ABSTRACT
Scholarly literature concerning terrorism and the media spans decades and disciplines with a dramatic increase after 9/11. This state-of-the-art review assesses strengths, limitations, and gaps in recent scholarship on mainstream mass-mediated news coverage of terrorism and outlines an agenda for research that cuts across traditional context-based divisions of communication research. It begins by synthesizing various conceptions of terrorism as communication and discussing models of terrorism’s relationship to the media. It then considers empirical studies of media content in television, print, Internet, and multimodal contexts. Finally, it identifies the need for expanded studies of multi-modal international news coverage of terrorism that cut across interpersonal, organizational, religious, and new media subfields of the communication discipline.
