Revisiting the Contagion Hypothesis: Terrorism, News Coverage, and Copycat Attacks

Contagion refers here to a form of copycat crime, whereby violence-prone individuals and groups imitate forms of (political) violence attractive to them, based on examples usually popularized by mass media. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, for instance, Palestinian terrorists staged a number of spectacular hijackings of commercial airliners, exploited the often prolonged hostage situations to win massive news coverage for their political grievances, and appeared to inspire other groups to follow their example. Although terrorism scholars, government officials, and journalists have pondered the question of mass-mediated contagion for decades, they have arrived at different conclusions. Because of significant advances in communication and information technology, and changes in the global media landscape during the last decade or so, this article reconsiders arguments surrounding contagion theories and contends that various types of media are indeed important carriers of the virus of hate and political violence.&nbsp

Post-9/11 Terrorism Threats, News Coverage, and Public Perceptions in the United States

Terrorists, policy-makers, and terrorism scholars have long assumed that the mere threat of terrorist strikes affects societies that have experienced actual acts of terrorism. For this reason, most definitions of terrorism include the threat of violent political acts against civilians. But so far research has neither validated this conventional wisdom nor demonstrated how actual and mass-mediated threat messages by terrorists and terror alerts and threat assessments by government officials affect the public in targeted states. This paper fills the gap providing evidence that who conveys such messages matters and that mass-mediated threat messages by al Qaeda leaders and announced alerts and threat assessments by U.S. administration officials had a significant impact on the American public’s threat perceptions in the post-9/11 years