A Global Comparative Analysis of News Coverage about Terrorism from 1945 to present

FAIN: HJ-253500-17

Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (Champaign, IL 61801-3620)
Scott Althaus (Project Director: June 2016 to January 2026)
Hatmut Wessler (Co Project Director: June 2016 to January 2026)
Wouter van Atteveldt (Co Project Director: June 2016 to January 2026)

Participating institutions:
University of Illinois (Champaign, IL) - Applicant/Recipient
University of Mannheim (Mannheim) - Participating Institution
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Amsterdam) - Participating Institution

A collaboration among scholars of media studies, communication, and political science from the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands to study the history of media coverage of terrorist attacks and to gain a better understanding of how such coverage can be done in a responsible manner that doesn’t provide aid to terrorists. The project team includes researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (US), the Universität Mannheim (Germany), and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (the Netherlands). Co-funding provided by DFG (Germany) and NWO (the Netherlands).

The ResTeCo project will use text analytics methods at extreme scales to assess 70 years of terrorism coverage from around the world as a natural experiment for identifying successful reporting strategies. By charting the quality of terrorism coverage at a global scale, with historical depth, and across multiple languages, the ResTeCo project will clarify how journalists in different places and times have reported on terror attacks, and what responsible terrorism coverage looks like within the limits of journalistic professionalism and media logic.