Data Sources

The Use of Large-Sized Newspapers

Newspapers have often served as a critical medium for social science investigations; prior scholarship has faithfully documented their utility as a source, including more detailed content (Nacos 2003; Paletz et al. 1982, cited in Altheide 1987), ease of access, and archival

completeness (Padilla 2007). Though these advantages are important to the investigation at hand, newspapers have been selected as the primary medium for another important reason—the

communicative impetus of their journalists. As David Skok, Senior Producer of Online Content for Global News notes, the “ultimate purpose of journalism is to communicate with, and on behalf of, the audience” (Hogg 2010). The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism elaborates on this assessment, endowing journalism with the central aim of providing audiences with “accurate and reliable information” that “creates a map for citizens to navigate society” for the purpose of functioning in society (2011). The mainstream conceptualization of journalism and its practitioners consequently assumes that individuals are able to understand and make use of what they read and implies that one of the duties of the journalist is to communicate said information in the most readily understandable fashion that both accounts for and is

sensitive to the culture and experiences of his/her readership. The advantage afforded by such mass popular texts—for even if some characterize papers such as The New York Times as elitist, there is often an overlap of shared content with smaller, localized papers in the form of wire service articles (e.g. Reuters or The Associated Press) or even small newspapers’ reprinting of articles authored by their large-circulation counterparts—parallels R. Williams’s assertion that the authors of texts aimed at the masses (e.g. novels) “show people and their relationships in essentially knowable and communicable ways” (1973, p.165). Thus, it may be said that

journalists also “deliberately select words the average reader will immediately recognize as communicating enough information about the character. Because of their desire to be

understood,” such authors act as “unintentional ethnographers for the societies about which they write” (Hopf, 2009, p.288). Consequently, the use of newspaper articles provides the researcher with an articulate, detailed record of the identities and related assumptions under investigation written in a manner accessible to and shaped by elite and popular culture. This prevents an investigation restricted to a select few and provides a more accurate and relevant base for future research on media content and public opinion.

The case that must be made here is, therefore, justification for the use of large-circulation

newspapers as a source of analysis. At the most rudimentary level is the quantitative explanation; newspapers of this scale simply reach a larger number of individuals in the population, meaning that their content is able to both reflect and affect the perceptions of a proportionately larger group. Furthermore, in terms of data availability, Pew Research Center’s State of the Media 2004 Report records that articles in smaller newspaper are shorter in length; 64% of large newspaper stories topped 1000 words, whereas only 13-29% of small to medium-sized newspapers did so. At the largest papers, the average article length totaled approximately 1200 words, whereas the average fell short of 600 at the smallest papers (PEJ 2004). Shorter articles may be less likely to yield the detailed accounts that are required for source-intensive qualitative methods such as discourse analysis. Aside from content length, it must also be noted that the news reported becomes more local and less international as circulation size decreases (PEJ 2004). Given that the events under investigation in this study take place overseas—though they may involve

American forces or interests—newspapers with a rapport for covering national and international events are essential.

Yet in order to compensate for accusations of elitism that have been occasionally levied against major newspapers, this study also includes data from the wire services of The Associated Press and Reuters. These services supplement national and international coverage not only for large papers but also for those with smaller circulations that rely on such sources to complement their limited news gathering resources (PEJ 2004). Consequently, the sources that have been identified in this study are ones made available to and consumed by all segments of the literate population, which strengthens the likelihood that their content would reflect the dominant cultural discourses on terrorism.

Justification of Country-Specific Sources

For this study, The Associated Press, The New York Times and The Washington Post will be used as representative measures of American media culture. The New York Times and The Washington Post are two of the largest, nationally-circulated broadsheet papers in the country; in the case of the former, it is also the most highly-trafficked American news website and boasts the highest volume of articles as compared to other papers (PEJ 2004). The Washington Post, headquartered in the nation’s capital, produces a superior quantity of articles on national politics and provides intensive coverage of US interests abroad. For its part, The Associated Press is the leading national wire service; innumerable news sources within and outside of the United States utilize its articles.

British coverage of the terrorist acts will be collected from Reuters, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Times. Reuters, headquartered in London, is the world’s largest international news agency and has a stated policy of “neutral language” when covering terrorist events (Thomson Reuters 2011). Also based in London, the left-leaning Guardian is one of the top- selling broadsheets and the largest English-language newspaper presence on the Internet behind The New York Times—in the case of the United Kingdom, it is also the highest-trafficked virtual news presence (Reid & Teizeira 2010). To balance the political leanings of The Guardian, content from the center-right The Daily Telegraph and The Times will be used in combination, given the difference in article output between these sources and their more liberal competitor. Both broadsheets are amongst the top three most-circulated of their kind in Britain.

When identifying sources from a non-English speaking nation in which an attack occurred, English translations of articles from the primary newspapers in each respective nation were gathered via the World News Connection (WNC) service. Prior scholarship has established that high-quality English translations of original sources (such as those offered by the WNC) yield approximately the same scores under the rigor of content analysis as the originals and thus the use of such translations will not distort conclusions drawn from translated documents (Hermann 1980; Winter 1973).

The Selection of Articles

News articles span a year from the date of the terrorist incident in order to capture not only the immediate aftermath of the attack but also the lingering repercussions of trauma and details of the ongoing investigation. In instances where the quantity of articles was of a scope that

reasonably permitted an analysis of all relevant articles, the analysis included the entire body of stories pertaining to the attack in question. For events where the quantity of articles generated surpassed the temporal resources of the investigator and given that selecting a random sample of articles would potentially eliminate key stories and bias the resulting analysis, the following methods were followed: (1) duplicate articles (the same story released for subsequent editions on the same day) were eliminated; (2) articles grounded in subjective opinion (those from the “commentary,” “opinion,” or “editorial” sections) were eliminated11; (3) those articles meeting the 600-word threshold of the “average article in a medium-sized paper” (according to the PEJ 2004) were retained, as it was assumed they were among the main features of the paper and were of sufficient length to provide data for the qualitative methodology employed.

11 _{The elimination of these articles was justified on an authorial basis; opinion or editorial pieces} are generally composed or decided by an Editorial Board, the staff of which are separate from the newspaper’s primary news staff (see USA Today or TheNew York Times) and who are generally distanced from news meetings, story assignments, and day-to-day newsroom operations (Passante, 2007, p.28). Additionally, many of these pieces were more opinionated restatements of news content previously touched upon in the primary news article and therefore a narrative to which the audience would have already been exposed.