Kleinberg, B; McFarlane, P; (2020) Assessing the sentiment in UK media coverage of terrorism and terrorist attacks. (Commissioned Report ). Royal United Services Institute (RUSI): London, UK.

Text McFarlane_report_rusi_final_Nov_2020.pdf Access restricted to UCL open access staff Download (1MB)

Abstract

This report examined language use in UK media publications related to terrorist attacks and events. We operationalised language as the sentiment of newspaper articles in a corpus of 22,341 documents and investigated how sentiment changed over time and whether there were effects of the political leaning of the news outlet and the terrorist ideology. The analysis revealed that left-leaning publications had a significantly more negative tone than right-leaning publications, albeit with a small standardised effect size. For both media-leaning (left vs right) and the terrorist ideology (Islamic vs far-right) of the articles, the time series data suggested some patterns where the two groups showed divergent trajectories. Further analyses indicated that these factors were associated regarding the publication frequency: left-leaning outlets covered far-right terrorism more often than expected and Islamic terrorism less frequently than expected, and vice versa for right-leaning outlets. Keyword analysis looked at the frequency of the concept “terrorism” and found that it occurred with a higher frequency in articles by left-leaning media and articles about Islamic terrorism. Lastly, we conducted a causal impact analysis and found no evidence for a causal effect of terrorist attacks on subsequent sentiment. The report closes with an outline of limitations and suggestions for future work.

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