Analysing media portrayals of far-right inspired terrorism

It is widely acknowledged that media, academic and government portrayals of terrorism have over-represented the threat of Islamist-inspired terrorism post-9/11 (Powell, 2018). Consequently, far-right terrorism has been under-researched and overlooked until recently, when far-right discourse entered the mainstream and their violence became more emboldened (Mondon & Winter, 2020; Ravndal & Bjorgo, 2018).
The project aims to study the print media's framing of far-right inspired terrorism by comparing and contrasting it with portrayals of Islamist-inspired terrorism, in the wider context of terrorism coverage across the political spectrum in print media. A multimodal and intersectional social science framework will be used to explore the framing of significant far-right and Islamist-inspired terrorism events in the US and UK in the last 20 years, since 9/11.

1. What are the prevalent frames, narratives and visual representations used to discuss far-right inspired terrorists/attacks, and how do they differ from Islamist-inspired terrorists/attacks?
2. What are the intersections of gender, ethnicity, religion and violence in terrorism coverage in print media, and how do these intersections impact frames/narratives/visual representations?
3. How has the term 'terrorist' or 'terrorism' been applied to different forms of terrorism by print media outlets with different political orientations?
4. How has media coverage of far-right and Islamist-inspired terrorism changed over the past twenty years?
Comparative media content analysis (Riffe et al., 2019) and framing approaches (Scheufele, 1999) will be drawn upon to explore the multimodal (narrative, visual) and intersectional (gender, ethnicity, religion, violence) framing of far-right inspired terrorism in the wider context of terrorism coverage in print media. The US and UK have been selected as they are both primarily English-speaking, have colonial, white supremacist histories, and have had notable far-right related violence in recent years. The study will focus on major events that have occurred in the US and UK from 9/11 to 6th January 2021, so that the impact of major terror events (both Islamist and far-right inspired) as well as significant social change moments and movements, can be examined.
The project will employ a two-phase sequential mixed methods design. Data for both phases will be gathered from open-source news articles, headlines, interviews, features, reviews and editorials in print and online about terror attacks previously identified as relevant, from a variety of news outlets based in the selected countries and from across the political spectrum. It will take an inductive saturation approach to the temporal sampling of terrorist attacks by including media coverage of these events that may extend for a limited or extended period of time, or until no new or notable aspects of media coverage are revealed.
The new knowledge produced by this project is likely to make a significant contribution to media framing of terrorism and research that seeks to understand the factors underpinning ideological motivations, intelligence and counterterrorism efforts. It will also have wider implications for understanding more fully the part played by media representations to understanding public representations of national and international security issues.