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ID:
138837
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| Summary/Abstract |
Reporting bias – the media’s tendency to systematically underreport or overreport certain types of events – is a persistent problem for participants and observers of armed conflict. We argue that the nature of reporting bias depends on how news organizations navigate the political context in which they are based. Where government pressure on the media is limited – in democratic regimes – the scope of reporting should reflect conventional media preferences toward novel, large-scale, dramatic developments that challenge the conventional wisdom and highlight the unsustainability of the status quo. Where political constraints on reporting are more onerous – in non-democratic regimes – the more conservative preferences of the state will drive the scope of coverage, emphasizing the legitimacy and inevitability of the prevailing order. We test these propositions using new data on protest and political violence during the 2011 Libyan uprising and daily newspaper coverage of the Arab Spring from 113 countries. We uncover evidence of a status-quo media bias in non-democratic states, and a revisionist bias in democratic states. Media coverage in non-democracies underreported protests and nonviolent collective action by regime opponents, largely ignored government atrocities, and overreported those caused by rebels. We find the opposite patterns in democratic states.
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| 2 |
ID:
165320
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| Summary/Abstract |
While event data provides researchers with insight into contemporary security threats, many are built upon secondary sources that may insert bias into empirical studies. Specifically, we argue that one form of bias—description bias—can be conditional on an event's characteristics or locale, thus influencing the certainty an observation is coded as an act of terrorism. We find that, using the Global Terrorism Database's own variables, attacks on civilians, particular types of tactics, and attacks that occur closer to a populated place are more likely to be coded as terrorism. These findings speak to broader conceptual issues in terrorism research and reiterate the need for researchers to evaluate the validity of their data before making claims.
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