Many terrorism and media scholars have criticized the news media for excessively covering terrorist activities, for sensational reporting patterns that contribute to heightened fear among targeted populations, and leaving little or no space or airtime for reporting on counterterrorism and other important events and developments. Aaron M. Hoffman's research contradicts this conventional wisdom and offers, based on his innovative research, a positive picture of terrorism and counterterrorism reporting in the leading U.S. print press.

The author presents a theoretical framework that distinguishes between two media models described at some length in Chapter 2: the professional model that adheres to values of American journalism and, in contrast, the profit-seeking model that emphasizes sensational coverage with the calculated goal of attracting large numbers of news consumers. While past content analyses of terrorism coverage focused mostly on shocking incidents and relatively short crisis periods, Hoffman examined this sort of reporting between 1997 and 2014 in four leading American newspapers (The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA TODAY) and also additional media for case studies of terrorist crises.

The research described in Chapter 3 shows that most of the relevant reporting was