Media Events in the Aftermath of Terrorism: Exploring How Reporting Templates Produce Social Drama

Abstract

Studies of the reporting of terrorism have traditionally examined the continuities that exist in the news representations of terrorists and the outcomes of their actions (Altheide, 2006; Freedman and Thussu, 2012). Adopting a ‘media events’ approach (Dayan and Katz, 1992) to explore the same coverage by contrast brings into view the mediation of terrorism as an ‘event’. In particular, it adds to those established insights on coverage (see Chermak, 2003; McDonald and Lawrence, 2004; Montgomery, 2005), a new view of the media’s scripting and choreography of the terrorism incident. Weimann (1987) applies the approach to analyse the news reporting of international terrorism, for example. He notices, in the process, how this coverage magnifies the attributes of ‘high drama’ and ‘personification’ found in Dayan and Katz’s (1992) understanding of pre-planned ‘media events’. As equally significant are his observations on the other features that their approach assumes should also characterize this reporting. Not only are several of these features absent from this news coverage, but also the focus of their approach on the ‘media constructed event’ overlooks, more fundamentally, the process by which the planned efforts of terrorists to attract media attention orchestrate this reporting (Weimann, 1987). Nevertheless, a media events approach remains useful for exploring recent terrorism events, many of which are now perpetrated on ‘home’ national rather than international soil, as it recognizes that journalists will draw on collective ideas to make sense of these incidents.