November 10, 2020
Headline : Domestic terrorism is happening, here and right now
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind.- Dr. Zulli and her colleges at the Brian Lamb School of Communication performed research on public relation approaches to domestic terrorism.
Zulli questions in her research, “How do we actually manage a domestic terrorism crisis when the perpetrators are homegrown?” She also questions how these perpetrators are connected to the morals and values of our nation.
Why is this research worthy? Like Dr. Zulli has stated her reasonings, and The Center for Strategic and International Studies agrees with her. Saying that domestic terrorism is happening now and will get worse, especially being in an election year.
They studied the unfolding crisis of domestic terrorism between the years of 1990 and 2020. Dr. Zulli explained the first real domestic terrorism event was the bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995.
In 2019 their research shows that domestic terrorism was talked about more than ever in the media. This is due simply to numbers rising. As you can recall there was the El Paso shooting, the Dayton, Ohio shooting and more shootings and stabbings in general.
Dr. Zulli and her team performed their study with the method of content analysis. In this case they were researching themes of domestic terrorism in broadcast media, like ABC, NBC, CBS and more.
The research questions they asked were:
RQ1: Which sources are most prominent in news coverage of domestic terrorism?
RQ2: Hows does news coverage contextualize domestic terrorism in reference to prior terrorist attacks?
RQ3: Does news coverage differentially apply ideological labels to groups associated with domestic terrorism?
RQ4: How does news coverage question the designation of an act as domestic terrorism?
One of the major trends they found was that as years went on presidents spoke more on the domestic terrorism happening. A few years back it would have been industry and advocacy speaking on the matters. This is due to the political leaders having more of a media platform of their own now. We expect the president to get on twitter, bypass the media, and tell us what is going on in real time.
Going along with this finding, presidents would contextualize these attacks to other terror attacks.
Domestic terrorism is probably not going away anytime soon or lose relevance, thinking about how news organizations frame domestic terrorism will always be really important, says Zulli.
Writer: Clara Boles, 765-894-6621, boles1@purdue.edu
Sources: Dr. Diana Zulli, dzulli@purdue.edu
and Seth G. Jones, 202-741-3955, sjones@csis.org
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