responsible Terrorism Coverage project has a list of recommendations for social media users and platforms as well. Among them is to avoid naming particular terrorists or terrorist groups who might be responsible for an attack, because these groups thrive on social media attention.
We also recommend that social media users never share terrorist manifestos that offer reasons for an attack, and also avoid sharing images or videos of terrorist attacks. Terrorist groups are often trying to scare us or stoke our anger so that our governmental leaders respond to terrorist threats in particular ways.
The choices of social media users about what information to share about terrorist events can help or hinder the ability of terrorist groups to produce the kind s of political leverage they intend for their violence to generate in a target population.
Longer-term campaigns of terror as well as insurgencies that make use of terrorist methods present particular challenges for news organizations, in part because such violence can come to be normalized in news coverage as "the latest development" rather than consistently using the terrorism label to describe what happened.
This is true for overseas insurgencies like the Gaza war that started with a massive October 7, 2023, terrorist attack that killed 1,195 Israelis, most of them civilians. It's also true for longer-term campaigns of domestic extremism in the United States, in which far-right extremists have produced far more civilian deaths since 1990 than far-left extremists according to National Institutes of Justice data.
But our research team found that because news coverage often attributes domestic extremism perpetrated by right-wing attackers to mental illness or simple malice, all around the world right-wing political violence is less likely to be characterized as terrorism than are attacks undertaken by Islamist perpetrators.
