Media congestion limits media terrorism

John Scott

Defence and Peace Economics, 2001, vol. 12, issue 3, 215-227

Abstract: In the early 1980s scholars and laymen expected an explosion of terrorism fed by media attention. Instead, the quantity of terrorism settled into familiar patterns, rather than spiraling upward. This paper attempts to explain why the dire predictions did not come to pass. We develop theory that explains how terrorists compete for media attention. We find that in equilibrium terrorists congest the media, limiting the benefits of additional terrorist incidents. Data from 1969 to 1984 substantiate our theoretical result. During the period, when the media provided more coverage to one terrorist incident, they provided less coverage on other incidents.

Keywords: Terrorism; Media; News; Conflict; Common property; Empirical model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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DOI: 10.1080/10430710108404985

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