Media Coverage Impact

The concept of terrorism itself has an eternal link with media coverage, since the goal of terrorism is to achieve terror and this requires media coverage. So it goes without saying that media coverage has a strong influence on the risk perceptibility. More and more people nowadays are aware of this influence and we now observe a large amount of documents and studies mentioning it. In the publication of David Baker, “The effect of terrorism on the Travel and Tourism Industry”, the author says that the volatile relationship between tourism and terrorism is magnified by the media in manner to cloud actual probabilities of being targeted by terrorists. Speaking about the probabilities, according to the US Centers for Disease Control, one is 35,079 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack.

It’s hard to quantify the media coverage ratio for acts of terrorism compare to others events such as natural disaster, war etc… but we can easily observe that the phenomenon is disproportional and leads to bigger influence than any others medias topics.

One of the biggest influence observed is that it outweighs the perceived risk reality in forming attitudes toward destinations. This leads to the decrease of tourist flow in the destinations were terrorist attacks recently happened. For example even prior to 9/11 , a study conducted by Enders and Sandler, “ An Econometric Analysis of the Impact on Tourism” concluded that a typical terrorist incident in Spain resulted in the reduction of 140 000 tourists.
The terrorist media coverage disproportion also has a more serious impact on the society. A recent study conducted by Michael Jetter, who analyzed more than 60 000 terrorist attacks derives an empirical methodology to show that the media coverage can trigger further attacks. The publication mentioned at the same time that every additional New York Times article about an attack in a particular country increased the number of ensuing attacks in the same country by between 11% and 15%.

We are currently witnessing a real awareness of this phenomenon and some medias have already taken some measures to limit the impact. For example, in France after the series of aftermaths which strike the population in 2015, some medias have decided to stop publishing pictures and names of terrorist so it prevents to turn them into hero.