Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Terrorism In Context: The Stories We Tell Ourselves, James Brown V

Honors College

With no universally accepted definition of terrorism, the process by which the media labels an act as terrorism becomes inherently variable. In Western media, such variance is unilaterally skewed towards coverage of Islamic terror. This paper examined the similarities and differences in newsprint coverage of two unique terrorist attacks: The Boston Marathon bombing and the Charleston Church mass shooting. Data included 64 articles from The Wall Street Journal that were published in the seven days following each attack. Data were analyzed using grounded theory, which revealed three primary themes: construction of the attack, construction of the attacked, and …