Economists: Print The News, Pay The Price
As Richard Morin reports, economists Bruno S. Frey and Dominic Rohner used the Granger Causality Test, a statistical procedure, to determine the correlation. "Both the media and terrorists benefit from terrorist incidents," according to the study. As Morin summarizes it, the study claims that "terrorists get free publicity for themselves and their cause. The media, meanwhile, make money 'as reports of terror attacks increase newspaper sales and the number of television viewers.'"
First off, I'm not sure why one needs a PhD in economics to determine what appears to be common sense: More people are interested in the news when there's a terror attack, pushing newspaper sales and television viewership higher, and terrorists become better known when they commit such attacks.
As for the Granger Causality Test itself, it entails a complicated regression analysis – you can go here to learn more. I am not qualified to dispute the economists' conclusions. But I would encourage you to read Moran's report. This, in particular, struck me:
The results, they said, were unequivocal: Coverage caused more attacks, and attacks caused more coverage -- a mutually beneficial spiral of death that they say has increased because of a heightened interest in terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001.Unequivocal? That's quite a determination for a study with what to me seems a relatively small sample size – according to Moran, "the researchers counted direct references to terrorism between 1998 and 2005 in the New York Times and Neue Zuercher Zeitung, a respected Swiss newspaper. They also collected data on terrorist attacks around the world during that period." I am skeptical of the notion that that were enough data to prove an unequivocal correlation, particularly in light of all of the other variables at play.
Frey suggests a solution to the problem he identifies: Don't publicly identify terrorists, at least until after their conviction. Of course, as Moran points out, the Internet would complicate any such an attempt. And there's also the matter of the value of the self-censorship – would it be worth it to deny people such information? If the correlation is unequivocal, as the researchers claim, you could perhaps make the case that it is a worthwhile trade-off. But I think we should be extremely hesitant to embrace the idea that refusing to publicly acknowledge the identity of our attackers will somehow make them go away.