Transnational terrorism and the western elite press

Abstract

This paper seeks to analyze transnational terrorism as a political resource or, more specifically, as a means of political communication. In order to examine how terrorists have used the media, we have performed a content analysis of the coverage given to a selected sample of 158 incidents of transnational terrorism in two major daily newspapers of the Western world: The New York Times and The Times of London. Our findings indicate that while transnational terrorism does generate a considerable amount of press attention, the particular type of coverage it receives would appear to undermine the effectiveness of terrorism as a communications strategy.