Does bottom-line pressure make terrorism coverage more negative? Evidence from a twenty-newspaper panel study

Abstract

Existing research suggests that journalists who work at newspapers that emphasize profitability increase the negativity of their terrorism reporting in response to declining revenues. Many journalists, however, dispute the connection between the sale of news and the coverage of news. The authors address this debate using an original panel dataset of articles about terrorism between 1997 and 2014, published by 20 of the top circulating newspapers in the United States. The results show that the negativity of coverage is influenced by the profit orientations of newspaper owners rather than the success that news organizations have in selling the news. The deadliness of terrorist attacks, the post-9/11 media environment, and public distrust of the news media also influence the tone of terrorism coverage.