In all of , there were total attacks, but through the first three quarters of , ISIS managed to conduct attacks, expanding significantly in southern Raqqa and eastern Hama. This year may present more, not fewer, opportunities for terrorist groups to recruit and launch strikes throughout the Levant. In Iraq, Iran has already moved to increase its influence by supporting various Shia militias groups throughout the country.
Encroaching Iranian influence could push Iraqi Sunnis, however begrudgingly, back into the arms of the Islamic State, in a replay of a phenomenon that has played out several times in recent years. As a state sponsor of terrorism, Iran may also look to increase its support to various proxies, especially if the regime in Tehran feels threatened by a shifting geopolitical alignment in the Middle East defined by warming relations between Israel and Sunni Arab nations in the Gulf.
In late December, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif caused a stir when he suggested that the Iranian-trained Liwa Fatemiyoun, currently fighting in Syria, could be deployed to Afghanistan to help a future Afghan government with counterterrorism operations. With the U. In West Africa and the Horn of Africa, jihadist groups are gaining momentum, which will likely continue well into next year.
Many of the countries most at risk of suffering terrorist attacks are now located in Africa, a shift in the counterterrorism center of gravity from the Middle East. In the wake of the Christchurch and Auckland attacks, should official definitions of terrorism conflate the actions of a white supremacy extremist and a radical Islamist extremist? Instead of a prison sentence for possessing bomb-making material, Ben John will be expected to read classic novels and report back to the judge about what he learns.
Twenty years later, al-Qaida and its offshoot the Islamic State group still have trouble attracting recruits. Was it worth it? Hijacking deaths are then only a very small fraction of the total from aviation. In this chart we see the annual deaths from commercial airliners, and the number specifically from hijackings. This again highlights that hijacking fatalities are rare: with increased safety measures post there have been almost none. Spreading widespread fear is a key aim of terrorism.
How effective have terrorists been in this regard? How many of us are actually worried about terrorism? Many of the most comprehensive surveys on public opinion on terrorism have been conducted in the United States. This visualization shows public concern for terrorism in the US since Throughout this period — with the exception of — less than 0. The average over the period from to was 0. We also see that concerns were spiking after large terrorist attacks in the US or European countries.
When we see a recent attack in the news, we become more worried it will also happen to us or family members. We should treat these results with some caution. Is this asking about how likely we think this scenario is?
The level of risk? People may interpret it differently. Because of this we should study how people change their behaviors based on this fear.
Here we find more evidence that many people in the US are worried about terrorism. There are certain locations and activities that are often the target of terrorist attacks: busy public spaces or countries around the world where attacks are more frequent. The chart shows the share of respondents who said they were less willing to do such activities. A range of studies have looked at the impact of major terrorist incidents on airline demand, travel and tourism. Although passenger demand later increased again, analyses suggest that domestic air travel did not return to the levels which would have been projected in the absence of the attacks.
In a separate post we looked at levels of concern about terrorism in the US. What about the rest of the world? Is it just as worried about terrorism? The WVS is a global research project running for decades, which assesses public opinion on a wide range of values and beliefs. For a range of questions it provides comparable data from across the world.
A terrorist attack. But the data is complete enough to provide perspectives across the world regions. But, compared to other countries this was relatively low. What becomes clear here is that there is not a clear relationship between concern about and prevalence of terrorism. We see this in the scatter chart which plots the share who are worried about terrorism in a given country, against its share of deaths which result from terrorism.
In most countries the probability of being in a terrorist attack is very low: terrorism accounts for less than 0. Terrorism receives media attention which is disproportionate to its frequency and share of deaths. This is also the intention of terrorists. But they are very successful hijacking global news cycles. But media coverage of terrorism is also highly unequal: some events receive a lot of attention while most receive very little. Which are the characteristics that influence whether an attack is covered in the media or not?
A previous study which looked at terrorist attacks in the US from to found they received more attention if there were fatalities; airlines were a target; it was a hijacking; or organized by a domestic group. In a recent study, researchers looked at the differences in media coverage of terrorist events in the US from to They assessed how these factors affected the amount of coverage attacks received in the US media. In this study the authors define five major news sources as CNN.
It appeared to play less of a role for local outlets. From this analysis we also see that media coverage was higher when the perpetrator was arrested partly because an arrest is a reportable event in itself ; the target of the attack was law enforcement or government; and when people were killed in the attack.
Which events do and do not receive media coverage matter: evidence shows that media plays a defining role in shifting public opinion; perceptions of the importance of particular issues; and national policy conversations. In particular, increased coverage when a perpetrator is Muslim presents an unbalanced overview of US terrorism to the public. In the dataset that this study relied on, Muslims perpetrated Combined with the fact that terrorism in general gets a disproportionate amount of media attention, the fact that the worst attacks — those that cause the greatest number of deaths — get most attention further exacerbates public fear.
One of the primary motivations for our work at Our World in Data is to provide a fact-based overview of the world we live in — a perspective that includes the persistent and long-term changes that run as a backdrop to our daily lives. We aim to provide the complement to the fast-paced reporting we see in the news.
The media provides a near-instantaneous snapshot of single events; events that are, in most cases, negative. The persistent, large-scale trends of progress never make the headlines. But is there evidence that such a disconnect exists between what we see in the news and what is reality for most of us? One study attempted to look at this from the perspective of what we die from: is what we actually die from reflected in the media coverage these topics receive?
For each source the authors calculated the relative share of deaths, share of Google searches, and share of media coverage. They restricted the considered causes to the top 10 causes of death in the US and additionally included terrorism, homicide, and drug overdoses.
This allows for us to compare the relative representation across different sources. The coverage in both newspapers here is strikingly similar. And the discrepancy between what we actually die from and what we get informed of in the media is what stands out:. One way to think about it is that media outlets may produce content that they think readers are most interested in, but this is not necessarily reflected in our preferences when we look for information ourselves.
As we can see clearly from the chart above, there is a disconnect between what we die from, and how much coverage these causes get in the media. Another way to summarize this discrepancy is to calculate how over- or underrepresented each cause is in the media.
To do this, we simply calculate the ratio between the share of deaths and share of media coverage for each cause. In this chart, we see how over- or underrepresented each cause is in newspaper coverage. Numbers denote the factor by which they are misrepresented. Homicides are also very overrepresented in the news, by a factor of The most underrepresented in the media are kidney disease fold , heart disease fold , and, perhaps surprisingly, drug overdoses 7-fold.
Stroke and diabetes are the two causes most accurately represented. But there is another important question: should these be representative? The first is that we would expect there to be some preventative aspect to information we access.
There are several examples where I can imagine this to be true. People who are concerned about cancer may search online for guidance on symptoms and be convinced to see their doctor. Some people with suicidal thoughts may seek help and support online which later results in an averted death from suicide.
Some imbalance in the relative proportions therefore makes sense. But clearly there is some bias in our concerns: most people die from heart disease hence it should be something that concerns us yet only a small minority seek [possibly preventative] information online.
Second, this study focused on what people in the USA die from, not what people across the world die from. Is media coverage more representative of global deaths? Not really. The relative ranking of deaths in the USA is reflective of the global average: most people die from heart disease and cancers, and terrorism ranks last or second last alongside natural disasters. Terrorism accounted for 0. The third relates to the very nature of news: it focuses on events and stories.
Whilst I am often critical of the messages and narratives portrayed in the media, I have some sympathy for what they choose to cover. Reporting has become increasingly fast-paced. Combine this with our attraction to stories and narratives. The most underrepresented cause of death in the media was kidney disease. But with an audience that expects a minute-by-minute feed of coverage, how much can possibly be said about kidney disease? Without conquering our compulsion for the latest unusual story, we cannot expect this representation to be perfectly balanced.
Media and its consumers are stuck in a reinforcing cycle. The news reports on breaking events, which are often based around a compelling story. We come to expect news updates with increasing frequency, and media channels have clear incentives to deliver.
This locks us into a cycle of expectation and coverage with a strong bias for outlier events. Most of us are left with a skewed perception of the world; we think the world is much worse than it is.
These were typically carried out by left- or right-wing nationalist organisations. A lot. Political communications scholarship has long noted the influence of powerful sources over the news agenda. It has also been claimed that politicians adopt more emotive language when talking about terror threats, further increasing the news value of such information.
The rise of the internet and the emergence of social media, meant that terrorist groups had far greater access to the news media than ever before. Over time, grainy, homespun propaganda images transformed into spectacular, Hollywood-style exercises in terror PR which could be instantly shared with a global audience of supporters. But despite the presence of such imagery in western news coverage, media reports often failed to include detailed explanations for why terrorists sought to adopt violent tactics.
0コメント