ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a verbal description of the results of an extensive content analysis of New York Times stories about politically motivated violence: Assassinations, car bombings, and the like. The research design distinguished two general types of news stories: Initial and Follow-up. The initial news report is simply the very first New York Times account of some violent incident. "Source" is the person or agency specifically responsible for the violent action or label characterization of the actors or perpetrators of the violence specified in the article. Follow-up coverage is, according to the results of the content analysis, related to two factors, both associated with official sources. First, the very presence of US officials in a news story is associated with total coverage. Secondly, when designated as terrorism, identical acts of political violence tend to receive greater amounts of coverage. More interestingly, though, the terror designation itself tends to originate with government officials appearing in the story.
