News Discourse of Terror Attacks on Twitter: Comparative Analysis of CNN and Al Jazeera’s Coverage of 2015 Islamic State Attacks in Beirut and Paris

Arunima Kumar1 & Ruchi Jaggi2
1Thomson Reuters (Bengaluru), India
2Symbiosis Institute of Media Communication, India

The period between 2014 and 2016 saw the rise of the radical Islamist terrorist group Islamic State (IS), which committed acts of terrorism in not only Syria and Iraq but also unleashed violence in the rest of the world. Twitter took the lead in being the source of receiving and giving quick updates on terror news. However, a key question that arises is about balanced coverage. Media made enormous efforts to humanize the terror attacks in the West, while what was happening in West Asia (Middle East) was constructed from a partisan political position. The researchers studied the coverage of the Beirut attack and the Paris attack, both of which took place in November 2015. The Twitter handles of Al Jazeera and CNN’s Breaking News were used to conduct the study. The data analysis establishes that there was a clear imbalance while covering Islamic State attacks in Paris and Beirut, respectively. The Paris attack received far more coverage from both CNN and Al Jazeera in terms of quantum and nature of issues addressed.

Keywords: CNN, Al Jazeera, media bias, terror attacks, social media; digital age, Twitter, terrorism reporting

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Arunima Kumar received her Masters in Mass Communication (Journalism) from Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication, Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune, India in 2017. She currently works at Thomson Reuters, Bengaluru, India.
Ruchi Jaggi (PhD., Savitribai Phule Pune University, India, 2016) is an Associate Professor and Director of Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication, Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune, India. Her research interests include media representations, children and television, popular culture analysis, gender studies, television studies, journalism studies, and emerging discourses of identity on the new media.