21
NOTES
1
See Crenshaw (2000) for a review of these approaches. We are considering terrorism as a collective action here;
for a recent review of factors that may produce individual terrorists see Huesmann (2002).
2
The intended effects of such actions may vary for different audiences, as well. Action against a regime or
government may be designed to strike fear at the same time that widespread publicity elsewhere may build support
for a terrorist group and its followers. The focus here is on the coverage of events in the United States and how they
affected U.S. citizens; a study of the coverage in outlets like Al Jazeera would have a very different focus.
3
This includes special issues on September 14 and October 12. The issue of October 15 was their long-planned
“college guide” issue and contained almost no news content; as it result, it was dropped from the analysis since there
was a special issue produced three days earlier on the one-month anniversary of the event.
4
Heather Schaar and Eric Groenendyk completed this coding. A comparison of their coding of a sample of 25 of
the articles produced a 91% agreement in categories.
5
These data were collected with the support from internal funds at the Institute for Social Research. The study was
designed by a group of 11 principal investigators from the Center for Political Studies, the Survey Research Center,
and the Research Center for Group Dynamics. The Division of Surveys and Technology at the Survey Research
Center supervised the data collection.
6
The exact question wording was:
Now we have a set of questions concerning various public figures. We want to see how information about
them gets out to the public from television, newspapers, and the like. The first name is Trent Lott. What
job or political office does he hold?
The other individuals were William Rehnquist and Tony Blair. The number of correct answers was summed to form
a four-point index with values ranging from 0 to 3.
7
This variable was measured categorically as the week in which the interview was conducted, measured from the
start date.
8
The coding does not account for how lengthy an explanation was or how much prominence it received; it only
recorded whether a particular explanation was offered. This is a gross measure of topical coverage (any mention at
all) rather than a more proportionate measure (% of the article in column-inches devoted to explanations).
9
This variable was an ordinal coding of the week in which the interview took place after the starting date of the
fieldwork. Its values ranged from 1 to 5.
10
The correlation between “following the news about the terrorist acts” (Wave 1) and about the “war on terrorisim”
was .295.
11
Following the news about the attacks measured in Wave 1 was correlated with following the news about the war
on terrorism as measured in Wave 2 (r = .295).
Convention