Abstract:
'Political-elite' research takes news media to be serving government agendas on security and
conflict issues, with news content largely shaped by official sources. There is reason to ask
whether an emphasis on top-down influence fails to reflect the degree of critical news coverage
of governments and their agencies, potential contextual complexity, and a range of alternative
voices. Studying the news coverage of terrorism provides a way to address these issues given
the potential for state support but also scope for criticism of security failures and police or military
responses. This thesis is based on a large-scale content analysis of news articles on terrorism
in a single tumultuous year, 2016, in six of the world’s most widely-read newspapers based in
three countries – The New York Times, USA Today, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The
Hindu, and The Times of India. Almost 9,000 articles were coded for a range of variables in this
comparative study. Coverage patterns indicate that deference towards government actions and
policies is influenced by the newspapers ideological or political stance, and the region of coverage.
There are increased levels of criticism for state responses occurring in left-aligned newspapers,
and for foreign governments. High levels of support for a newspaper’s home government
were evident but, equally, overall levels of criticism were higher than suggested by existing
'political-elite' theories and research. This thesis seeks to make a significant contribution to the
study of news content with its use of a highly-detailed coding sheet, a dataset that includes every
terrorism-related news article published in 2016 from six newspapers, and a conclusion that the
way the news is reported, and the features of its coverage, is more nuanced and complex than
shown by existing research.
