Press Freedom, Publicity, and the Cross-National Incidence of Transnational Terrorism

• Author: Aaron M. Hoffman,Erik Cleven,Crystal Shelton
• Date: 01 December 2013
• Published date: 01 December 2013
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912913478840
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Research Quarterly

66(4) 896 –909

© 2013 University of Utah

Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1065912913478840

prq.sagepub.com

Article

Attention from the mass media is widely seen as critical

to the success of terrorist campaigns. Members of terror-

ist groups call press coverage the “decisive weapon” in

their conflicts (Levitt 2006, 140); politicians believe that

publicity provides terrorist organizations the “oxygen”

they need to survive. Claims like these suggest that gain-

ing access to the press would be a priority for terrorist

organizations and that terrorist attacks would dispropor-

tionately occur in states that protect the press’s ability to

cover attacks. Yet, cross-national studies repeatedly show

that the incidence of transnational terrorism is unrelated

to press freedom. Why?

We argue that the difficulty in finding a relationship

between press freedom and transnational terrorism has

two sources. First, the extant literature treats press free-

dom as a surrogate for press attention. It is not. The equa-

tion between press freedom and press attention derives

from the claim that the media in free societies is “almost

bound” (Wilkinson 1997) to cover terrorist violence. The

reality is that the news media often declines to report on

terrorism. Rather than guaranteeing coverage, press free-

dom provides coverage opportunities that are unavailable

in states that restrict media reporting. We argue that groups

effectively factor this into their targeting decisions by

using press freedom to weed out those states that are

unlikely to provide the attention from the media groups

crave. Once the pool of targets is defined, the issue of

where to attack remains. Groups make this decision by

targeting powerful states because reporters regard events

in influential countries as newsworthy.

Second, the existing literature presumes perpetrators’

demand for press attention is invariant across contexts.

This is an overstatement. Perpetrators’ need for media

coverage varies with the size and geographic dispersion

of the audiences they want to influence. The larger and

more diffuse the audience, the harder it is for groups to

publicize their actions without the news media’s help.

Press attention, by contrast, is less important when audi-

ences are smaller and more concentrated because terrorist

organizations can reach these audiences on their own. For

this reason, we expect that the pull of press freedom is

greatest when terrorists cross international boundaries

because these attacks are more likely to be designed with

international audiences in mind than strikes by domestic

perpetrators.

We test the above argument using zero-inflated nega-

tive binomial (ZINB) regression and data on transnational

terrorism between 1975 and 1995.1 Our results show that

states that restrict press freedom are two times less likely

to be targeted by foreign perpetrators than states that

478840PRQXXX10.1177/106591291347884

0Political Research QuarterlyHoffman et al.

1Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

Corresponding Author:

Aaron M. Hoffman, Department of Political Science, Purdue University,

100 North University St., West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA.

Email: ahoffman@purdue.edu

Press Freedom, Publicity, and the Cross-

National Incidence of Transnational

Terrorism

Aaron M. Hoffman1, Crystal Shelton1, and Erik Cleven1

Abstract

Publicity is central to terrorism, but demonstrating a link between press freedom and the targeting of attacks is

challenging. There are several reasons for this: (1) studies do not distinguish between press freedom and press attention;

(2) perpetrators use press freedom to weed out unacceptable targets rather than to determine which targets to

attack; (3) only foreign, not domestic, perpetrators depend on press attention; and (4) foreign terrorists satisfy their

desire for press attention by attacking powerful states. Our models confirm this argument about press freedom and

national power even after controlling for executive constraints, polity, and foreign policy activity.

Keywords

transnational terrorism, domestic terrorism, press freedom, publicity, media