SECURITIZATION AS A THEORY OF MEDIA EFFECTS:
THE CONTEST OVER THE FRAMING OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE

A Dissertation
presented to
the Faculty of the Graduate Schoolat the University of Missouri-Columbia

In Partial Fulfillmentof the Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy

By
FRED VULTEE
Dr. Lee Wilkins, Dissertation Supervisor
AUGUST 2007

© Copyright by Fred Vultee 2007
All Rights Reserved

The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined thedissertation entitled
SECURITIZATION AS A THEORY OF MEDIA EFFECTS:
THE CONTEST OVER THE FRAMING OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE
presented by Fred Vultee,
a candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy,
and certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance.

_______________________________________________________________________
Professor Lee Wilkins_______________________________________________________________________
Professor Glenn Leshner_______________________________________________________________________
Professor Dean Mills_______________________________________________________________________
Professor Herbert Tillema_______________________________________________________________________
Professor Wayne WantaACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Let me begin by honoring two groups of scholars whose thoughts, comments,
and patience have helped this project immeasurably as it stumbled into being: theMissouri faculty and my friends and colleagues in the doctoral program. I hope everyone
who enters the academy from the professional world finds a home as engaging,encouraging, and challenging as this one has been.
I am grateful to my dissertation committee for seeing the statue somewhere in
the strange pile of rocks I confronted them with at the outset of this journey. Each ofthem has made a unique contribution to my growth as a member of their profession:
Dr. Dean Mills, himself a former foreign correspondent, has long been theleader and public face of the Missouri program and of its conviction that the practical andtheoretical sides of journalism education can work together. He is this project’s reminderthat the academic study of journalism must persuade journalists as well as academics.
Dr. Herbert Tillema of the political science department made me welcome in myfirst venture outside the journalism school. He introduced me to the set of ideas that
underlie much of this paper, and he encouraged these explorations with his customary wit
and intellectual energy.
For many of us arriving from the newsroom, Dr. Wayne Wanta has been the firstto show how the world of media theory can be put to use on day-to-day questions. He isquick to see to the core of problems and offer fresh solutions, and he is generous with his
wealth of information about the academic life.
iiDr. Glenn Leshner saw a testable core in this project and patiently helped it getover all the hurdles at the laboratory door. He is unfailingly rigorous in procedure andunfailingly enthusiastic when the procedure begins to produce results. His door has
always been open for questions about teaching as well as research.
Dr. Lee Wilkins, the project’s chairwoman, leads by example on the subject of
how to assemble a research program: Start with interesting questions. She kept her eye
the project’s questions – is somebody doing something that looks like securitization, andif so, what does it mean? – throughout its practical and philosophical wanderings.
All these scholars willingly reached across disciplinary and methodologicalboundaries to help this project reach its conclusion, and their approval is the highest
praise. I cannot imagine better instructors in the never-ending study of how to be ascholar. They have my deepest thanks.
The project also benefited immeasurably from the careful critical eye of its final
editor, Denise M. Vultee, who over the past nine months has heard every idea and readevery word that follows – usually more than once. Such burdens are not generally
specified in marriage vows. For those efforts, for the graceful example she set inacquiring our first midlife PhD, and for more or less everything else, I am in her debt.

iii

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................. ii
ABSTRACT.........................................................................................................vi
Chapter
1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................... 1
Securitization as a media effect
2. LITERATURE..................................................................................... 8
How security begat securitization
3. LITERATURE................................................................................... 31
The memory of persistence:
Heuristics, processing models, and understanding the news
4. RESEARCH METHODS................................................................... 46
Content and experiment
5. CONTENT ANALYSIS RESULTS................................................... 65
How a War becomes a “war”
6. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS ........................................................... 82
The securitization frame at work
7. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS............................................... 95
Dulce et securum est
APPENDICES
A. CODING INSTRUCTIONS FOR CONTENT ANALYSIS............. 113
B. QUESTIONNAIRES....................................................................... 117
iv

C. EXPERIMENTAL STIMULUS MATERIAL ................................. 121
D. RECALL AND RECOGNITION QUESTIONS.............................. 138

BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................... 143
VITA............................................................................................................... 156

v

SECURITIZATION AS A THEORYOF MEDIA EFFECTS
Fred Vultee
Dr. Lee Wilkins, Dissertation Supervisor
ABSTRACTThis dissertation proposes a particular form of media framing effect fromsecuritization, a process in which political actors seek to create consensus about securityrelated issues such as terrorism and immigration by portraying them as imminent threats
to a state’s physical or cultural survival. The dissertation offers a two-stage model, in
which securitization is first examined as an effect in news media accounts and then tested
in an experiment as an effect of media accounts.
A content analysis found that a salient example of securitization, the idea of a“war on terrorism,” appeared as a consensual frame in distinct sectors of the media
market after the September 2001 attacks. The frame diverged predictably in ensuing
years, suggesting that the securitization frame changes in response to news organizations’sense of audience expectations and perceptions of the boundaries of political debate.
The experimental portion found that securitization does not affect how
accurately audiences comprehend the central point of a story but does appear to produce
less attentive processing among those opposed to the government. The absence of
securitization, on the other hand, appears to produce more attentive processing among
those who consider themselves politically to the right of the media. Emotionally, theframe has no effect on opponents of the government but produces more trust in
government among pro-government audiences and those to the right of the media.
vi

CHAPTER 1
Securitization as a media effect

What is a “war on terrorism,” and what does it mean for the United States to beembroiled in one? American political elites are far from agreement. In a skeptical view,the concept of a war on terror has created a “self-inflicted wound” that serves thedemagogic ends of political leaders but hinders the nation’s ability to confront thelegitimate threats that terrorism does pose (Brzezinski, 2007). No, counters the head of
the newly created Department of Homeland Security; such complacent revisionism
overlooks the fact that “our foes have declared their intent to make war, havedemonstrated a capability to prosecute war and have laid on us the horrific consequences
commensurate with war” (Chertoff, 2007). Another view comes from the governing party
in Britain, the nation’s closest ally in the conflicts that have followed the September 2001
attacks: The mere phrase “war on terror” itself emboldens those foes (Branigan, 2007).
The picture is no clearer in press accounts. In one Associated Press report, thevice president promises that “America will stay on the offensive on the war on terror”(Talmadge, 2007). By the time the report reached the Web site of Fox News, the war had
become a proper noun: “the War on Terror.” In yet other news outlets, the phrase rarely
appears without the support of quotation marks: “Without the ability to promise
confidentiality, the press would have been unable to report notorious abuses ofgovernment power from Watergate through the Bush administration's violations offundamental rights in the ‘war on terror’” (Lewis, 2007). Clearly, different readers willfind different maps to this strange territory in different sections of different newspapers –1

as clear an illustration as possible of the intuitively comfortable concept of media
framing.
Little wonder that the contested idea of a war on terrorism could provide such “arich current framing case, perhaps the most important of our time” (Reese, 2007, p. 152).
But at the same time, it illustrates a concern about framing to which scholars haveincreasingly drawn attention: Is framing an effect on media or an effect of media? Thisdissertation contends that it is both. The representation of a “war on terror” frame, andthe larger case of framing that it represents, is an outcome of news decisions, politicalmaneuvering, and pressure from outside groups. This dissertation suggests that those canproduce predictable effects. The frame’s impact on people who read or watch news
accounts, in Brzezinski’s version, amounts to “five years of national brainwashing”(2007). This dissertation tests his assertion.
Unsettled, though, is a lingering concern in framing studies: How can one concept
be its own outcome and its own cause? This dissertation will introduce a theoretical linkthat could help solve that puzzle: securitization theory, a recent outgrowth of security
studies. Securitization can be thought of as a particular form of framing that relies on ashared perception of an issue as an existential threat – an imminent peril to the physical,
cultural, or social health of the community. When an issue has been securitized, apolitical actor has been able to cast it as such a threat and has gained a degree of public
assent to use extraordinary measures to combat that threat. The news media are essential
to that process. Media frames are the lens through which the public sees an issue liketerrorism or immigration either as a routine matter best dealt with through the normal

2

workings of law enforcement and politics or as a crisis that requires extreme measures forindefinite periods.
Although securitization theory has produced a number of provocative theoreticalexaminations, it has seen little in the way of quantitative empirical study. The war on
terror provides an opportunity to explore securitization within a framing perspective.
This paper uses a content analysis of how the “war on terror” has been framed in three
newspapers to suggest that a consensus securitization frame emerged in media accounts
with the September 2001 attacks but has become increasingly open to challenge frommultiple directions since then. That divergence in framing will suggest stimuli whose
effects can then be measured experimentally.
Political violence is far from the only category of news that is subject to being
securitized. Research from Europe has often concentrated on immigration and infectious
disease as securitization issues, and a study released at the outset of a U.N. climate debate
in April 2007 described global warming as a threat to U.S. national security (Kaplan &Maugh, 2007). The tone of current debate on how such issues are to be properly framed
for news audiences suggests a significant level of heated dispute among and between
journalistic and political actors alike. For its second phase, then, this dissertation will
apply a “securitization” frame to news articles covering two securitizable issues,
terrorism and immigration, to see whether the frame has the sort of emotional or
cognitive effects that would seem to make a battle over War on Terror vs. “war on terror”
worthwhile.
Terrorism draws the bulk of attention in the present research because it remains
the most salient example of a securitization issue for U.S. news audiences. Explaining3

how terrorism reached that level of salience requires a brief examination of the peculiar
position terrorism holds in news framing.
Wars on terrorism are not creatures of the 21st century. In U.S. news texts, suchwars can be found as early as the Carter administration, making them nearly as old as theconcept of a “war on drugs” (e.g., “How not to fight the drug war,” 1977). Wars on
terrorism have been attributed to France (Lewis, 1982), Israel (Nordell, 1984), Peru
(Brooke, 1992), and Turkey (Howe, 1980), in addition to the Reagan administration(“Transcript of Reagan’s speech”). As early as May 2001, news texts described Osamabin Laden as “America’s top enemy in the U.S. war on terrorism” (Jones & Moore,
2001). But the concept took on an unusually specific set of referents after the September
11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Within days, the “war on terror” was restricted tothe struggle between the United States and its shadowy antagonists.
But the meaning did not long remain so specific, and the reasons reflect some of
the complex cultural attributes attached to the idea of terrorism. Nearing the end of his
term as the first “public editor” of The New York Times, Daniel Okrent acknowledged aconcern that surfaces regularly at his newspaper and at many other news organizations
around the country: “Nothing provokes as much rage as what many perceive to be The
Times’ policy on the use of ‘terrorist,’ ‘terrorism’ and ‘terror’” (Okrent, 2005). There is,he was quick to add, no such formal policy. But the perception of one can produce aneffect that appears to readers much the same as a mandate from on high. Such aperception can suggest the degree to which a news organization appears to align itself
with the views of the party in power. As importantly, though, reactions to that perception
suggest that audiences place an unusual value on the simple word “terror” itself.
4

Consider, for example, the case of a pressure group convinced that CNN was dilatory indescribing Palestinian attacks on Israelis as “terrorist.” The group’s demands for“progress on the T-word” (HonestReporting, 2004) led to such cascades of electronic
mail that it was able to command CNN’s attention by “effectively paralyzing” the
network’s internal e-mail system (Shalev, 2002, para. 39) – and, eventually, winning thesort of changes in news language its members sought.
Are those concerns an indication of some wholly new development – a sign that,indeed, “everything has changed” since transnational terrorism became a dominant topic
on U.S. news agendas in September 2001? A better case can be made that such concerns
reflect frames of discussion, and frames of reporting, that go back many decades earlier.
The idea that one camp’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter can be traced at least to
Britain’s efforts to contain the post-World War II Malay insurgency (Deery, 2003). For
several decades, research has noted that terrorism is something that happens to “us,”while the same sort of violence perpetrated against others – particularly distant others –tends to wear some less judgmental name (Epstein, 1977; Rolston & Miller, 1996). An
attack on the public transit system in the Indian city of Mumbai that killed scores ofpeople, blamed on Kashmiri separatists, was not a front-page story for one metropolitan
newspaper because “without an apparent direct connection to the U.S., it appears they’re
not part of international terrorism” (Zeeck, 2006). It seems only natural, then, that the
only political organization defined as “terrorist” in the Associated Press style manual is
al-Qaida, perpetrators of the September 2001 attacks.
All this is enough to leave the newspaper reader or TV viewer with a sense that“terrorism” must be a magic word, and magic is rarely amenable to empirical testing. But
5securitization theory (Buzan, Wæver, & de Wilde, 1998) suggests a testable proxy.
“Terrorism” is a securitizing word, and when a problem has been securitized, it has been
moved out of the arena of ordinary challenges dealt with by the normal workings ofsociety and into a realm of direct threats to a society’s political and cultural existence –an extraordinary peril justifying extraordinary measures in response.
Securitization is a kind of speech act, in which a word or phrase has the sort ofperformative function that occurs when a judicial authority pronounces a prison sentenceor a cleric pronounces a marriage. But unlike most speech acts, securitization depends for
its success on the consent of both the audience and other rival claimants: opposition
parties, allied nations, notionally equal branches of government. The power to securitize
is far from trivial. The party that succeeds in turning immigration into a crisis, or drugs
into a war, has opened up new streams of resources, forced new solutions into thediscussion, placed other solutions farther out of bounds. Little wonder that a concept like“terrorism” could invoke such a struggle for control.
That control appears to be heavily contested. In the Washington Post, the “war on
terror” is a fragile construct that rarely appears without the sustenance of quotation
marks. At Fox News, as noted above, the War on Terror is a proper noun. It is hard to
think of a clearer example of Cohen’s assertion: “The world looks different to different
people, depending not only on their personal interests but also on the map that is drawn
for them by the writers, editors and publishers of the papers they read” (1963, p. 13).
A “war on drugs” might raise the idea of an unusual or inappropriate opponent. A“war on terrorism” is more intuitively sensible, but it raises related questions. First, towhat degree does securitization create its own monster from a familiar threat that has
6traditionally been handled by crime-control and investigative organizations that are
already in place? Second, does securitization suggest a limitless peril: a dire threat thatcan only be resolved by the unconditional surrender of an enemy that can barely be
identified, let alone brought to bay? Third, what does securitization demand as a cost forcontrolling that peril? Finally, and most relevant for the purposes of this study: Whatmakes securitization work? Which political actors can invoke it successfully? To what
degree are its decisions democratic ones, and for the purposes of media studies, what roledo news media play in making those democratic decisions well-informed ones?
So this dissertation will proceed in three stages. First, it will explain securitizationand how that concept arose from the broader field of security studies. Then it will seek toshow that the framing of political violence in the American press is flexible – subject toan array of internal or external influences that modify the way such violence is presented
to the news-absorbing public. Last, it will examine whether the securitization of aproblem – the wave of the semantic wand that turns immigration into a crisis that requires
military intervention, or that turns terrorism into an existential threat demanding
extraordinary means for indefinite periods – affects both attitude and comprehension
among news audiences. Specifically, it will suggest that successful securitizationencourages a judgmental heuristic, a cognitive shortcut that suggests less-thoroughcognitive processing, along with a greater willingness to leave “security” decisions in thehands of authorities. Those are effects that would make securitization worth the effort on
the part of political elites – and would make it an essential form of framing fornewsrooms to understand.

7

CHAPTER 2
Literature: How security begat securitization

The theory of securitization is new to media studies, but it is also a relative
newcomer in its own domain, security studies. This chapter will begin by examining how
securitization arose in the post-Cold War ferment in studies of security and international
relations, then explain how it fits into the concept of framing as it is currently understoodin media studies and political science. Those theoretical approaches will suggest
hypotheses that can be tested through content analysis.
Securitization is a recent enough concept that its definition is easy to trace. An
issue can be securitized when it is “presented as posing an existential threat to a
designated referent object,” thus “justifying the use of extraordinary measures” (Buzan,Wæver, & de Wilde, 1998, p. 21). Security itself has proven harder to summarize. At its
simplest, physical security, the need of a nation-state to protect itself from attack andensure the survival of itself and its people, “was the core interest most often associated in
the early days of the [U.S.] republic with the concept of national security,” and “security
against foreign danger” was a prime reason for centralizing power in the new federal
government (Jablonsky, 2003, p. 4).
Still, although the pursuit of security is “a matter of the highest priority, part of
the raison d’etre of the state,” references to security in modern politics are often “ofrhetorical rather than analytic value” (Mangold, 1990, p. 1). Consequently, there are twomain approaches to the definition question: leaving the matter deliberately vague or
restricting security to a “narrow and traditional” approach, “stressing the study of the8threat, use and control of military force” and examining “causes, cures, and consequences
for war” (Mandel, 1994, p. 18). Given the straightforwardness and utility of the latterapproach, security studies have traditionally been identified with realism, thephilosophical current in international relations that emphasizes the centrality of power
and the self-interested behavior of states in an anarchic system (e.g., Walt, 1997). Realists
reciprocate this understanding: “The main focus of security studies is easy to identify. ...
It is the phenomenon of war” (Walt, 1991, p. 212). Military power might not be the soleconcern, but such other concerns as arms control and statecraft are intimately linked to it.
Though nonmilitary threats to states’ well-being deserve attention, they are not the realcore of security, and in Walt’s argument, the discipline is weakened by efforts to widen
it: “By this logic, issues such as pollution, disease, child abuse, or economic recessions
could all be viewed as threats to ‘security’” (1991, p. 213).
The orthodox conception of security was strengthened with the rise of whatbecame known as the “national security state.” This phenomenon is rooted in the rapid
advance of technology in the first half of the 20th century. “The unlucky discovery by animmature civilization of the internal combustion engine and the art of flying” (Churchill,
1948, p. 99) made changes in the balance of power between states much faster and muchless predictable. With the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons and themeans to deliver them around the globe, the idea of an existential threat to a nation or its
culture arising out of the blue became more plausible, and the idea of a permanent
national security establishment – one that could confront such threats as quickly as theyarose – became more firmly entrenched.

9Even under those circumstances, a view limited to the security of the nation-state,
its borders, and its armed forces was soon subject to debate, even within the traditionalist
camp. Where, for example, could threats to a nation’s economic well-being be placed?
Transformative events of the late 20th century brought further questions about traditional
concepts of security: whether and to what degree security is affected by globalization andthe changing nature of threats themselves (Ripsman & Paul, 2005), the “growing fusion
between law enforcement and national security missions” (Andreas & Price, 2001, p. 31),even the very sorts of forces that brought down the Soviet Union (Kolodziej, 1992).
Indeed, the perceived need to broaden traditional conceptions of security has raised directquestions about such foundational elements of the “security state” as the lines of
responsibility for military and nonmilitary threats drawn by the U.S. National Security
Act of 1947. That blurring of lines is evident in a different potentially securitizable threat,
the so-called war on drugs: “Give the Drug Warriors the technological edge of the Cold
Warriors” (Andreas & Price, 2001, p. 40) was the plea at one anti-drug conference. By
the early 21st century, the realm of orthodox security studies had even come toencompass infectious diseases (Brower & Chalk, 2003).
Even as challenges to the traditional conception of security were arising within
the mainstream, other challenges were being raised from without. Critical security theory
contends that just such an extension of security issues beyond the immediate concerns of
the state is essential if “security” is to play a meaningful role in improving the humancondition (Stamnes, 2004). The critical approach seeks to deepen conceptions of security,
rather than merely broadening them (Smith, 2005); the realism of orthodox security
studies “is part of the problem in world politics rather than being the problem solver”
10

(Booth, 2005, p. 3). As in other branches of social science, a critical security approachtakes aim at what advocates consider an excessively positivist and excessively Westernoriented view of the world and its problems. Nonconventional weapons and terrorism arecertainly security threats, but so are “consumerism, tyranny, massive disparities of wealth... and brute capitalism – as well as the more traditional cultural threats to peoples’
security as a result of patriarchy and religious bigotry” (2005, p. 1). Critical theorists
suggest that any study of security that does not point toward “emancipatory” practices iseffectively guilty of perpetuating the oppressive systems it describes. (For a summary andrebuttal, see Taureck, 2006.)
The theory of securitization emerged in the late days of the Cold War and offers atentative compromise: not a full-scale retreat from realism but a growing recognition inparts of the interstate community that states are ultimately made up of individuals andhouseholds (Alker, 2005). The advocates of securitization, who became known as the
Copenhagen School, sought both to widen and to broaden traditional security concepts.
But the Copenhagen School places two important hurdles in front of any such effort. Not
only must an “existential threat requiring emergency action” be identified, but asignificant part of the audience needs to accept that designation (Buzan, Wæver, & deWilde, 1998, p. 27). Such a threat might not be as self-evident as an erupting volcano or
an invading barbarian horde; more likely, a political actor will have to build a persuasive
case for securitizing the threat using the mass media. Although securitization draws
attention to a range of issues that are highly valued from a critical perspective, then, it
remains “largely based on power and capability and therewith the means to socially andpolitically construct a threat” (Taureck, 2006, p. 55). Despite its greater openness,
11

securitization acknowledges that the advantage remains with those who begin with more
power and more access to such elements as the media.
A media frame incorporating securitization involves a shared understanding of theneed for extraordinary measures and, more importantly, a shared sense of peril to thenation and its identity: not just its borders or armed forces but its institutions and its senseof self. Identity, rather than sovereignty, is the focus of existential threats to society“because it defines whether ‘we’ are still us” (Buzan & Wæver, 1997). Immigration canbe “securitized” because of the perception that the problems it creates go beyond themere matter of catching more people at more border points. When unchecked
immigration is portrayed as a threat to the very elements – culture, language, nationhood– that give the once-secure nation its uniqueness, securitization suggests that the result islikely to be laws mandating the use of English, for example, rather than calls for
improved immigration procedures.
Securitization, then, shares both the critical theorists’ interest in expanding thescope of issues that reflect “security” (Booth, 2005) and the traditional realists’ primaryemphasis on issues affecting the state (Smith, 2005). At the same time, it has come undercriticism from both camps – from the latter for straying too far from the fold (Buzan etal., 1998) and from the former for not straying far enough. Others question whether it is
too bound by European assumptions about society and state to effectively explain eventsin non-Western regions (Wilkinson, 2007). Still, even among some critical scholars(Elbe, 2006), the Copenhagen scholars’ work draws praise for its originality and its
systematic study of what it means to place nonmilitary issues on the security agenda.

12What sorts of issues fall into that category? As outlined by Buzan et al. (1998, pp.
22-23), securitization can take in politics (“anything that questions recognition,
legitimacy, or governing authority”), society (including “the abilities to maintain andreproduce a language, a set of behavioural customs, or a conception of ethnic purity”), or
the environment (“baseline concerns about the relationship between the human species
and the rest of the biosphere”). None of these threats are measured on an objective scale.
Rather, they are invoked more and less successfully by political actors whose goal is tobuild a shared understanding of what such threats look like (Buzan et al., 1998). From a
media perspective, securitization is built like any other frame. If the essence of framing is“to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in acommunicating text” (Entman, 1993, p. 52), securitization is the form of framing thathighlights the existential threat of an issue and diminishes the arguments for handling it
as a matter of routine.
Securitization is a distinct form of framing because, although its declarations are
made by and on behalf of a vested authority, the right to wield that authority is notassured and the declarations themselves are not necessarily final. Thus, securitization
poses two questions that are central to contemporary studies of media framing, whichemphasize distinguishing how frames are built from how frames are processed (e.g.,
Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007). The first question parallels Lasswell’s (1950) oft-cited
maxim of media studies: “Who can ‘do’ or ‘speak’ security successfully, on what issues,
under what conditions, and with what effects?” (Buzan et al.,1998, p. 25). The second
asks whether the frame has taken hold: “When does an argument with this particularrhetorical and semiotic structure achieve sufficient effect to make an audience tolerate
13violations of rules that would otherwise have to be obeyed?” (1998, p. 25). The languageof securitization is a political instrument used to categorize actors and situations and tooutline appropriate sets of solutions. That makes securitization is a comfortable fit withconceptions of framing as outlined recently by Entman (2003, 2004).
To those threatened by an impending outbreak of avian influenza, the idea that a
disease can be elevated to the level of a security concern might prove comforting, andsuch an expansion of the concept of security might indeed have the emancipatory effectthat critical scholars hope for. But the ability to securitize an issue is far from an
unmitigated good. Before returning to the discussion of how securitization works andwhere it fits into the wider concept of framing, it is worth spending a few moments
considering the advantages that can accrue to actors who can successfully invoke thisframe with regard to an issue like terrorism.

Securitizing terrorism: Who gains and who loses?
For nations and individuals alike, the levers of securitization are powerful tools.
Identifying an opponent as a terrorist works to delegitimize that opponent’s politicalgoals and thus to move the contest away from the gray areas of political contestation, andby implication political responsibility, and toward the black-and-white world of theexistential threat that is fundamental to securitization theory (Nadarajah &Sriskandarajah, 2005, p. 91). Once that frame is established at home, as in the case of Sri
Lanka (Nadarajah & Sriskandarajah, 2005, pp. 98-99), domestic political actors
contradict it at their own risk. Conversely, it is evident from the array of nations
identified as allies or partners in the “war on terror” that being on the proper side is a14political blessing. The chance to provide post-9/11 intelligence cooperation was a “getout of jail free” card for a Sudanese government seeking to have itself removed from
Washington’s list of nations that sponsor terrorism (Jervis, 2005, p. 52).
The political actor who controls the frame draws on other assets as well. The
narrative version of a conflict or dispute that becomes internationalized through media
coverage is likely to be the one that gains the widest acceptance, as in the narratives of“ancient hatreds” and “warring factions” that emerged during the Bosnian secession warsof the 1990s (Campbell, 1998; Nadarajah & Sriskandarajah, 2005). The utility of “war on
terrorism” as a narrative is clear in New York Post editorials excoriating 2004 presidential
candidate John Kerry for suggesting, in effect, a desecuritization of terrorism. Just such a
set of normal routines – emphasizing police work, cooperation, and intelligence gathering– has long been used to organize responses to terrorism (Jervis, 2005). But if terrorism is
successfully cast as a war, Kerry becomes a 21st-century Neville Chamberlain: the sort ofcandidate who would seek to contain Nazism with border police and immigration laws.
Kerry’s “reluctance earlier this year to call the war on terror an actual war” (Bishop,
2004), in the understanding of the pro-Bush New York Post, is more than semantic
quibbling.1 It defines the essential characteristic that separates an unworthy candidatefrom one to whom the nation’s survival can be trusted.
Because securitization relies on a sense that ordinary measures cannot resolve a
particular crisis, formalizing terrorism as a war is a clear example of the political utilityof the frame: “The war against terror is about opening up a space outside the establishedrange of police operations and judicial procedures” (Oberleitner, 2004, p. 264).
1

It is mildly ironic to find Kerry himself invoking a securitizing move – referring to organized crime as“the new communism, the new monolithic threat” – as early as 1995 (Andreas & Price, 2001, p. 37).

15

Securitization can be described in near-identical terms: “‘Security’ is the move that takes
politics beyond the established rules of the game and frames the issue either as a special
kind of politics or as above politics” (Buzan et al., 1998, p. 23). The mechanism by which
securitization works this magic is derived from speech-act theory.

Securitization: Framing as a speech act
Two characteristics are essential in an issue that has become securitized (Buzan etal., 1998). First, the issue must be seen as an existential threat – one that puts the very
physical or cultural continuity of the state at risk. Second, this threat must be the kind forwhich extraordinary, if not extralegal, measures may be invoked. Two of thejustifications put forth for the 2003 invasion of Iraq – that country’s assumed intent toimperil the United States with nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons and its notional
links to Qaida-style terrorism – suggest how an obstreperous but militarily prostratenation could be turned into the sort of imminent menace that required full-scale
preventive war.
Securitization is distinguished from other framing models because it suggeststhat this transformation comes about by a speech act (e.g., Austin, 1975): a particularrhetorical action in which the mere pronouncing of a condition has the force of bringing
the condition about, as in pronouncing a legal verdict, declaring a couple married, or
naming a vessel. These are “performative” utterances: “To utter the sentence (in, ofcourse, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing ... or to state that I am
doing it: It is to do it” (Austin, 1975, p. 6). Wæver (1995, p. 55) explains how suchstatements can work in securitization: “By uttering ‘security’ a state-representative moves16

a particular development into a specific area, and thereby claims a special right to use
whatever means are necessary to block it.”Who controls the switch, though? Who has the power to declare some state ofaffairs an existential threat and, by so doing, to set forth the sorts of extraordinary or
extralegal maneuvers necessary to deal with it? Securitization not only suggests thecentrality of such questions but opens a number of new avenues for examining media
performance, particularly in the portrayals of conflicts and crises. It is an avenue down
which, for example, responses to a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina might beanalyzed. First, though, securitization must be distinguished from – and set in relation to– other forms of framing.
Securitization is rooted in a different strain of scholarship, and in some ways in adifferent philosophical orientation, than those forms of framing known best to media
studies, which draw on sociology and psychology. If securitization is a different sort offraming, then, it is one that both disciplines can recognize. Some researchers imply theinterdisciplinary connection without naming its parts. Lobell (2006), for example,
describes what amounts to a securitizing effect as a matter of aversion to loss (a cognitiveeffect known from psychology). Political actors, in this view, have a stake in making surethe public knows things are bad and bound to get worse if their proposed measures –economic, military, and the like – are not adopted (a sociology-based approach, with theframe as a way of organizing a narrative).
Securitization also draws on two disciplines that are less known in framing:
international relations (particularly security) and language studies. Further, it offers toshed new light on an area that scholars in international relations (e.g., Huth & Allee,
17

2002; Levy, 1989) have identified as a gap in the study of interstate conflict: the impactof domestic political behavior on international behavior. As the role of the press in suchprocesses as the “democratic peace” (e.g., Van Belle, 2000; Choi & James, 2005) anddemocratization itself (e.g. Kuo, 1993; Lawson, 2003) becomes more prominent, media
portrayals of political performance will become even more relevant to studies of how
media perform in crises.
In line with that interplay of mediated communication and policy outcome,
Balzacq (2005) looks at securitization as a discursive practice aimed at persuading theaudience to accept a particular development as the sort of threat that deserves animmediate policy aimed specifically at it. This persuasion, it is important to note, is basedon what the audience already knows about the world. Thus, the “securitizing move” – apower-holder’s attempt to move an issue into the realm of securitization – has to rely on
the audience’s own frame of reference, its trust in the would-be-securitizer and thus its
readiness to be convinced, and its ability to give or deny officials the mandate necessary
for security (2005, p. 192).
As noted above, securitization grows from traditional concerns of state andmilitary security but builds a theoretical bridge toward critical studies by defining theterms under which new categories of threat can be admitted to the domain of security
risks. Such a widening may be welcome in practical terms, but it creates some confusion,or at least some inconsistency, in theoretical ones. Much of that squishiness arises fromsecuritization’s equally important grounding in language theories, particularly in speechacts. To extend an analogy from Austin (1975), a baseball umpire commits a speech act
in declaring a ball foul or fair. Players might disagree, fans might disagree even more18

loudly, sportswriters might mumble among themselves, but the authority to pronounce
the ball fair or foul lies with the umpire.
Although securitizing declarations are made by and on behalf of a vested
authority, the right to wield that authority is contested and the declarations themselves are
not necessarily final. It is not enough for an issue to be declared a security threat; it mustbe broadly accepted as such by the audience as well (Buzan et al., 1998). It is as if anumpire’s call of “Foul!” were met by the shadow cabinet’s declaration that if that ball isfoul, the fairs have already won – with the decision resting finally on the consensus of the
fans.
Recent studies using securitization as a framework underline its relevance toquestions of framing and news language. Bigo (2006) makes the connection explicit:“What are the reasons for the persistent framing of migration in relation to terrorism,
crime, unemployment and religious zealotry ... rather than in relation to newopportunities for European societies ... or for some new understanding of citizenship?”(2006, p. 64). Jutila (2006) quotes a number of scholars as suggesting that migration
should be desecuritized – moved away from the emergency realm and into the realm of
normal politics. Mantouvalou (2005) finds that Greece’s immigration policy is defined byshifts between tolerance and securitization, with growing concern about the likelihoodthat it could be strongly securitized in future political discourse.
Other research from the current decade suggests the range of issues that can be
examined in a securitization framework. Emmers (2003) describes an effort to securitize
transnational crime by Southeast Asian political elites, though the ultimate effects wereprimarily cosmetic and strong “criminalization” might have proved a more useful19strategy. Abrahamsen (2005) finds that while an overall securitization of Africa in
British foreign policy might bring a slight increase in Western aid, it nonetheless offeredmuch more assistance to the “war on terrorism” than to African development overall.
Elbe (2005, 2006) and McInnes and Lee (2006) caution that securitization of such publichealth issues as HIV/AIDS is likely to emphasize elite health over public health and toprioritize threats to the developed world, rather than the developing world.
Securitization has clearly been a fruitful theory for normative explorations – oneof the very areas that Kolodziej (1992) had suggested was implicit in the thinking ofRealists like Morgenthau but absent in mainstream state-oriented security studies. To
date, though, it has seen little in the way of empirical testing. This project proposes to put
the theory to such a test – to determine, in other words, whether a securitization effect is
actually at stake when power-holders and interest groups and media outlets wrestle oversecuritizing efforts, particularly in the context of a war on terrorism. The first step in suchan effort is to determine how securitization in media texts can be measured.

Securitization: Defining and measuring the frame itself
The starting point for defining the securitization frame is found in Buzan et al.’s
explanation of securitization’s core points: “What is essential is the designation of an
existential threat requiring emergency action or special measures and the acceptance ofthat designation by a significant audience” (1998, p. 27). That means two types of scales
will ultimately be required to determine how thoroughly the frame has been invoked. One
will measure the way in which the threat is characterized; a second will measure thedegree to which it is accepted or rejected.
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Not all “crises,” of course, are security crises. The wholesale loss of textile jobs inthe southeastern United States may be a crisis, but it is partly compensated in the region
by the creation of other jobs and in the rest of the nation by job gains driven by the same
sorts of forces that drive textile jobs offshore. The concerns of the 1980s that a thenresurgent Japan was in a position to buy rather than bomb Pearl Harbor were of adifferent sort. The threat, even if it never reached the level of a crisis, of overseas debtholders’ calling in U.S. markers was accompanied by concerns that America would lose
control of the cultural institutions – movie studios, national landmarks, and the like – that
help provide its identity.
Nor do all uses of military power become securitized issues. The successful
invasion of Grenada in 1983 resolved a minor irritant to American will in its homehemisphere; the unsuccessful attempt to rescue U.S. captives from Iran in 1980 may have
deepened a sense of national embarrassment but did nothing to make the then-six-monthold “hostage crisis” into a national emergency. However dire they may be, such situations
are seen as properly handled by social institutions functioning in their accepted ways (cf.
Lau & Schlesinger, 2005).
Much like agenda-setting (Wanta, 1997), framing reflects a kind of social
learning. The ways in which socialization can “interact with cognitive wiring” (Grabe &Kamhawi, 2006) will be underscored later as the audience effects of the securitization
frame are discussed. But securitization is, at bottom, a mediated process. Before it cancreate consensus in the audience, it must be invoked by a political actor and passed alongmore or less intact by mass media. Such processes can be understood broadly under theconcept of framing.
21

Framing: A “fractured paradigm” settling in at lastFraming has supported a rich variety of studies and paradigms and a collection
nearly as large of complaints about its vagueness and imprecision. Its mixed backgroundin both psychology and sociology points to some of the confusion that has surrounded it,
and to the theoretical openness that has helped drive that confusion.
Implicitly or explicitly, framing has been a concern of media observers since
Lippmann’s observation (1922) that we know the outside world only at second hand:“We can see how indirectly we know the environment in which nevertheless we live. We
can see that news of it comes to us now fast, now slowly; but that whatever we believe to
be a true picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself” (1922/1997, p. 4).
Lippmann’s point remains true today in matters as intensely local as race relations (Shah& Thornton, 2004) and as distant as international relations (Wanta & Yu, 1993; Brewer,
Graf, & Willnat, 2003). Iyengar and Simon summarize the “psychological and social
pedigrees” of the concept: from psychology, changes in judgment based on the way
problems are defined; from sociology, primarily the study of “story lines, symbols andstereotypes” in media accounts (1993, p. 369). Both strains are evident in current researchon news content and its effects. Shah, Kwak, Schmierbach, and Zubric (2004) reflect thepsychological studies that initially cast problems in “gain” and “loss” frames; Entman(2004) revisits his exploration of the culturally congruent story lines that news magazines
chose to explain the destruction of civilian airliners by Soviet and U.S. forces; Iyengar
and Simon (1993) touch on both in distinguishing “episodic” frames (concentrating on
single instances) from “thematic” ones (placing issues in general or abstract contexts).

22

The convenience of framing as an organizing tool has been especially appropriate
for examining ways in which pictures of the distant world, rarely known at first hand toaudiences, are constructed for U.S. news markets. “The essence of framing is selection toprioritize some facts, images, or developments over others,” thus “promoting one
particular interpretation” (Norris, Kern, & Just, 2003, p. 11) – and perhaps more to thepoint, a particular evaluation or solution (Entman, 2003). But useful as such frames arefor organizing knowledge, they are equally good at misorganizing it. A “one-sided”
frame, even one as consensually accepted as the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism, canmonopolize the organizing capacity in such a way that contradictory evidence is simply
unable to enter (Norris et al., 2003).
Such convenience is an ally of political actors, particularly those seeking theconsensus a securitization frame is expected to evoke. As Lippmann noted eight decadesago, “Where the incidence of policy is remote, all that is essential is that the program
shall be verbally and emotionally connected at the start with what has become vocal in
the multitude” (1922/1997, p. 156). Norris et al. list a half-dozen incidents of substate
violence in a half-dozen unrelated conflicts to illuminate that point: “Without knowing
much, if anything, about the particular people, groups, issues or even places involved, theterrorist and anti-terrorist frame allows us to quickly sort out, interpret, categorize, andevaluate these conflicts” (2003, p. 11). The power of that particular interpretation is borneout in the dominance of an accessible, unambiguous “‘good vs. evil’ frame” surrounding
the campaign against terrorism, with elites implying broad support for administration
policy and the media falling quickly into line (Baum, 2004, p. 332).

23

Framing is a useful and flexible metaphor, but a metaphor is not the same thing asa theory. That very flexibility has often left framing, in Entman’s memorable title, a“fractured paradigm”: “Despite its omnipresence across the social sciences andhumanities, nowhere is there a general statement of framing theory” to show the
relationships between frames and texts or frames and thinking (1993, p. 51). In anotherview (D’Angelo, 2000), that lack of unity itself is a virtue, and there is no need for such a
unified paradigm. Framing should continue as a framework of diverse paradigms –constructivist, critical, and cognitive – that guide both the choice of theories and theresearch itself.
Scheufele (1999) offers a compromise that incorporates the social-constructionist
views of sociology and political communication, the critical stance implied by thegroundbreaking descriptive work of such scholars as Entman, and the cognitive effects
summarized in the second level of agenda-setting. Merely demonstrating the presence ofa frame, he suggests, is essentially devoid of theoretical interest. But a “process model”
that incorporates the ways in which frames are built and set, the individual effects offraming, and the audience-to-media feedback process can provide a common theoreticalmodel while letting the different approaches retain their individuality. Entman’s“cascading activation” model (2003, 2004) expands on that approach by incorporating thepotential influence of the audience on the political process. The most significant ability to
set and control frames resides at the top: in the United States, with the president and top
advisers. Organizing frames spread downward from there through other elites andjournalists to the public, and with slightly more difficulty, ideas filter back upward as24

well. Consensus at the top helps ensure the propagation of frames that favor theadministration’s perspective; dissent gives contrary frames a higher chance at success.
Closely related to Entman’s concept is indexing, which sees an “ongoing, implicit
calibration process” (Bennett, Lawrence, & Livingston, 2007, p. 49) in coverage of
public affairs. Changes in issues or perspectives that receive coverage suggest changes in
how those issues or perspectives are being considered among policymakers and otherelites; the media “open the gates wider or close them more tightly as they perceive
potentially decisive challenges or a lack of challenges to the most powerful institutional
players and their agendas” (p. 49). The cascading and indexing models point to a close
relationship between elite opinion and media opinion but leave more room for the
professional norms and judgments of journalists than, for example, the propaganda modelof political economy offered by Herman and Chomsky (2002).
Framing has been more clear-cut, or at least less contested, in the realm ofdomestic and international politics. Much of this clarity derives from the more explicitly
psychological model exemplified by prospect theory, in which identical information can
produce different preferences depending on whether it is presented in a way thatexemplifies gains or losses. Druckman (2004) calls those presentations “equivalency” or“valence” frames, distinguishing them from “issue” or “emphasis” frames, which present
considerations that are equal in presumed relevance but factually distinct. In an emphasis
frame, for example, the different effects of portraying a Klan demonstration as a matter offree speech or of public safety might be examined. But a valence-oriented frame could be
extended to the realm of securitization by presenting identical events as the result of a“terrorist” or a “guerrilla” attack: the product of a greater or lesser threat, rather than25

merely a gain or a loss. Prospect-oriented framing has been used to illuminate casestudies (McDermott 1998) and experiments (Boettcher 2004) alike. Shamir and Shikaki(2005) use a prospect-oriented approach to examine how “constructive ambiguity” inframing peace negotiations can influence public opinion.
Disputes about framing in media studies appear to have reached a point ofagreement, or at least a truce: Concepts and methods from the psychological andsociological sides alike inform each other. Cognitive outcomes in particular are often
explored under the banner of second-level agenda-setting (Wanta 1997, McCombs 2004),
which looks at many of the elements that make up news frames as part of an “agenda of
attributes.” But a central concern raised by such scholars as McDermott (1998) andShamir and Shikaki (2005) remains: If so much is known about the effects or apparent
effects of framing, why is so little done with that knowledge? The securitization frame
provides another practical context in which that knowledge can be made available.
What broad category of framing does the securitization frame occupy? It
resembles a “policy metaphor” (Lau & Schlesinger, 2005) in that it moves in two steps.
The first is an understanding of what makes a frame appropriate; in short, whether theframes admitted to discussion involve the right actors and invoke, in Entman’sconception (2004), the right definitions of problems and solutions. The second is a matterof preferences: of the available choices, which is the best (Lau & Schlesinger, 2005).
Securitization, then, is a mediated process in which the media act as a gatekeeper: They
originate few if any frames themselves but instead select from among those madeavailable to them – primarily from elites, but in some cases from perceptions of audienceinterests or concerns as well.
26

Securitization, then, is both a cause and an outcome. As an outcome, it appears as
a result of the ideological stances of news organizations and their staffers, of those actors’
understanding of themselves as thoughtful or passive processors of elite messages, and of
the “news” itself and the quality and consonance of elite interpretations of the news. As acause, it can affect audiences’ choice of news outlets and their alignment with the frame
and its contents. And through the media, frames that have taken root in the audience caneventually reach the ears of elites (Entman, 2004; Scheufele, 1999).
From a journalist’s perspective, such discussions can seem like much ado about
the square root of nothing. News is the substance detected by a nose for news; it has noframe but the one it comes in, and terrorism looks bigger than other news because it isbigger than other news. Securitization is not a complex process of creating and sustaining
a consonant frame of cultural peril; it is the natural result of how newsmakers talk about
news. Such views find support in the study of how news comes to be understood. When
Shoemaker and Cohen (2006) explain news as a function of two predictors, deviance andsocial significance, the event used as an exemplar of the top end of both scales is the2001 attack on the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon. As storytelling, news is biased
not so much toward particular political views as toward the dramatic and the simple(Wolfsfeld, 2004). There are no prizes for the less exciting or the more convoluted story.
But such observations are clearly not universal. If there were not cases in which
the securitization frame fails to take hold, or in which issues can and do become
desecuritized, there would be little point in examining the frame’s progress. Nor is there
an explanation for why some scents become available to the “nose for news” only withthe passage of time: for example, U.S. public opposition to the Iraq war. A concept that27

will help tie those concerns together is the notion of “news slots” (Wolfsfeld, 2004), or
topic areas into which journalistic resources can be allotted. Slots and frames are not thesame things, but the creation of new slots can support changes in the ways framing
carries out its emphasis, selection, and highlighting functions. An increase in slots
dedicated to a familiar perspective – covering hawkish views about the war in thelegislature as well as in the executive – is likely to reinforce prevailing frames. On theother hand, alternative frames can be created or strengthened if new slots are created fortalking about unfamiliar views: an erstwhile enemy as a peace partner, for example, orthe advantages of an increase in immigration. A change in framing is likely to correspondwith a change in the allowable range of public debate. If such a change can be found in
the realm of terrorism and political violence, given its unique place in American political
discourse, it can likely be found in other domains as well.

Why the “war on terror”?
The framing of terrorism is hardly a new field for scholarly exploration, nor is it
the sole example of securitization in news coverage. But it has continued to draw
attention, and increasingly (e.g. Dunn, Moore, & Nosek, 2005) it is attention to theempirical effects of framing at the lexical level: frames, in short, that can be manipulated
in units as small as a single word or phrase. Demonstrating such variance in framing
among national media outlets is a building block in suggesting how a securitizing frame
like terrorism – or, for similar purposes, immigration or illegal drugs – can be invoked
and the potential rewards that a successful securitization could mean for political actors.

28

The threat of terrorism is a particularly appropriate place to start in the study of
U.S. news framing because of the frame’s sheer utility: The “war on terror,” in particular,
seems able to organize “a large swath of political action” (Reese, 2007, p. 153). And
because it seems likely that “media effects would be stronger when the audience is highly
dependent on the news media” (Hindman, 2004, p. 39) – the immediate aftermath of theSeptember 2001 attacks being exactly such a time – an effects paradigm like framing isparticularly appropriate for examining a securitization model. The idea that news content
indexes both journalistic judgment and the judgment of political elites points to how
portrayals of this conflict, and of the set of political actions organized and captured inthose portrayals, might diverge.
For its content analysis portion, then, this dissertation will propose a securitization
frame that can be examined in news content and track its path in elite, popular, andpopulist news outlets since the September 2001 attacks. These hypotheses are proposed:
H1: Across all categories of media examined, coverage of the “war on terrorism”
will reflect the securitization frame more closely in 2001 and 2002 and less closely inlater periods.
H2: As the 2001 attacks become more distant in time, the securitization frame will
diverge in different media, so that it will appear least frequently in elite media, morecommonly in popular national media, and still more commonly in populist media alignedwith the governing party.
The appearance and divergence of this frame are relevant because asecuritization frame is expected to bias readers and viewers toward a series of cognitive
shortcuts – judging the threat as more direct, being more willing to leave decision-making
29authority in others’ hands, and thus allowing the frame to determine the amount ofknowledge they actively seek. The next chapter will examine the theories under which
the cognitive and emotional effects of such a frame can be measured experimentally andpropose a set of tests to determine whether the frame can be made to take hold.

30

CHAPTER 3:
The memory of persistence:
Heuristics, processing models, and understanding the news

However prominent or interesting a particular frame might be, demonstrating its
presence or absence is only part of the study of how news reports shape public
perceptions. It is true, in the aphorism that agenda-setting scholars cite from Cohen(1963), that news audiences are not directly told what to think, but it is equally true, as
Entman (1989) noted, that they are guided toward what to think about, how to arrange
their thinking, and what categories to store the resulting thoughts in. The way thismaterial is organized and presented affects not only what audiences fear or like but what
they know and how they know it – the facts and schemas they store for future retrieval
and comparison. If news media are indeed the link in the democratic chain that provides“pure mental food” (Commission on Freedom of the Press, 1947) to would-be voters,then what audiences learn, what they learn about, and how they categorize those things –not only what goes in the mental file folders, but how those folders are organized andlabeled – are intertwined with what they feel and whom they feel it toward. This chapter
examines theories of how messages, including news messages, are approached andprocessed; how those messages affect attitudes; and how attitudes toward news media
relate to the messages those media provide. The intent is to propose several effects that asecuritization frame is expected to have and questions about how it might work.
In line with securitization theory in general, it is hypothesized that the
securitization frame will produce a greater willingness to leave decision-making power in31the hands of authorities and a greater willingness to endorse extraordinary measures todeal with security crises. This will be called the securitization effect, summarized in the
results as “trust in government,” and tautological as it might sound, it is the summary
hypothesis of this dissertation:
H3: News accounts employing the securitization frame will produce a higher levelof trust in government than accounts that do not employ the frame, and this effect will be
more pronounced among supporters of the government than among nonsupporters of thegovernment.

Memory and heuristics
The argument thus far has been that securitization is primarily a correlate of
attitude: the securitization frame is expected to affect the ways in which an issue isjudged and the means that audiences endorse for dealing with it. But if the sociologicalside of the framing debate suggests that the frame helps people organize their feelings
toward an object, the psychological camp suggests that the frame helps them organize
their thoughts. An issue that has been securitized is not just perceived differently than it
was before; it leaves behind a different set of things to think about. Securitization is notjust a frame but a heuristic – a term that refers broadly to cognitive shortcuts but also to amode of cognitive processing that relies on such shortcuts to help the processor (the poor
multitasking mortal who is just trying to make sure that the most important mental tasks
get their proper share of processing resources) get through the day.
Thus, the securitization frame – which appears when an issue or story has beensuccessfully declared a security matter, one that threatens the public’s essential physical32

or cultural well-being and admits to extraordinary solutions – can produce both affective
and cognitive outcomes. By its nature, it implies a condition in which members of the
public are more ready to widen the range of things done in their name: to be less insistenton their (and others’) procedural rights; to be more comfortable with decisions made at
the top, without much if any public input or debate; to hand over power, in short, until thecrisis is over. That effect would be reinforced if those members of the public takeincoming information at face value, rather than exposing it repeatedly to carefulconsideration and seeking out contradictory or confirmatory data.
“Cognitive miser” approaches to information processing are important because of
the likelihood that run-of-the-mill judgmental biases are a sign of economical use ofcognitive resources rather than of cognitive inability (Thompson et al., 1994). Lang’s
limited-capacity model (2000) offers a number of propositions that help explain how andwhy that cognitive wealth is spent: Processing draws on a limited pool of resources, thoseresources need to be applied to preparing a media message for long-term storage as wellas to storing it and bringing it out for comparison with later stimuli, and those resources
can be allotted both deliberately and involuntarily. In the study of news, for example, themodel has been used to examine efforts to make TV news reports more memorable(Lang, Potter, & Grabe, 2003).
This approach is usefully informed by a set of theories known as dual-processmodels, which hold that information can be processed either carefully or casually, using aseries of cues and shortcuts. They share with the limited-capacity model the idea thatpeople are “cognitive misers” but suggest that these misers are equipped with awonderfully “adaptive toolbox” (Pachur & Hartwig, 2006, p. 983): the human mind,33

constantly applying cognitive strategies that seek to maximize accuracy or similar goals
while minimizing complexity, saving resources for use elsewhere.
Cobb (2005) proposes two connections between framing and its cognitive effects
as tracked in dual-process models. One is accessibility: Because processing capacity islimited, a thought or concept that is handy in mind is likely to be the one applied to a
judgment if there is no reason to search for a better or more applicable one. A second issalience. Frames that align with considerations the receiver considers important, such as
the “core values” invoked in political advertising, will be assigned a greater value in theprocess of opinion formation (2005). Although these models have traditionally been used
to explore changes in attitude, their applicability to memory as well is clear.
The heuristic-systematic model (Chen, Duckworth, & Chaiken, 2000; Eagly,
Chen, Chaiken, & Shaw-Barnes, 1999; Griffin, Neuwirth, Geise, & Dunwoody, 2002)
takes its name from the idea of heuristics as cognitive shortcuts – the peripheral bypass
route that takes the brain on an easy ride around the congested zone of complex
argument-building and comparison. It is distinguished from other dual-process models by
several assumptions. One is that situations that are expected to produce effortful, or
systematic, processing can include an element, sometimes a large one, of heuristic
processing as well (Ziegler & Diehl, 2003). Not only can the two paths co-occur, but they
can then have interactive or additive effects on attitudes (Chaiken & Maheswaran, 1994;
Ziegler & Diehl, 2003). Yet it remains unclear what stimuli will steer the reader orviewer toward which path and under what circumstances. One important benchmark is
the information “sufficiency threshold” (Zuckerman and Chaiken, 1998). Audience
members who perceive a gap between what they know about a subject – say, a potential
34

health hazard – and what they think they need to know to make a satisfactory decision
will be motivated to process more systematically (Griffin et al., 2002, p. 707).
Research suggests that memory is a useful measure of heuristic impact. Chaiken
and Maheswaran (1994) used thought-listing among other measures in examining theinterplay of source credibility and message ambiguity on which mode of processing
dominated. McGuire (1993) used recognition memory in comparing the strength of the
primacy and recency heuristics (whether an argument is the first one or the most recent
that a subject encounters). Dunn, Moore, and Nosek (2005) found higher false-memory
results in news reports that used a “them” terrorism frame as opposed to an “us” patriotic
frame. Drawing on Lang’s limited capacity model of mediated message processing(2000), Grabe and Kamhawi (2006) used recognition memory and recall to examine how
the valence (positive or negative) of news reports interacted with gender to affect recall
and comprehension. Their results indicate no main effect of gender on processing news
but an interaction with valence, such that men appear to gain more information fromnegatively framed news and women from positively framed news – underscoring theimportance of examining interaction effects as well as main effects and of measuring
memory on multiple levels.
A measure of securitization could be expected to involve two sorts ofrecognition, with distinct effects on each. Because a securitized issue requires a sharedsense of an existential threat, one that poses a danger to the very elements that make asociety what it is, comprehension (Robinson & Levy, 1986; Grabe & Kamhawi, 2006) –the “big picture” presented in an article – is the first element. A securitization heuristic
should not affect understanding of the central point of a news story – the specific event
35

that would cause a new or ongoing story to make its way into the next day’s newspaperor the evening’s broadcast. But at the same time, if it discourages systematic processingof messages, it should produce lower accuracy on a second measure: recognizing detailsof news reports.
The following hypothesis is proposed about the effects of the securitization frameon memory:
H4: Details of articles employing the securitization frame will be less wellremembered than details of articles that do not employ the securitization frame, but “bigpicture” comprehension will not be affected. The effect on recognition of details will be
more pronounced among supporters of the government than among nonsupporters of thegovernment.

Proximity: The reader and the news
The relevance of a message and its clarity are other factors thought to play a rolein determining how processing paths are chosen. A message that suggests a personal
effect on the receiver would be more likely to invoke systematic processing; anambiguous one, a greater reliance on such heuristic cues as authority or trustworthiness ofthe communicator. The issues that are subject to securitization might be highly salientand might show up at or near the top of “most important problem” opinion surveys, but
their crisis points themselves are generally remote, increasing the likelihood that
authority cues would be relevant. Americans are unlikely to have much direct exposure to
terrorism or, outside the airport security line, to measures meant to deal directly with it.
Similarly, if they have direct exposure to the effects of illegal immigration, it is more36

likely through the service or hospitality industries than through the sort of borderlawlessness portrayed on tabloid-style news reports. These issues are perceived at second
hand through the media, and measures for dealing with them are offered at second hand.
Again, this is not only fertile ground for authority, it is an area in which news audiences
are less likely to perceive a gap between what they know and what they need to know –and thus, more likely to find themselves on an easier processing path.
Much as the concept of “terrorism” allows the audience to organize a number ofconflicts it knows nothing about under a single rubric (Norris et al., 2003), heuristic cues
help organize political decisions for smart and lazy voters alike (Bucy & Newhagen,1999). Cobb (2005) underscores the role of heuristics in decisions about new or
personally distant issues by pointing to the importance of elites and their credibility in
how public opinion is formed. When the public has only limited factual knowledge about
a topic, as with nanotechnology, opinions are especially susceptible to dramatic eventsand new information (Cobb, 2005) – the sort of volatile attitudes that are associated withheuristic processing, rather than the more stable, permanent ones produced by systematic
processing (Griffin et al., 2002). And the sort of repetition that makes an issue salient isalso likely to reinforce heuristic judgments. As Chen et al. (2000, p. 48) note, “therepeated activation and application of particular heuristics to particular judgments islikely to result in the development of strong associations between those heuristics andjudgments.”
Two more hypotheses are suggested, taking into account the likelihood that
securitization will create a sense of familiarity and stability and that it will bring about agreater sense of personal risk and thus higher personal involvement:37

H5: News accounts employing the securitization frame will be considered
ongoing stories or concerns – matters that readers expect to keep hearing about as time
passes – to a greater extent than the same accounts not employing the frame. This effectwill be more pronounced among supporters of the government than among nonsupportersof the government.
H6: News accounts employing the securitization frame will produce a greater
sense of personal concern and anxiety than for the same accounts not employing theframe. This effect will be more pronounced among supporters of the government thanamong nonsupporters of the government.

Congeniality of messages and messengers
The “congeniality hypothesis” (Eagly et al., 2001) suggests that generally,
memory is biased toward information that is aligned with the receiver’s attitudes. But
Eagly et al. (2001) propose a more complicated picture: People can encode and process
noncongenial data effectively, even though they find it unpersuasive, in the capacity ofbuilding a defense against it. Eagly et al.’s meta-analysis suggests that processing
motivation and capacity are more important than alignment of the message with priorattitudes in determining the route a message takes. If, as the authors suggest, congenial
messages are more easily remembered anyway, without the need for systematic
processing, it seems reasonable to expect a heuristic effect from a securitized message –particularly in audiences predisposed to support the political elites who are trying tosecuritize the issue in question. If anything, a congenial message, being trustworthy,
would also be more likely to undergo heuristic processing. This would be particularly
38

true in the case of such controversial issues as abortion (Eagly et al., 1999) – or, for the
purposes of this study, anti-terrorism measures and immigration control.
Those concepts help explain why readers and viewers choose the news they do
and how well they process the messages they take in. But they leave aside a related
question: Why would people choose to get news from a source they disagree with? Do
dedicated conservatives really turn on CNN merely to be inoculated against some liberalnews virus? More likely, several factors besides alignment with the politics of a particular
news outlet are in play. Tsfati and Cappella (2005) point to the “need for cognition”:
People who enjoy thinking and knowing can find material to satisfy those interests evenon outlets whose politics are incongruent with theirs. Kohring and Matthes (2007)
suggest that “trust” reflects a number of dimensions reflecting journalists’ selections, sothat a newspaper that picks the right topics to talk about would not necessarily need totalk about them in the right way.
Another set of dual-processing concepts that would support a heuristicprocessing hypothesis for securitization deals with such peripheral cues as source
expertise and source likeability (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986, pp. 142-143). In the realm ofpolitics, source-related signals that are presumed to encourage heuristic processing
include party cues and celebrity endorsements (Kam, 2005). Kam also found that aspolitical awareness increases, reliance on party endorsement as a cue declines andreliance on “issue-relevant” values associated with systematic processing – in the case ofher experiment, trust in scientific innovation – increases. Political awareness is often
conceptualized as attention to and understanding of politics, though there is some39

disagreement about whether media exposure is a component of it or should be measured
separately (Cassel & Lo, 1997).
Ziegler and Diehl (2003) also point to the importance of source credibility andpreference but suggest that it is moderated by the strength and clarity of the message. In
an attempt to reconceptualize the idea of message ambiguity, this experiment usedmessages containing arguments designed to be of moderate strength rather than an equal
mixture of arguments designed to be strong and weak. The idea of ambiguity is relevantto this study because news reports on potential securitization issues should be expected tocontain a mixture of arguments of varying strength (with the exception, noted earlier, ofreferences to Qaida-style terrorism). This study supported a “bias” hypothesis, in whichorientation with the source of preferred messages affects agreement or disagreement withthe message.
Because of the difficulty of disentangling such issues as trust in the message,
trust in the messenger, and trust in the government, this literature suggests a researchquestion about the relationship between a securitization frame and attitudes toward thenews media:
RQ1: How does the securitization effect interact with participants’ sense of theirpolitical alignment with the news media?

Other media relationships
What about media exposure? The psychological literature seems to share in acertain optimism about its beneficial effects: “The dramatic development of the mass
media, especially television, may have increased exposure to both sides of many issues”
40

(Eagly et al., 1999, p. 66). Especially in the matter of terrorism, though, media coveragethat suggests a nuanced, multifaceted issue with a variety of motives all worthy of
examination would be distinctly the exception rather than the rule. As noted above, U.S.
media in particular are unanimous in relegating terrorism to the sphere of unallowabledebate. For other matters at the center of public controversy – illegal immigration,
infectious diseases, or gay marriage – news coverage might be thorough and balanced,
but it might as easily devolve into the sort of “cover the debate” that reduces public issues
to the loudest common denominator. Readers and viewers might be heavily exposed totwo sides on an issue, but whether those two sides are both sides, let alone all sides, isdebatable.
The salience of these issues, and of the polarized debates that surround them, canbe highlighted by the unusual role of the U.S. president as chief newsmaker as well as
chief executive. If the White House is not making news, it is responding to news: “Whenlooking for reaction to a news event of national importance, then, it is natural to expect,and see, a presidential response” (Bucy & Newhagen, 1999, p. 63). It is hard to conceiveof a securitizable issue on which the president’s views are not prominent, but what willthat prominence produce? If supporters of the president are reinforced in their support,
are opponents similarly strengthened, or are they drawn away from their prior positions?
Shortcuts in news do not mean an absence of news. A preference for daytime
talk shows over the New York Times does not guarantee a nation of news zombies.
Rather, as Baum and Jamison (2006) argue, it means politically inattentive voters haveaccess to palatable information that helps them vote in ways that reflect their preferences.
But these voters are among “the least strongly wedded to their political attitudes and41

preferences” (2006, p. 958) and among the most likely to change those preferences –again, in dual-route processing, those most open to heuristic arguments.
Many factors that should in a vacuum offer clear predictions about how
systematic or heuristic processing is activated, and what effects the chosen route might
have on producing or changing attitudes, are more ambiguous when considered from thisperspective. Ego involvement, for example, might predict that a message receiver’s
attitude toward an object would be linked to the receiver’s values (Eagly et al., 1999, p.
66). “Outcome relevance” (Eagly et al., 1999) is also thought to affect attitude toward adevelopment likely to affect “important, near-term goals,” by increasing systematic
processing – exactly the opposite, though, of what might be expected from something
potentially menacing but irrelevant or absent in day-to-day life, such as terrorism or thecollapse of border controls with Mexico.
The “need for cognition,” a “tendency to engage in and enjoy thinking”(Cacioppo and Petty, 1982, p. 119) and generally to look for more information andprocess it harder, has been thought to affect the choice of processing paths. Areni, Ferrell,and Wilcox (2000) suggest that the effect is more complicated than a simple linear
relationship between higher need for cognition and more thorough processing. Peoplehigh in need for cognition, considered likely to reject simple cues like group opinions infavor of detailed processing, were indeed susceptible to those cues when they seemed
directly connected to more relevant information. And Kam (2005) found that need forcognition provided no clear results in distinguishing people who are likely to processsystematically from those processing heuristically; the need for cognition might simply
not be relevant to how people approach politics.
42

Emotion and mood have been found to be influential in determining processing
route, but Zuckerman and Chaiken (1998) suggest that no clear direction has emerged.
Fear might imply a “sufficiency gap” and thus encourage systematic thinking; more inline with what the securitization frame suggests, it could also reduce the motivation tothink about a topic the receiver would rather avoid. A more important effect of emotion
on framing, Nabi (2003) suggests, could be played by how emotion is primed, or madeaccessible at the point where a decision is made. Nabi found promising, if sometimes
ambiguous, indications that fear and anger primes can affect the kinds of information
subjects seek (addressing the cognitive idea of the sufficiency gap) as well as the sorts ofpolicies they prefer (the attitudinal effect of a frame like securitization).
Recent research in priming also suggests a complex interplay between
immediate and cumulative news coverage and prior knowledge and attitudes. Although
coverage alone may be unlikely to change attitudes, it could affect the choice of attitudes
used in making political judgments (Althaus & Kim, 2006) – just as might be predictedby the successful invocation of a securitization frame on an issue that had been dealt with
before by the normal workings of the system.

Issue ownership
Unlike a hitherto unseen image or unheard song whose novel effects on an
audience can be tested with some confidence, news does not emerge from a vacuum.
Securitized issues are not unprecedented developments swimming into human ken for the
first time. Immigration, illegal drugs, political violence and the like occur both in theirown contexts and in contexts shaped by the prior news knowledge and political and43cultural attitudes of the audience. But those bits of knowledge and attitude themselves
can be used as a measure. In the case of political violence, they help form the individual’s“terrorism schema” (Dunn, Moore, & Nosek, 2005), which in its turn affects how that
person encodes violent acts for remembering and, later, retrieves them for comparison
with new stimuli.
Any such measure includes such political attitudes as party orientation but is not
limited to them. Issue ownership theory (e.g. Petrocik, 1996; Petrocik, Benoit, & Hansen,
2003) suggests that the contemporary Republican Party generally “owns” issues related
to national defense and security. Such ownership reflects a combination of an individual
politician’s record and the understandings and expectations of the corresponding party’s
constituency (Benoit & Hansen, 2004; Petrocik, 1996), and there are indications that
Republican-owned issues tend more toward the “novel” – and because unprecedented,
more subject to securitizing moves – even as Democrat-owned issues resemble thosehandled by the process of politics as usual (Petrocik et al., 2003). But individualoutbreaks of war or violence, like short-term fluctuations in economic indicators, fall in adifferent domain; the handling of a war or a recession is a “performance” issue, open to“lease” by whichever party can paint itself as more capable of solving the problem athand (Petrocik, 1996, p. 827). Thus, a measure of how prior political attitudes mightinteract with securitization attempts must take into account not only political affiliation
but opinions about how the incumbent party is handling the issue at stake and how thecountry itself is faring.
The following research questions are thus proposed:44

RQ2: What is the relationship between the effect of the securitization frame andthe identification of terrorism as the “most important problem” facing the nation?
RQ3: Is there a relationship between the channel through which a participant
gets news (print, broadcast, Internet) and the effect of the securitization frame?
RQ4: Is there a relationship between those who list a specific source of news (aparticular newspaper or network program, rather than “newspapers” or “TV”) and theeffect of the securitization frame?
RQ5: Is there a relationship between how closely participants follow news of
security-related issues and the effect of the securitization frame?
The following chapter will explain the methods by which these hypotheses andquestions are tested.

45

CHAPTER 4
Research methods: Content and experimentThis chapter begins by explaining the media outlets and variables chosen for acontent analysis of securitization framing of the U.S. “war on terrorism.” The study
primarily asks two questions of the data: Is there a “baseline” image of the war on
terrorism? Do images of this conflict diverge from that baseline over time, and if so, in
which directions? That pattern of framing provides the context for a controlled
experiment meant to test whether the securitization frame has the hypothesized effects.
Securitization, in which a political actor is able to characterize an issue as an existential
threat justifying extraordinary measures, is expected to bias readers and viewers toward a
series of heuristic judgments – judging the threat as more direct, being more willing toleave decision-making authority in others’ hands, and thus (reflecting less need to processattentively) allowing the frame to determine the amount of knowledge they actively seek.
These proposals will be measured through affective and cognitive responses to news
stories employing the frame, which will suggest the degree to which the political actor isable to win consent for securitization. Procedures for this experiment are described
below.

Content: Where the frame is and isn’t foundStudies of media effects are, at bottom, studies of media content. For there to bean effect of securitization framing in news reports, in other words, there have to be more46

and less securitized ways in which news can be presented. Thus, the first part of theinvestigation uses content analysis to propose that the maps U.S. news organizations
draw of terrorism – both as a “war” and in the more familiar incarnation of substate
actors demanding an audience with the state through violence directed at noncombatants– look drastically different depending on how and by whom, and in response to whatpressures, they are drawn. Specifically, it will examine how and in what ways the “waron terror” is invoked by different news organizations in reporting on events that occur
within the same time frame. The two content-related hypotheses predict that the
securitization frame will be less widely reflected overall as that conflict wears on, butalso that the frame will appear with greater or lesser frequency depending on the natureof the medium.
Content analysis, like framing itself, is an empirical extension of a familiar andcomfortable everyday activity: “A formal system for doing something that we all doinformally rather frequently, drawing conclusions from observations of content”(Stempel, 1989, p. 124). Riffe, Lacy, and Fico (1998, p. 20) describe content analysis as a“systematic and replicable examination of symbols of communication,” categorized andstudied by statistical methods with the idea of describing communication or drawing
inferences about its effects and practices.
Where might such an examination find relevant differences in the framing ofterrorism and other securitized issues? As contemporary agenda-setting studies havenoted, a media agenda can no longer be reliably determined from a stroll past the post
office in a town of 30,000. This project uses three newspapers with distinct profiles thatsuggest the sorts of agendas available today across several news platforms.
47

USA Today, the nation’s largest circulation daily newspaper, claims a circulationof 2.3 million. A mission statement describes the paper as “the easy-to-use,comprehensive source of timely news and information edited to inform and entertain
today's time-pressed, affluent and influential people” (“Our mission statement,” n.d.).
Because it has no specifically local or regional interests to address, USA Today’s
selections of national and international news can be considered to parallel those of
network television news. And much as the emergence of “objectivity” in news agency
reporting is sometimes hypothesized to have emerged from those agencies’ need to sell
their wares in a number of ideologically and culturally distinct markets, USA Today is theprint incarnation of news designed to be equally palatable to any audience anywhere in
the nation. USA Today is “popular” rather than populist (Illouz, 1994). It is widely read ata number of cultural levels, whereas the readership of the elite press is skewed toward theupper echelons of wealth and influence; its news follows a highly standardized format;
and its popularity represents the “wide variety and all-inclusiveness of a highly
commercial newspaper” (1994, p. 48). At the same time, it provides sufficient coverageof national politics to be studied alongside the more prestigious New York Times,
Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times (e.g., Aday & Devitt, 2001). It is expected toshow the least variation over time – the fewest challenges to the status quo, from
whatever direction – in its portrayals of the war on terrorism.
The other two newspapers in the sample also represent distinct segments of thenews spectrum. The Washington Post, with a weekday circulation of about 850,000, is
both a local newspaper and, given its coverage of the federal government, its
international presence, and the nationally syndicated news service it contributes to, a48

national one. It positions itself as a paper that breaks new ground on major stories andmaintains a high standard of quality and quantity in coverage (e.g., Downie & Kaiser,
2000, chs. 3-4). It is used here as a representative of the prestige press.
The tabloid New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., is also a
distinctly local newspaper, but it is used here because of the degree to which its populist
coverage resembles the “fair and balanced” approach made available nationally by its
corporate partner, the Fox News Channel. Fox quickly gained a wide audience amongcable networks, positioning itself “not simply as another competitor, but as a brash,
opinionated, and unashamedly patriotic channel” (Conway, Grabe, & Grieves, 2007, p.
199). A former editor for a British Murdoch property, the Sunday Times, describes
Murdoch’s views as “a radical-right dose of free market economics, the social agenda of
the Christian Moral Majority and hardline conservative views on subjects like drugs,
abortion, law and order, and defence” (quoted in McKnight, 2003, p. 349). Style points
that reflect such viewpoints, such as capitalizing “war on terror” and using “homicide
bomber” rather than “suicide bomber,” can be found at Fox News’s Web site and in the
New York Post. They underscore the distinctive point of framing that this section of thenews media represents.
These papers, taken together, suggest the sort of variation available to a U.S. news
audience with regard to the framing of terrorism and political violence, the easiest
example of a securitization frame to operationalize.
Methods: Sampling frame and variables
The month of October in each year from 2001 through 2006 was chosen as acontent frame. This month provides examples of coverage immediately after the49

September 2001 attacks and continues with election and nonelection years alike. Filesfrom the three papers in the Lexis-Nexis database were searched for content containing
the phrases “war on terror” or “war on terrorism” in the text. Letters to the editor andnon-staff-written opinion columns were not coded, because letters are assumed torepresent unmediated content, and syndicated columns are often selected to present a
range of views regardless of the paper’s own editorial stance. Staff-written news reports
and analyses, as well as those provided by news agencies, and editorials were included in
the coding. Indications of the frame could be, and were, found in nearly all sections of thenewspapers, including sports, business, and entertainment.
The unit of analysis was the individual mention of “war on terror” or “war on
terrorism”; articles contained anywhere from one to six such mentions. When necessary,
the remainder of an article and its accompanying display type were used for context units.
It was assumed that the war on terrorism could appear in different ways in an article. In
several cases, several New York Post articles appearing on the same page had no specificmentions of “war on terror.” It was assumed that these were indicated by a page label, sothey were coded as real, in the paper’s voice, and unspecified location.
Variables were developed through examination of content in similar media thatwere not part of the sample frame, primarily Foxnews.com, CNN.com and the New YorkTimes. The securitization frame was conceptualized as lying along a continuum. Threevariables were used to measure the degree to which it has been invoked (for details, see
Appendix I, Coding instructions):
Voice: Whether the “war on terrorism” is mentioned in the paper’s voice or asource’s. Even terms as contested or incongruous as “homicide bomber,” after all, can50

appear in news texts if they represent the direct words of a source. The more thoroughly
the securitization frame is established, the more regularly the paper will mention the war
on terrorism in its own voice, without relying on a source to say it. A “taken-for-granted
use of the phrase” (Reese, 2007, p. 153) suggests that deeper structures are in play.
Status: Ranging from the formal status assigned by a proper noun to the highly
contested status in which the name appears not in a direct quote but in quotation marks
assigned by the newspaper. The War on Terror has been securitized; the “war on terror”
has not.
Location: A geographically concentrated effort against a known and identifiable
foe – the attacks in Afghanistan against al-Qaida and the Afghan government thatsheltered it – is the most readily delimited and thus the least securitized. The more diffuse
and less specific the war is, the more it becomes a “global” war, and the more likely it is
to reach the United States, the more thoroughly it is securitized.
Data collection yielded a total of 841 articles and 1,098 mentions of “war on
terror” or “war on terrorism” in the period under study. Of these, 41 articles comprising
76 mentions (7%) were double-coded to assess the reliability of the categories. Intercoder
reliability using Scott’s pi, which accounts for agreement by chance, was .75 for thevoice category and .88 for the status category.
The category of location proved more problematic. Categories comprising Iraq
and the wider Arab and Muslim worlds were collapsed into a single category and articles
that either coder deemed to present no identifiable location were dropped, and when abroader set of content was double-coded for reliability, an acceptable pi figure of .68 wasreached for this category.
51

Similar constructs, such as the displacement of a threat from a specific location toa general one and the appearance of the threat in the neutral voice of the news
organization as well as the biased voice of the political actor, could be applied to othersecuritizing issues. Immigration would be framed differently, for instance, if one news
organization’s house style restricted the use of phrases like “illegal alien” to direct
quotations and a competing organization used it in a wider set of contexts. But a “war on
terrorism” encompasses a broader conceptual range than such issues as drugs,
immigration or disease. It is thus particularly relevant for study on its own and for settingout the context in which securitization itself can be studied.
As the measures above suggest, securitization is a continuum, and many elementsof it are specific to the time and place in which they are brought forth. From theperspective of the U.S. press, securitization of terrorism is operationalized as follows:
The war on terrorism is a fully securitized concept when it refers to an
unambiguous, singular entity, familiar to both the writer and the news source who might
discuss it; when it occurs in the writer’s voice as well as the source’s; and when it has
spread beyond areas where U.S. forces are directly involved.
The war on terrorism is partly securitized when it appears as an uncontestedly realentity in the writer’s voice.
In other circumstances, when the war on terrorism is not securitized, it resembles
what Petrocik, Benoit, and Hansen (2003) refer to as a “normal issue.” This is not tosuggest that international conflict or substate political violence is unremarkable, but thatin such situations as these it is dealt with by normal workings of the state – assecuritization theory predicts.
52

Recalling again Cohen’s observation (1963) that the world looks different todifferent people, depending on the maps drawn for them by the editors of the news theyfavor, this dissertation predicts an initial consensus on the nature of the war on terrorismthat changes at different rates in the different newspapers. In the Washington Post, it isexpected to become closely restricted to the search for al-Qaida in Afghanistan and much
more contested in its other iterations, mirroring change in elite opinion about U.S.
foreign-policy behavior. In USA Today, it will change more slowly, reflecting an attempt
to correspond with a universally popular public opinion. In the New York Post, the war
will change toward a more securitized portrayal, reflecting support for President Bushand his policies as broader approval of his policies and the war in Iraq decays, as well as
a populist desire to “support our troops.”
Indicating the flexibility of the frame, of course, is not the same as demonstrating
its effects. Thus, the project now turns to a method for determining whether the
securitization frame produces the cognitive and affective outcomes hypothesized above.

Why an experiment?
As concerns were raised in the 1990s about exactly what framing was and how it
could be maintained as a theory, as opposed to a set of observations, interest grew instudying the quantitative effects of framing rather than cataloging its manifestations incontent. Scheufele (1999) sought to address the “theoretical and empirical vagueness” offraming by creating a model that emphasized framing as a process. Scheufele did notpropose to discard the previous decades of framing studies; their “valuable
contributions,” he made clear, are not diminished by their use of data “as illustrations
53

rather than as rigid tests” (1999, p. 109). Rather, he offers a way to bridge the gap
between the sociological and psychological wings of framing – in effect, as thisdissertation proposes, to put the illustrations of content analysis to the rigid test ofexperimental procedure.
The study of framing as a process requires assertions about cause and effect, andthe controlled experiment is a valuable way of measuring the impact of the patterns that
content analysis unearths – as Grabe and Westley (2003) put it, “the most powerful
method of seeking answers to research questions about cause and effect available to thesocial scientist.” Equally, though, the experimental method rewards attention to carefully
constructed, ecologically sound stimuli; parsimony of variance in messages (Reeves &Geiger, 1994); and an appreciation of context.
Such a diverse basket of requirements makes clear that experimental tests of news
framing effects are not summoned by a snap of the fingers. Yet they have become more
frequent in recent years. This work sprang initially from the psychological side offraming. Shah et al. (2004) sought to determine the influence of different frames andarrangements of frames on the cognitive system. Their work added to the mixture aslightly different concept of “framing,” from the work of Kahneman and Tversky (Heath& Tindale, 1994), in which “the context or ‘frame of reference’ surrounding a decision is
an important consideration” (1994, p. 9). The concept that “gain” and “loss” frames havedifferent influences on decision making leads to one of the salient features of the Shahstudy, its examination of multiple frames’ interaction.
Early experimental studies in the effects of framing wrestled with the dilemmaspresented by the concept. Price, Tewksbury, and Powers (1997) acknowledge the54limitations posed by presenting a single constructed news item out of context. Still, their
examination of the impact of different frames, such as conflict or human interest, on thesort of cognitive patterns produced by news reports suggests that mixed methods canilluminate effects of framing beyond the immediate ones reported by the subjects.
McLeod and Detenber (1999) used a set of three television reports aboutanarchist protests, chosen to represent different levels of status quo support, to test
whether news framing influenced characterizations of police and protester actions. They
found significant effects but acknowledged that idiosyncratic effects from the sample, as
well as the use of three reports about the same situation, could have influenced thefindings.
The need for precise manipulation of the independent variable and the need for
simulated news accounts that look and feel like the real thing have remained a challenge.
Thus, experimental research that accurately reflects standard news practice is particularly
valuable. De Vreese (2003) persuaded Dutch public broadcasting to produce amanipulated story as the No. 2 item in a version of its standard evening news and used
the result to test frames reflecting competing news values: conflict and economic
consequence. New footage and interviews were recorded, but the “conflict” and “bottomline” reports were presented by a regular anchorwoman and adhered to regular style andtechnical standards. De Vreese gave participants a questionnaire on demographics, media
use and the like but rejected a pretest on grounds that it would cue participants “to watch
the news in a specific manner.” He found that frames had as much impact as news “facts”
but also found that the different frames had little influence on understanding the basic
issue – European Union expansion – of the news reports. More recently, Grabe and55

Kamhawi (2006) used broadcast reports from network programs, with broadcast
journalists rewriting and re-editing the original audio and video tracks to create themanipulation, to examine the interaction of demographic factors (such as gender) andframing.
An experiment in which the securitization frame can be manipulated
consistently in an array of news reports can be expected to address some of the concernsthat researchers have wrestled with before and to provide a powerful within-subjects
measure for determining the effects of a securitization frame on both knowledge andemotion.

Experimental design
This study employed a 2 (frame) x 2 (orientation toward government) mixed
design. Frame was a within-subjects variable, operationalized as the presence or absenceof the securitization frame. This frame was used with both cognitive (memory) andaffective (feelings of personal threat, trust in the government, and the likelihood that thenews event depicted in the article represented part of a larger ongoing pattern).
Orientation toward government was a between-subjects factor, operationalized as highsupport and low support.
Independent variables
For stimulus material, this experiment uses 8 constructed news articles based onreports of events that reflect securitizable issues. Articles were edited to a range of 200 to
250 words and manipulated between the second and fourth paragraphs to present theissue as a security threat or as an event handled through the regular functions of the state56

– an issue for “normal politics” (Petrocik, Benoit, & Hansen, 2003) rather than the strong
reactions evoked by the securitization frame. The manipulations were done by the
primary researcher, whose 25 years of daily journalism included extensive experience
with national and international news. Of 10 articles originally prepared for the study andapproved by the Institutional Review Board, one (dealing with North Korea’s nuclear
weapons program) was discarded because the situation produced a series of prominent
news developments shortly before the experiment was to begin. A second article was thendiscarded to maintain a balance of four articles in each condition per participant.
The articles and questionnaires were organized using the MediaLab computer
program (Jarvis, 2006) for ease of randomization and data collection.
Participants’ reports of their main sources of news were separated into three
categories:
Print (n = 46), which included specific newspapers and magazines, those outlets’Web sites (e.g., “nytimes.com”), and generic responses like “newspapers.”
Broadcast (n = 63), which included specific radio and TV stations or their Web
sites (e.g., “foxnews.com”) and generic responses like “television.”Internet (n = 38), which included Internet portal sites and generic responses like“the Internet.”
These responses were also reanalyzed to distinguish those who reported a specificprint, broadcast, or Internet source (n = 81) from those who responded with a generic“newspapers,” “TV,” or “Internet” (n = 69).

57

Participants’ reports of the problems they deemed “most important” were sorted
into 14 categories, with three – terrorism (n = 33), Iraq (n = 48), and economic issues (n =18) – emerging as the most frequent.
Participants’ orientation toward the government, favorable or unfavorable, wasmeasured by adding responses to the following four questions in the pretest. (Because
conflict is a “performance” issue (Petrocik, Benoit, & Hansen, 2003) as much as anownership issue, it should not be assumed to be the property of either major party, so
support for the incumbents is expected to be as relevant as party affiliation.) Each ismeasured on a 7-point scale:
How much do you trust the government to look after your interests?
Do you think the country is better or worse off than it was six years ago?
Do you think the country is safer or less safe than it was in 2003?
How good a job would you say the president is doing?
These were reversed so that lower numbers were at the left, then added anddivided into two categories, high (n = 78) and low (n = 73) in orientation toward thegovernment, at the whole number nearest the median split (17).
Orientation toward the news media was conceptualized as the degree to which
participants considered their political views aligned with those of the media. A scale wascreated by subtracting participants’ rankings of the news media’s politics on a 1-to-7
Likert-type scale (from “very liberal” to “very conservative”) from their assessment of
their own political views on the same scale, then adding 7 to place the entire scale on thepositive side of 0. A rating of 7, then, meant that participants saw themselves as exactlyaligned with the media. Ratings less than 7 indicated participants who saw the media as58

being politically to their right; ratings greater than 7 indicated participants who saw themedia as being to their left. For analysis, this was broken into three categories. Ratings of
3 through 6 (n = 47) were considered left of the media; ratings of 7 or 8 (n = 60) wereconsidered similar to the media; ratings of 9 or higher (n = 44) were considered right ofthe media. Three categories rather than two were used to make the distribution morebalanced.
Attention to securitized issues was measured by asking participants how closely
they followed news about Iraq, terrorism, and civil liberties. The mean of these scores
was taken and divided into three categories, low (n = 50), medium (n = 51), and high (n =50). Three categories instead of two are used because the measure fell almost perfectly
into thirds but no convenient median split was available.

Dependent variables
Participants’ recognition memory was measured by summing the number ofcorrect responses to multiple-choice questions taken from the securitized andunsecuritized articles. Thus, each participant had a maximum score of 16 for eachcondition.
Comprehension was coded from responses to the “what was the main point”
question, using the indicators suggested by Robinson and Levy (1986). Responses werethen recoded as a binary variable, with 0 representing scores below the comprehension
level and 1 indicating comprehension of the main point and possibly more details about
the article. Each participant thus had a score between 0 and 4 for comprehension of
securitized and nonsecuritized articles. About 15% of the responses (22 participants)59

were double-coded to check reliability of the categories. Intercoder agreement using theHolsti formula was .90, but Scott’s pi, accounting for agreement by chance, was .64.
Measures of the degree to which participants perceived events in the articles asthreats to their personal safety and security, how much they trusted the government todeal with the situation described in each article, and the degree to which they thought thearticles represented an ongoing issue that they would expect to read about again wereassembled from the questions measuring affective response presented after each news
article. Multiple-item scales are useful for examining prior political beliefs, because such
scales provide greater levels of discrimination and are less affected by idiosyncratic
responses (Evans, Heath, & Lalljee, 1996). Measures used in this study incorporate
questions created by Brewer, Graf, and Willnat (2003) to examine the impact of framingon attitudes toward foreign countries; other measures developed specifically for thisstudy reflect similar principles.
Principal components factor analysis with varimax rotation indicated that threemain factors were present:
Trust, which represents the key dimensions of the securitization frame. It
comprises answers to these questions, presented on a 1 to 7 Likert-type scale, with 1
representing “strongly agree” and 7 representing “strongly disagree”:
This sort of event represents a threat to our way of life.
The government needs to take extraordinary measures to deal with this situation.
I’m confident that our leaders will handle this properly.
Cronbach’s alpha for these three questions was .75.

60

Safety measured the degree to which the participant deemed the situation a threat
to his or her personal safety. It comprised answers to these questions:This story is personally important to me.
This story makes me worried.
This story makes me frustrated.
This story makes me anxious.
This story makes me concerned about the country’s safety.
Cronbach’s alpha for these five questions was .91.
“Ongoing” measured the degree to which participants thought the article wasimportant not only today, but as part of a larger pattern and thus presumably more likely
to be the sort of continuing concern that would be securitizable. It comprised answers tothese questions:This story needs to be prominent in the news report.
This story will probably be followed up tomorrow.
This story is part of a pattern that needs attention.
Americans need to hear a lot more about this issue.
I knew what was important about this story by the second paragraph.
Cronbach’s alpha for these five items was .74.
Variables were then created from these factors by making the scales’ direction
consistent (so that low numbers represented low levels of the condition) and taking
means of the subjects’ answers to the questions involved. These were then separated intomeans for securitized articles and means for unsecuritized articles, as were the answers to
the comprehension and recognition memory questions.
61

ParticipantsParticipants (N = 151) were recruited from an undergraduate survey class in thejournalism school, which offered extra credit for participation in as many as threeresearch projects. Experimental studies using student populations are perhaps lesscommonly used to test hypotheses in international relations than in media studies orcommunications, but they do exist. Mintz and Geva (1993), for example, found apotential mechanism for the “democratic peace” hypothesis in student responses toaccounts of a potential conflict with a rival state and replicated their findings with ageneral adult sample as well. Beer, Sinclair, Healy, and Bourne (1995) used a student
sample to test whether knowledge of a peace treaty between two (fictitious) countries
affected decisions on the appropriate level of U.S. response to a fresh militarized dispute
between those countries. Mintz, Redd, and Vedlitz (2006) conducted a decision-making
scenario experiment using military officers and repeated it later with university students.
They concluded that although students are likely to be unreliable as stand-ins for politicalelites, “when the real-world ‘equivalent’ of a student sample is the ‘public’ rather thanthe leader or the elite ... student experiments may actually tell us a great deal about the
behavior of the public” (2006, p. 769). In the present study, a student sample was
expected to act as a representative of the public at large: a news audience before which
political elites attempt to categorize security issues, sometimes working with andsometimes working against the news media that cover them.
More broadly, Basil, Brown, and Bocarnea (2002) defend the use of
nonrepresentative samples – specifically, students – in studies that examine multivariate
relationships, as opposed to those that try to extrapolate to a population from a univariate
62

estimate. If the process that underlies the relationship of one variable to another is
expected to be essentially the same among students as among members of othersubgroups and the wider population, they find, such a nonrandom sample is suitable.
Because this dissertation examines the interaction of the securitization frame withattitudes and opinions, rather than extrapolating to the public from those attitudes, astudent sample is appropriate. Further, a sample of students at similar points in the sameacademic program can be expected to be more homogenous on such factors as age, yearsof education, and socioeconomic status that traditionally interact with exposure to news
and selection of news channels.
A priori analysis using the program GPOWER (Feld & Erdfelder, 1992) indicatedthat about 130 participants would produce sufficient power to avoid Type II (falsenegative) error, or the failure to detect a difference that actually exists.
For measures of prior attitudes and a list of postexposure questions, see Appendix
B. For stimulus material and questions to test memory, see Appendixes C and D.
Experimental procedure
After signing consent forms and receiving a brief overview of the study,
participants completed a pretest to assess their political orientation and attitudes toward
news media; where they placed terrorism among “most important problems”; and thedegree to which they approved of key political actors. Each subject read all 8 articles on alaptop computer. For half the subjects (assigned at random), even-numbered stories weresecuritized; for the other half, odd-numbered stories were securitized. Order ofpresentation was randomized by the computer program.
63

Affective responses were measured after each article was presented. Participants
were asked, among other things, whether the situation presented requires extraordinary
measures, whether it is appropriate to surrender some civil liberties to handle it, whether
it is part of a larger ongoing story, whether the securitization frame provides “all I need toknow,” and whether the situation should be left to authorities in power without further
public input or debate.
After a brief distractor task, participants undertook the memory portion of theexperiment. First, they were asked to explain the “main point” of each article (Grabe &Kamhawi, 2006; Robinson & Levy, 1986). Recognition memory was measured with a setof 32 multiple-choice questions, four taken from each article. Both sets of questions wererandomized, with the “main point” questions appearing first.
Participants were then debriefed and thanked. The experiment took an average of
30 to 35 minutes.

64CHAPTER 5
Content analysis results: How a War becomes a “war”

The idea of waging war on terrorism, as noted earlier, is not new. Nor, to judge
from a broad consensus in the U.S. newspapers analyzed for this study, was the post-9/11
incarnation of it especially controversial. How, then, could the “war on terror” havechanged from a war of consensus to “a rich current framing case, perhaps the mostimportant of our time” (Reese, 2007, p. 152)? How can those changes be documented innews content? More broadly, how would any such pattern be related to a process of
securitization?
This section of the dissertation proposes two hypotheses about how the conflict
will appear in news media content:
H1: Across all categories of media examined, coverage of the “war on terrorism”
will reflect the securitization frame more closely in 2001 and 2002 and less closely inlater periods.
H2: As the 2001 attacks become more distant in time, the securitization frame will
diverge in different media, so that it will appear least frequently in elite media, morecommonly in popular national media, and still more commonly in populist media alignedwith the governing party.
This picture of consensus and divergence, in turn, will offer insights into how thepolitical competition for control of the securitization switch is contested. The importanceof such measures is underlined by Reese’s suggestion (2007) that the war on terrorism
has become a “macro-framework”: in other words, even criticism of policies related to65the conflict is conducted within boundaries set by the “war on terror” frame. The degree
to which coverage in different papers provides alternate frames will indicate how
thoroughly the war on terror is securitized for those papers’ audiences. By extension, it
will also suggest how other securitizing moves, such as those involving immigration,
could be similarly indexed.
This chapter will address the hypotheses by setting out what appears to be abaseline: a consensus view of the “war on terror” common to all three newspapers. Thenit will examine divergence or lack of it on the three measures involved – the papers’
willingness to speak of the war in their own voices, their portrayal of it as a less or more
contested concept, and their suggestion of whether it is geographically concentrated ordiffuse. It will conclude by examining the different pictures of the war that were available
to different audiences as time passed after the September 2001 attacks.

Results
The baseline picture of the “war on terrorism” in October 2001 is in some ways
strikingly consistent and in others unsettled. Overall, discussion of the war is similar
among the three newspapers in October 2001, the month that followed the 9/11 attacks
and the month in which the attacks on Afghanistan began, although the frequency withwhich it is mentioned is divergent: 176 times in Washington Post content, 89 in USA
Today, 57 in the New York Post. A similar pattern holds true of the entire sample;
throughout the sample period, the Washington Post mentions the war more than the othertwo papers combined, though the other two are nearly even across all six years.

66

Table 1. Number of times each newspaper mentions “war on terror” or “war on
terrorism” in October of each year.
2001
Washington Post 176
USA Today89
New York Post 57

2002
124
54
27

2003
84
32
25

Year
2004
145
58
98

2005
31
12
30

2006
37
6
13

total
597
251
250

About 89% of mentions of the “war on terror” or the “war on terrorism” during
October 2001 appeared on news pages (national news, local news, editorial, and businessnews), and about 11% on sports or feature pages. A slightly higher proportion ofmentions (91.5%) in the Washington Post appear on news pages than in USA Today(87.6%) and the New York Post (84.2%), but the difference is not significant, χ2 (2, n =322) = 2.63, p = .27.
A similar overall proportion of mentions (88.2%) put the war in the paper’s own
voice, compared with 7.5% in direct quotes and 4.3% in indirect quotes. Slightly more of
the Washington Post’s mentions are in the paper’s voice (89.8%, compared with 88.8%
and 82.6%), but this difference is not significant either, χ2 (4, n = 322) = 6.43, p = .17.
There is a significant difference in how the status of the war is portrayed (χ2 (6,n = 322) = 15.03, p = .02, but this difference arises from the near-unanimity in USA
Today (95.5%) and the New York Post (96.5%) that the war is unambiguously real. The
Washington Post places the phrase “war on terror” in distancing quotes three times thatmonth, but the last of those appears in an article October 8 about Arab reaction to theattacks on Afghanistan that had begun the day before. More frequently, the Washington
Post introduces ambiguity by referring to the war as the president’s or theadministration’s war on terror, and 8 of those 18 mentions occur at or before the67beginning of actual combat. And despite those apparent cautions, seven-eighths ofmentions in the Washington Post (87.5%) cast the war as unambiguously real. The
differences are less than meet the eye. On these two measures, the securitization frame
enjoys a consensus.
More relevant are the differences that emerge in where the war is situated. In
cases for which a location could be determined in Washington Post coverage, the war is
confined to Afghanistan and al-Qaida about as often as it is a “global” threat that could
reach or has reached the United States (37 to 38, respectively). The proportions are
similar in USA Today (28 to 34); in the New York Post, the war is “global” as opposed to
Qaida-specific by a proportion of about 3 to 1 (30 to 11). The difference in location issignificant (χ2 (4, n = 322), = 14.43, p = .006). Interestingly, part of the overall difference
can be attributed to articles suggesting that the war on terrorism could comprise Iraq as
well; this accounts for 22 cases in the Washington Post.
Further, the concept itself, though “real” enough to be readily discussed without
quotation marks, remains novel and unsettled. Three mentions in the Washington Post in
the week before the Afghan fighting began describe a “new war on terrorism,” a phrasethat also occurs in USA Today (the idea of a “war on terrorism,” as noted above, can befound as early as the first Reagan administration in U.S. news language). The October 8
editions of the Washington Post (“the cruise missiles and bombers that opened the war on
terrorism”) and the New York Post (“opening salvos of a lengthy war on terrorism”) both
link the war specifically to the fighting in Afghanistan. But in the same edition, the New
York Post refers to the 9/11 attacks as “a turning point in the war on terrorism”(Blomquist, 2001).
68

To be sure, some confusion arises from the diffuse nature of post-9/11 policies.
If the war is hard to pin down at first, that comes about in part because in its broadest
sense it is, as a USA Today headline writer put it, a “war on five fronts”: military,
diplomatic, financial, police work, and intelligence. It is hardly surprising, then, thatwithin three paragraphs in the same article, the “war on terrorism” can stand for both themilitary campaign in Afghanistan and a diffuse campaign that could take years (Weisman& Stone, 2001). A presumptive logic in those months also tended to push unsolved
mysteries into the category of the war on terrorism. Hints even arose that Iraq could belinked to the mysterious mailing of anthrax to legislative offices (Johnson, 2001).
Despite such differences, a consensus picture emerges at all three levels of
media studied here. The war on terrorism is frequently or predominantly a global concernthat could easily affect the U.S. homeland. There is some disagreement, within andamong newspapers, on the geographic boundaries of the war, but no paper appears to ruleout any particular location. But wherever the war is, it is real, and the three newspapers
quickly adopt the habit of speaking about it in their own voices. No source is needed for
either the phrase or the securitized concept that it entails.
The picture is slightly more divergent in 2002. For one thing, counting all threepapers, there are sharply fewer mentions of the “war on terror” or “war on terrorism” in
October 2002 (205) than in the previous October (322). Indeed, the frequency with which
this conflict is named falls steadily throughout the study period, except for thepresidential year of 2004. The three newspapers still mention the war on terrorism
predominantly in their own voices, though the proportions have begun to diverge. In the
Washington Post, there are 2 mentions in the paper’s own voice for every direct or69

indirect quote; the ratio is about 7 to 1 in USA Today and about 4.5 to 1 in the New York
Post. This difference is significant (χ2 (4, n = 205) = 10.58, p = .032). This movement
suggests that in the pages of the Washington Post, the war is a less surely securitized
concept. The war’s location is increasingly more likely to be specific to Afghanistan and
al-Qaida in the Washington Post and USA Today, but remains strongly oriented toward
the global-U.S. category in the New York Post (χ2 (4, n = 205) = 18.62, p = .001). And if
the four categories in which the war’s status is measured are collapsed into two (proper
nouns and unambiguously real in one, ambiguously real and artificial in the other), thedifference remains significant for the 2001-02 period but is not significant for 2002 itself.
This overall picture suggests that H1 is supported. Despite some differencesamong the papers, the war seems to be a unified concept at its outset. The bulk of theframing could appear in any of the three papers and seem at home. The war is theunexceptional context in which many matters are discussed. Some of these are political,
as in this example from USA Today: “In what is shaping up as the first major test of
President Bush's political clout since the war on terrorism began, the House is heading fora showdown vote Thursday on competing bills to strengthen the nation's aviation
security” (Benedetto, 2001). Others are economic, as in the Washington Post: “Thatwould come on top of more than $55 billion already committed to bailing out the airlines,
rebuilding New York and revving up the U.S. military for the coming war on terrorism”(Pearlstein, 2001). Yet others have the ring of a World War II radio broadcast, as in the
New York Post: “White House officials met this week with top television executives toenlist support in the war on terrorism and find out what ‘Hollywood could do for thenation,’ participants said yesterday” (“Les: More to be done,” 2001).
70

Before turning to the changes in the dimensions along which the war is
portrayed, it is important to note that while this picture might become fractured in many
media contexts, it does not vanish. A USA Today retrospective at the 25th anniversary of
the Iran embassy siege does not mention the “war on terrorism” by name, but its portraitof a globalized existential threat with America as its prime target is evident:
The Americans did not know it, but they were staring at the
future – a militant Muslim fundamentalism that would one day replacecommunism as the greatest threat to their nation.
What was shocking in 1979 has now become routine. A newgroup of extremists – this time in Iraq – almost daily takes hostages,
makes threats and demands concessions. And though the circumstances
are vastly different than in Iran 25 years ago, the plan is the same: Invoke
Islam to crush America. (Hampson, 2004)
Those assumptions remain part of the mainstream in the news portrayals studied
here. What sets the later years apart is the appearance of different mainstreams. Media
that support the administration, like the New York Post, can make securitizing moves on
their own, even in news columns: “President Bush yesterday warned America has to stayon the offensive in the war on terror—and slammed rival John Kerry for likening the lifeor-death battle to a police action” (Bishop, 2004). Elite media, even if they do notnecessarily oppose any of the conflicts subsumed under the heading of the “war on
terror,” nonetheless challenge the premises of the frame: “The Bush administration isundercutting its ‘war on terrorism’ by embracing a Libyan regime that plotted a year ago
to assassinate the ruler of Saudi Arabia” (Ignatius, 2004). Whatever may have happened
to the armed search for the attackers of Sept. 11 and their enablers, it has in that sentenceslipped beyond the borders of securitization. The power to invoke a securitizing move is
not gone, but neither is it uncontested. An examination of those changes is now in order.
71

The big picture: How it changes
Several stark changes in the framing of the “war on terrorism” are evident whenthe election year 2004 is considered. For one, 2004 is an exception to the steady decline
in mentions of the “war on terrorism” since 2001. The decline continues even more
sharply in 2005, as the Iraq war approaches and enters its third year. Measuring thesecuritization frame during election years is particularly important because, as Reese(2007) suggests, when critics of the administration discuss the war in terms of its more orless successful conduct rather than its reality, they are discussing it in terms of theadministration’s chosen frame. The tape of Osama bin Laden released in October of thatyear had a Kerry supporter asking: “Why haven't we captured him, if the Bushadministration was going to be so effective in the war on terror?” (Milbank, 2004) – notwhether “war” was the appropriate organizing concept for such an effort in the first place.
Increasingly, the war is a contested concept. The Washington Post and USA
Today both mention it more frequently in 2004 than in the two preceding years, but both
mention it proportionately less in their own voices: 50% of the time for the Post, 61.5%
for USA Today, continuing a steady decline from 2001 in both cases. In one Washington
Post article (Shear, 2004), the “war on terror” appears five times, with an array ofgeographic implications, but each is in a direct quote from a congressional candidate.
There appears no reluctance to discuss the war – just a reluctance to mention it without
making clear that it is prompted by an outside influence.
In the New York Post – a pro-Bush paper, in which the securitization frame isexpected to appear most clearly – the war is mentioned more frequently as well. Indeed,this is the only paper of the three for which it is mentioned more often in October 200472

than in October 2001. At the same time, the proportion of mentions in the paper’s own
voice remains steady at 76%. The difference in voice among the three papers in 2004 is
significant (χ2 (2, n = 275) = 31.55, p < .001). The war’s status also differs significantly(χ2 (2, n = 275) = 13.77, p = .001) among the papers. In Washington Post coverage, it iscounted as ambiguous or artificial 13.8% of the time, compared with 5.2% in USA Todayand a mere 1% in the New York Post.
By the eve of the 2004 election, the consensus picture of the “war on terrorism”
across these diverse newspapers had dissipated. Examining the papers individually willshed further light on that picture’s new look.
H2 implies that USA Today would be the most stable of the three, because of its
interest in maintaining a uniformly palatable package of form and content wherever it isavailable. In assessing the status of the war, this stability is strikingly clear. Only 4.4% of
mentions (n = 251) across the six-year period portray the war as less than unambiguously
real – not qualified, in other words, by implication that it is the president’s war or by
quotation marks that would indicate writers’ distancing themselves from the idea . The
proportion of mentions of the war that are made in the paper’s own voice declines
steadily and significantly across the study period. Changes in the identifiable location of
the war are also significant, even when excluding the disproportionately small final two
years (χ2 (5, n = 153) = 18.46, p = .005). When these locations are identified, they tend toinclude the narrow Afghanistan conception and the broad global/US one in fairly evenproportions, suggesting that the concept is neither more nor less securitized with time.
The war can be presented in different ways in the same USA Today article:“Bush calls the war in Iraq a central front in the war on terrorism” and “Kerry argues that73

the invasion of Iraq has diverted important resources from the war on terrorism” (Nichols& Kasindorf, 2004). In neither case is it suggested that the war is artificial, or indeed that
it is not a global issue of central concern to U.S. voters; at issue is its western border.
That too suggests a certain stability to the concept.
The Washington Post, representing the prestige press, mentions the “war on
terrorism” the most frequently during the study period (597 times) and in each of the six
Octobers studied. Mentions of the war are most frequent in October 2001, declining in
the following two years, rebounding in the election year of 2004, then declining more
sharply thereafter. (An exception to this overall trend is the New York Post, in which
mentions of the war were more common in October 2004 than in any other year.) And,
like the other papers, the Washington Post is hardly hesitant to mention the war in its own
voice; 89.8% of its mentions in October 2001 are in that voice.
Figure 1: Percentage of mentions of “war on terror” or “war on terrorism” in the paper’s
own voice.
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
2001 (n=322)
All (n=1,098)

2002 (n=205)

2003 (n=141)

WashPost (n=597)

2004 (n=301)

2005 (n=73)

USA Today (n=251)

74

2006 (n=56)

NY Post (n=250)

This category presents the change that is most striking. In the following two
years, the percentage is 65%, and in the election year of 2004 it falls to 48%. The overall
differences are significant (χ2 (10, n = 597) = 81.86, p<.001). The Washington Post isclearly more reluctant to pronounce the existence of a “war on terrorism” on its own
authority as time passes.

Figure 2: War’s status: Percentage of mentions suggesting ambiguity or artificiality.
25
20
15
10
5
0
2001 (n=322)
All (n=1,098)

2002 (n=205)

2003 (n=141)

WashPost (n=597)

2004 (n=301)

2005 (n=73)

USA Today (n=251)

2006 (n=56)

NY Post (n=250)

The Washington Post’s expression of the war’s status presents a more
complicated picture. Once again, there is little doubt through the years that the war is areal thing, but it is most definitively real during October 2002 – at a ratio of 14-1,
compared with about 7-1 for the previous October, in which U.S. forces attacked
Afghanistan. The air of ambiguity is never predominant, and indeed is never close to
predominant, but during the 2004 election year the war is presented as an ambiguous or
artificial construct about once in every seven mentions. And in the following years, as the“war on terrorism” continues to make fewer appearances, its ambiguity grows
75

proportionately larger. These differences are significant, and they suggest that in the elitepress, the idea of such a war is increasingly a contested concept.
The Washington Post, then, is not the “anti-war paper.” It is the most balanced
across the study period in references indicating that the war is either specific to al-Qaida– “the war on terrorism launched Oct. 7, 2001” (Vogel, 2002) – or global in its
implications. Intriguingly, it is also the most likely to suggest that Iraq is a part of thewider war, arguing in 2002 that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein has forced President Bush into a“two-front war on terror” (Hoagland, 2002). And it is the one that shows significant
changes in all three of the variables that index the securitization frame: location, voice,and status (χ2 (5, n = 597) = 11.11, p < .05). It is the only one that makes regular use,although later rather than sooner, of a writer’s quotation marks to cast doubt on the war’s
status: “What if substantial numbers of Democrats and moderate Republicans, enough toconstitute a majority of the House, had questions about Iraq, or about torturing detainees,or about the whole course of this incoherent ‘war on terror’?” (Robinson, 2006). Thesedevelopments support the hypothesis that the prestige press will diverge more than others
toward skepticism.
No such change is evident in the New York Post; indeed, the picture of the war
develops in quite the opposite direction. Both papers speak predominantly (if not
overwhelmingly) of the war in their own voices in its first two years, 2001 and 2002.
That voice remains predominant for the New York Post, even as it recedes – eventually
into minority status – at the Washington Post.
Of 250 mentions in the New York Post over the course of the study period, only
one appears in the artificial voice represented by quotation marks, and only twice does76the war appear ambiguous. The striking difference here is the rise of the War on Terror asa proper noun – marked by capital letters as are the Korean War and the War of 1812.
These mentions, appearing almost exclusively in editorials or other commentaries,
account for nearly a third of cases in the 2004 election year and more than a third in thefollowing two years (again, as overall mentions revert to their pre-election decline).
An example is the editorial in which the New York Post endorses the candidacy of
President Bush, which uses the proper noun phrase “War on Terror” five times:
Indeed, it was President Bush's vision and fortitude alone that led
the nation to wage its fiercest war in decades.
Nine days after the attack, Bush announced a War on Terror. It
would begin with al Qaeda, but “not end until every terrorist group of
global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
He said that in its “grief and anger” America had found its mission
and moment – “the advance of human freedom.” And he vowed to use
every legitimate means of warfare at his disposal (“Bush for America,”2004).
Contrast those references with a Washington Post column the same month, inwhich the war is “the struggle that most Americans call the war on terrorism” (Hoagland,2004). Even if it is geographically definable, it is clearly a suspect idea:
The related military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the operational
definition of the “war on terrorism” -- have had this clarifying effect:
Muslim governments that for more than a quarter-century ignored orsought to profit from the spread of intolerance toward non-Muslims can nolonger pursue those options with impunity (Hoagland, 2004).
Unlike the other two papers, the use of the paper’s voice remains steady or
increases in the New York Post; it is three-fourths (76.9%) of the mentions in the
campaign year 2004, compared with 50% in the Washington Post. There is no significant
change in the war’s status (χ2 (5, n = 250) = 2.613, p < .759); only 3 times out of 250(1.2%) is it deemed even an ambiguous idea. When a location for the war can be77determined, it is first predominantly, then overwhelmingly, a global conflict that could
threaten the United States. When the securitization frame has changed in the New York
Post’s pages, it has become more favorable toward the administration – the set ofpolitical actors with the most to gain if the U.S. effort to thwart and mitigate transnational
terrorism is securitized as a “war.”

Figure 3a. War’s location: Percentage of mentions placing “war on terror” in Afghanistan
or specifically against al-Qaida.
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
2001 (n=210)
All (n=652)

2002 (n=152)
WashPost (n=348)

2003 (n=80)

2004 (n=147)

USA Today (n=166)

NY Post (n=138)

Figure 3b. Percentage of mentions suggesting a “global” war that could easily reach theUnited States.
100
80
60
40
20
0
2001 (n=210)
All (n=652)

2002 (n=152)
WashPost (n=348)

2003 (n=80)
USA Today (n=166)78

2004 (n=147)
NY Post (n=138)

Taken together, these findings support Hypothesis 2: Diverging from a roughconsensus at the start of the study period, the prestige press grows less accepting of the
securitization frame and the pro-administration press more accepting. Elements of thatframe that remain consistent are most steadily portrayed in media that emphasize theirability to be all things to all readers or viewers.

Discussion
Establishing frame movement in news texts is the first step in suggesting that
securitization provides an appropriate framework for explaining a particular multidimensional type of framing. The variation in these three measures – the degree to whicha news organization transmits the “reality” of a concept supported by a set of politicalactors, the organization’s willingness to use a term favored by political actors in its own
voice, and the precision or vagueness with which the threat is defined – provides a way ofmeasuring whether the concept has been “securitized,” or understood as an existential
threat requiring a suspension of normal routines and the arrogation of special powers to
the actors who have been able to “call security.” The war on terrorism is a familiar andimportant example of an issue open for securitization, but the same mechanism can beused to study similar issues. A “war on drugs” serves not only to harden the lines of classand ethnocentrism that help to define how communities approach issues of illegal drugs(Pryce, 2006); it also may well alter the way financial resources are allocated and the roleof the military in concerns that had traditionally been the province of police forces.
The ease with which political actors conflate such concepts as the “war on
terrorism” with U.S.-Mexican immigration issues (an example is among the stimulus
79materials used in the experimental part of this study) is a clear parallel but not the only
one. The debate over whether newspapers should use terms like “illegal alien” provides acomparable semantic category for study. The language of news sources will find its way
into the language of news no matter what, but the degree to which a contested term
appears in the news organization’s own voice is a measure of the degree to which thesecurity frame is passed along intact from political actors to audiences.
The divergence of this frame in different forms of daily journalism is significant
as well and underscores the importance of examining multiple media outlets. The prestigepress, after all, is not the one that frames the world for “the milkman in Omaha” (Cohen,
1963, p. 110) and his or her family and friends. Indeed, if they watch Fox News and read
USA Today, they are seeing two distinct wars on terrorism that are both, in turn, different
from the one in the pages of the New York Times. Which of these different frames isdominant, and how much securitization from which source adds up to what degree ofeffect, are issues for future research. But it seems reasonable to conclude that politicalactors fight to control the securitization switch because it is worth controlling: the ability
to “speak security,” as Buzan et al. (1998) put it, promises to bring with it control of thevarious extraordinary rules that a securitized issue puts into play. And, as the next part ofthis study will suggest, that control is delimited in part by frames chosen by the media.
Media acceptance or rejection of securitizing frames is only one link in the larger
chain of public acceptance, which securitization theorists deem essential to a successful
securitizing move. The results of this content analysis indicate that such media choices
are not monolithic, even in the face of an organizing idea as consensual as the September
2001 attacks. Journalists and media critics alike can find some elements of interest in80

these findings. The divergence noted in the Washington Post’s framing of the war on
terrorism can hardly be called opposition. Whether it represents a genuine set ofalternatives introduced into discourse by an independent media watchdog or merely
indexes a divergence in elite political opinion (Bennett, 1990; Bennett, Lawrence, &Livingston, 2007; Entman, 2004) is a different sort of question, and one beyond the scopeor measuring tools of this project. But given the criticism leveled at the prestige press
both externally (e.g., Bennett, Lawrence, & Livingston, 2007; Dadge, 2006), and within
the profession (e.g., “The Times and Iraq,” 2004; Getler, 2004) as the Iraq conflict wore
on, the emergence of a counterframe, however belated, indicates that securitizing moves
will not always go uncontested.
Meanwhile, though, what are the potential effects of securitizing an issue innews reports? Who is persuaded by a securitization frame, and how might that frame
effect the information it surrounds? The focus of the dissertation turns now to an
experiment that addresses those questions.

81CHAPTER 6
Experimental results: The securitization frame at work

As the preceding chapter suggests, a securitization frame, in which news eventsare framed as imminent threats to a society’s physical or cultural survival that justify
extraordinary measures, can be created, nurtured, or contested in news reports. Such aframe appeared with some consistency immediately after the September 2001 attacks anddemonstrated a distinct and predictable divergence after that. But if framing is to be atheory of processes (cf. Scheufele, 1999), demonstrating a frame’s presence mightcomplete one equation, but it is only the beginning of another: What does the frame do?
This chapter discusses the experimental results of presenting articles using asecuritization frame to a news audience.
These hypotheses and research questions were proposed:
H3: News accounts employing the securitization frame will produce a greater
securitization effect (the situation in the article is perceived as a threat to “our way oflife,” participants are confident in the government’s ability to handle the situation, andextraordinary measures are needed), and this effect will be more pronounced amongsupporters of the government than among nonsupporters of the government. Thissecuritization effect is summarized as “trust in government.” The hypothesis is based on
the central questions posed by Buzan et al. (1998): Who can invoke the security claim,
how can it be invoked, and what makes it acceptable?
H4: Details of articles employing the securitization frame will be less wellremembered than details of articles that do not employ the securitization frame, though82

overall comprehension will not be affected. This effect will be more pronounced amongsupporters of the government than among nonsupporters of the government. Thishypothesis reflects the idea of securitization as a heuristic effect that will lead to lessthorough processing of news reports.
H5: News accounts employing the securitization frame will be more closely
associated with ongoing stories – issues that need to be prominently displayed in news
coverage, representing patterns that need attention and matters the country needs to hearmore about – than are the same accounts not employing the frame. This effect will be
more pronounced among supporters of the government than among nonsupporters of thegovernment. The enduring nature of this sort of issue, like the “long war” against
terrorism, should be reflected in its portrayal as a long-term threat.
H6: News accounts employing the securitization frame will produce a greater
sense of personal concern and anxiety than the same accounts not employing the frame.
This effect will be more pronounced among supporters of the government than among
nonsupporters of the government. Because a sense of personal involvement could affectthe balance of systematic processing and heuristic processing, this sense of personalanxiety could also shed light on how securitized news is processed.
Several concepts of potential interest to news producers, news audiences, andpolitical actors do not lend themselves to predictions based on extant literature andtheory. They are tested as research questions:
RQ1: How does the securitization effect, both emotional and cognitive, interact
with participants’ sense of their political alignment with the news media?

83

RQ2: What is the relationship between the effect of the securitization frame andthe identification of terrorism as the “most important problem” facing the nation?
RQ3: Is there a relationship between the channel participants list as their primarysource of news (print, broadcast, Internet) and the effect of the securitization frame?
RQ4: Is there a relationship between listing a specific source of news (a particular
newspaper or network program, rather than “newspapers” or “TV”) and the effect of the
securitization frame?
RQ5: Is there a relationship between how closely participants follow news of
security-related issues and the effect of the securitization frame?
The results comprise data from 151 participants, recruited from two sections of an
introductory journalism survey class. They ranged in age from 18 to 26 (M = 18.81, SD =0.995); 116 (76.8%) were women. The experiment was conducted between March 7 andApril 10, 2007.
On a scale of 1 (very liberal) to 7 (very conservative), participants rated their own
politics (M = 3.62, SD = 1.399) and the politics of the news media (M = 3.21, SD =1.111). On a scale of 1 (very much) to 7 (not at all), they trusted the media (M = 3.61, SD= 1.286) more than the government (M = 4.01, SD = 1.288) to look after their interests, t(150) = 3.44, p = .001. They thought the country was worse off (M = 4.94, SD = 1.179)
than it was six years ago and slightly less safe (M = 4.19, SD = 1.359) than it was in2003.
On a scale of 1 (very closely) to 7 (not at all), they reported following news about
civil liberties (M = 4.03, SD = 1.46) more closely than news about terrorism (M = 4.18,
SD =1.26) or Iraq (M = 4.21, SD = 1.335). Asked to rate the performance of national84politicians on a similar scale (very good to very bad), they rated the president worst (M =5.09), followed by Republicans in Washington (M = 4.70) and Democrats in Washington(M = 3.82).
Examination of the data indicated that no participants were extreme outliers on
recognition memory (more than 2.5 standard deviations above or below the mean). To
test the success of the randomization, responses in the pretest were compared in a pairedsamples T-test, with the groups based on whether even-numbered or odd-numbered
articles were securitized. For only one question, whether the country was safer than in
2003, did the difference between the two groups approach significance at the .05 level.
Table 2. Mean differences on pretest. Groups are based on whether odd-numbered oreven-numbered articles were securitized. For exact wording of the questions, see
Appendix B; for the articles in both versions, see Appendix C
Question

Grp1

Grp2

t

sig.

How would you rate your own politics?

3.73

3.51

.967

.335

How closely do you follow news about terrorism?

4.13

4.22

-.439

.661

News about Iraq?

4.16

4.26

-.474

.636

News about civil liberties?

3.92

4.13

-.890

.375

Trust government to look after your interests?

4.05

3.96

.441

.660

Trust the media to look after your interests?

3.60

3.62

-.088

.930

How would you rate the politics of the media?

3.12

3.30

-1.010 .314

Is the country better off than six years ago?

4.95

4.93

.065

.948

Is the country safer than it was in 2003?

4.37

3.96

1.883

.062

How good a job is the president doing?

5.04

5.13

-.383

.702

Republicans in Washington?

4.55

4.84

-1.230.221

Democrats in Washington?

3.84

3.80

.224

.823

85

Hypotheses
The hypothesis that the securitization frame would produce a greater all-aroundsecuritization effect – “trust in government” – was tested with a repeated measures
analysis of variance (ANOVA), with the presence or absence of the securitization frame
as a within-subjects condition and orientation toward government as a between-subjects
condition. The interaction effect was significant, F(1, 149) = 5.016, p = .027, η2part =.033(see Figure 4).2 Securitized articles overall produced more trust in the government, andthe effect was significantly higher among supporters of the government. H3 was
supported.

Figure 4: Effect of securitization frame and government orientation on trust in
government.

Trust in government

4.75
4.5
4.25
4
3.75
3.5
unsecuritized

securitizedFrame

Anti-government

Pro-government

H4, predicting that recognition memory would be lower for securitized articles
than for nonsecuritized ones, was tested by the same procedure, with recognition memoryfor questions from the securitized vs. the nonsecuritized articles as a within-subjects
2

The dependent variable “trust in government” was squared to improve normality of distribution for the
ANOVA and t-test calculations. Means and standard deviations are reported in original units.

86

condition. The interaction was significant, F(1, 149) = 4.856, p = .029, η2part =.032 (seeFigure 5). Recognition memory in the two conditions is not different among supporters of
the government, but memory for securitized articles is significantly higher among those
low in orientation toward the government. H4 was partly supported. There is a main
effect for the presence of the securitization frame, with the mean number of correct
answers significantly lower for securitized articles than for nonsecuritized articles (F(1,2149) = 9.185, p = .003, η part =.058), but the interaction with support for government is in

the opposite direction from the one hypothesized.

Figure 5: Effect of securitization frame and government orientation on recognition
memory.

Memory

9.5
9
8.5
8
7.5
unsecuritized

securized
Article frame

Anti-government

Pro-government

H4 also predicted that comprehension would not be significantly different for
securitized and nonsecuritized articles. This part of the hypothesis was supported. Theinteraction was not significant (F(1, 149) = 0.426, p = .336, η2part = .006), and there were no
significant main effects for frame (F (1, 149) = 2.781, p = .097, η2part = .018) or orientation
toward government (F (1, 149) = .341, p = .560, η2part = .002). The means, though, suggestthat this “main point” question was ineffectively measured or ineffectively explained to87

participants. The highest comprehension scores, for pro-government participants reading
unsecuritized articles, indicate that those participants were getting the “main point” ofless than one (.59) in four articles.
H5 predicted that the securitization frame would be more closely associated withongoing stories, with that effect stronger among those high in orientation toward thegovernment. The interaction was not significant (F (1, 149) = 0.251, p = .617, η2part= .007),and there was no main effect of the frame (F (1, 149) = 1.065, p = .304, η2part = .002) or oforientation toward government (F (1, 149) = .121, p = .729, η2part = .001). H5 was notsupported.
H6 predicted that the frame would be more closely associated with a sense of
personal concern and anxiety, with the effect stronger among those high in orientation
toward the government. The interaction was not significant (F (1, 149) = 2.076, p = .152,
η2part = .014), and there was no main effect of the frame (F (1, 149) = .906, p = .343, η2part =.006) or of orientation toward government (F (1, 149) = .089, p = .766, η2part = .001). H6
was not supported.
Research questions
RQ1 asks whether participants’ political orientation with respect to theirperceptions of media political orientation (whether they perceive the media as more
liberal or conservative than they are) is associated with emotional or cognitive outcomes.
This “media distance” is similar but not identical to support for government (see Table3). RQ1 was tested with repeated-measures ANOVA, with the securitization frame as awithin-subjects variable and media orientation – left of the media (n = 47), about thesame (n = 60) and right of the media (n = 44) – as a between-subjects variable.
88

Although the overall interaction of the frame and media distance on recognition
memory was not significant (F (1, 148) = 1.337, p = .266, η2part= .018), there were several
significant differences among the means (Figure 6). Participants who consideredthemselves politically to the left of the news media had no significant difference inrecognition memory (t (46) = -.273, p = .786, d = .04). Memory for securitized articles
was significantly lower among those who saw themselves as similar to the media (t (59)
= -2.188, p = .033, d = .28) or to the right of the media (t (43) = -3.025, p = .004, d = .46).
Similarly, the interaction of the securitization frame and media distance on trust in
government (Figure 7) was not significant (F (1, 148) = 1.616, p = .202, η2part = .021). Butamong participants who saw themselves as to the right of the media, securitized articles
produced significantly higher scores on trust in government than unsecuritized articles (t(43) = 2.628, p = .012, d = .40). There were no significant differences in trust for those
who saw themselves as similar to the media (t (59) = 1.467, p = .148, d = .17) or to theleft of the media (t (46) = -.008, p = .994, d < .01).
Figure 6: Effect of securitization frame and participants’ “media distance,” orpolitical orientation relative to the media, on recognition memory.
9.5

Memory

9.25
9
8.75
8.5
8.25
8
left of media

similarright of media

Media distance
Unsecuritized89

SecuritizedTrust in government

Figure 7: Effect of securitization frame and media distance on trust in
government.
5
4.75
4.5
4.25
4
3.75
3.5
left of media

similarright of media

Media distance
Unsecuritized

Securitized

Table 3: “Media distance,” or how participants rate their own politics vs. those of
the news media, and orientation toward government.
Orientation
Anti-government
Pro-government

Left of media
36
11

Similar29
31

Right of media
836

RQ2 asks whether participants’ identification of “most important problem” isassociated with differences in their affective or cognitive responses. “Most important
problem” was an open-ended question asking participants to identify the three mostimportant problems the country faces. The first response was then coded into one of 14
categories, which were then reduced to a top three – terrorism (n = 33), Iraq (n = 48), andeconomic issues (n = 18) – and an “other” category. This was used as a between-subjects
variable in a repeated-measures ANOVA with the securitization frame as a withinsubjects variable. Both trust in government and recognition memory were used as
dependent variables.
No significant interactions were found for either memory or trust. Individual ttests found that only in the “other” category was there a significant difference for90

recognition memory (t (50) = - 2.687, p = .01, d = .38), with memory for securitized
articles lower than for unsecuritized articles. On trust in government, there were no
significant differences in any of the four conditions between securitized andnonsecuritized articles.

Table 4. Effect of “most important problem” and frame on recognition memory.
Problem
Terror
Iraq
Econ
Other

Mem
unsec
8.48
9.06
8.78
9.33

SD
2.266
2.292
2.016
2.026

Mem
secure
8.21
8.52
8.56
8.39

SD
2.713
1.924
2.036
2.001

t
-.543
-1.549-.468-2.687

p
.591
.128
.646
.01

d
.10
.23
.11
.46

Table 5. Effect of “most important problem” and frame on trust in government.
Problem
Terror
Iraq
Econ
Other

Trust
unsec
4.14
4.11
3.89
4.02

SD
.798
.832
.843
.918

Trust
secure
4.30
4.22
4.00
4.12

SD
.809
1.003
1.051
.980

t
1.109
.992
.655
1.025

p
.276
.326
.521
.298

d
.19
.11
.10
.11

RQ3 asks whether there is a relationship between the medium that participants list
as their primary source of news and their cognitive and affective responses tosecuritization framing. This variable was taken from an open-ended response asking
participants’ three main sources of news. The first response from each was thencategorized as “print,” meaning magazines and newspapers or specific Web sites
associated with them (n = 46); “broadcast,” meaning television or radio outlets or their
Web sites (n = 63); “online,” meaning specific Internet portal sites or general responses
like “the Internet” (n = 38); and other or no response. The overall interaction with91

recognition memory was not significant (p > .29), but the means for those giving print as
their main source of news were significantly higher than for broadcast (p =.025) or online(p =.007). There was no significant difference in memory for securitized andunsecuritized articles among those getting their news from print (p = .12) and broadcast(p > .47), but for those getting their news from the Internet, recognition memory wassignificantly lower for securitized articles than for unsecuritized ones (t (37) = 2.615, p =.013).
Similarly, the interaction of orientation toward the government with type of news
source was not significant (p > .18), but there was a main effect for type of news source(F(1, 144) = 6.118, p =.003, η2part =.078), such that securitized articles produced
significantly higher scores on trust in the government among those whose main source
was broadcast or Internet than among those whose main source was print. This measureof trust in government was also significantly higher for securitized articles amongbroadcast subjects (t (63) = 2.566, p = .013) but not among Internet subjects (p = .19).

Table 6. Effect of primary news medium and frame on recognition memory.
MediumPrint
Bdcst
Internet

Mem
unsec
9.59
8.67
8.79

SD
2.227
2.087
2.195

Mem
secure
9.02
8.43
7.74

SD
2.165
2.100
2.062

t
-1.603-0.720-2.615

p
.116
.474
.013

d
.24
.11
.48

Table 7. Effect of primary news medium and frame on trust in government.
MediumPrint
Bdcst
Internet

Trust
unsec
3.79
4.17
4.26

SD
.902
.894
.647

Trust
secure
3.77
4.40
4.37

SD
.919
.907
.920
92

t
-.201
2.330
1.077

p
.842
.023
.288

d
.02
.26
.12

RQ4 asks whether there is a relationship between securitization and those who
give a specific (n = 81) news source as opposed to a general “TV” or “Internet” as theirmain source of news. There is a main effect for securitization on trust in government (F(1,2148) = 5.368, p = .022, η part = .035), such that trust for securitized articles is higher in bothconditions, and a main effect for specificity in news source (F(1,148) = 4.673, p = .032,
η2part = .031), such that trust is higher for both types of article among those listing anonspecific source, but the interaction is not significant (p > .79). Specific vs. nonspecificsource has no significant effect on recognition memory (p > .32), nor does it interact withthe securitization frame (p > .69).

Table 8. Effect of specific vs. general news medium and frame on recognition memory.
MediumSpecific
General

Mem
unsec
9.09
8.22

SD
2.198
2.159

Mem
secure
8.58
8.88

SD
2.173
2.100

t
p
-1.756 .083
-2.291 .025

d
.23
.31

Table 9. Effect of specific vs. general news medium on trust in government.
MediumSpecific
General

Trust
unsec
3.91
4.24

SD
.942
.698

Trust
secure
4.03
4.35

SD
.986
.879

t
1.382
1.377

p
.171
.173

d
.12
.13

RQ5 asks if the degree to which participants follow news about security-related
issues is related to the effects of the securitization frame. There is a significant effect of
securitization on trust in government (F(1,148) = 4.95, p = .028, η2part = .NNN), such that
securitized articles produce greater trust, but no effect from the degree to which93participants follow news (p = .23). There is a significant effect of the frame onrecognition memory (F (1,148) = 8.509, p = .004, η2part = .NNN) but no effect of following
the news (p > .69).

Table 10. Effect of frame and how closely subjects follow security news on recognition
memory.
Mem
unsec
9.00
9.39
8.66

Follow
Low
Mod
High

SD
2.119
2.219
2.219

Mem
secure
8.38
8.39
8.50

SD
2.089
2.359
1.982

t
-1.875-2.763
-.441

p
.067
.008
.661

d
.29
.42
.07

Table 11. Effect of frame and how closely subjects follow security news on trust in
government.
Follow
Low
Moderate
High

Trust
unsec
4.05
4.26
3.87

SD
.803
.766
.938

Trust
secure
4.19
4.26
4.03

SD
.908
.874
1.080

t
1.701
.159
1.553

p
.095
.875
.127

d
.16
.02
.16

The securitization of news articles, then, appears to produce several effects.
Some appear to be intuitively sensible: Securitization gives people who are oriented
toward the government a stronger cue to perceive an existential threat and to put theirfaith in government to remove that threat. Some effects appear contradictory: Those whoare not oriented toward the government process securitized articles less thoroughly thanthey do unsecuritized articles, but so do those who consider the media politically left ofthemselves (who are predominantly pro-government). The next chapter will consider
what these findings might mean in context of how the securitization frame appears in
different news accounts.
94

CHAPTER 7
Discussion and conclusions: Dulce et securum est

A walk to the corner drugstore for the Sunday newspapers this June morning
provides an unusually clear look at the securitization frame in both its conditions. The top
story on the front of the Columbia Daily Tribune reports the thwarting of a plot by a“suspected Muslim terrorist cell” to bomb a set of fuel pipelines, thus destroying New
York’s Kennedy Airport and killing thousands in the bargain (“JFK Airport,” 2007).
At the New York Times, for which Kennedy Airport is a local story, thepurported plot rates a one-paragraph mention in the front-page news index, referring to afull article on page 30. The word “terrorist” does not appear until the sixth paragraph; it isused only three times in the entire article and only in direct quotations from officials, oneof whom refers to a suspect as “not a Grade A terrorist” (Buckley & Rashbaum, 2007).
The facts, and many of the quotations, are identical in both articles: The bombplot is the terror plot, and vice versa. Yet it is hard to imagine a sharper example ofvalence framing, and in this case the valence goes directly to the questions proposed by
Buzan et al. (1998): Who gets to “speak terror,” on what topics, and to what effects? And
what must be present, in the message and the audience, for a terrorism frame to takehold? For the purposes of this study, another question needs to be added: What is it in the
structure of that frame that links it conceptually to immigration, to infectious diseases, tonuclear proliferation among “rogue states,” and potentially to issues seemingly as far
afield as climate change? How do we get from the specific topic of terrorism to the broad
set of threats implied by securitization?
95

This dissertation has attempted to show that, along with its place in security
studies, securitization has a distinctive function in framing as well. It is the process bywhich a series of events is organized into a problem, but it is also the process by whichthat problem and others like it can be organized into a particular kind of threat. Because
securitization is a mediated effect, the political actors who seek the assent needed todeclare a securitized threat and to prescribe the measures needed to counter it must winthat assent not just from the public but from at least some of the mass media as well.
And because securitization is the sort of frame that can be measured as an outcome intexts and manipulated to measure outcomes in news audiences, it offers further evidence
that the sometimes “fractured paradigm” of framing has more structural and theoretical
integrity than it might let on. Specifically, a process of securitization framing must
involve both the way the frame is created in the media and the way it is understood in theaudience. This process requires a step beyond traditional understandings of the limits ofcontent analysis, in which content is usually “not linked in any systematic way to either
the forces that created the content or to its effects” (Riffe, Lacy, & Fico, 1998, p. 9).
Those links are exactly the ones called for in contemporary critiques of framing; in thisstudy, content stands as a bridge between antecedents and outcomes.
Framing entails cognitive shortcuts, as Lippmann (1922/1997) noted eight
decades ago: Without the ability to sort by stereotype, the busy editor would soon die of
excitement. Frames, like agendas, do not tell audiences what to think, but they do help
audiences know what to think about, how to think about it, and – cognitively – how hardto think about it. From the evidence presented earlier, the securitization frame appears toplay a role in all those developments. Depending on how and whether it emerges from the96

competition through which frames are created and contested, and depending on which
sectors of the audience are prepared to listen, securitization influences the way discrete
events are organized into categories of threat and the degree of attention that a particular
report on that threat needs before it can be understood and categorized. Before discussing
how those effects play out, it is worth spending a moment looking at how threats appear
among other categories of news and how threats constructed from the same elements canappear to be the wildly diverse set of perils that the securitization frame suggests.
“News” is not a naturally occurring element. It is constructed by particularjournalists, in particular times and places, for what those journalists assume to be theinterests, needs, and wants of particular audiences. The threat posed by the purported
Kennedy Airport plot had to be distinguished from other perils, graded against othernews, then cast as a particular kind of threat – the point at which the securitization frame
comes in. In the Tribune headline, the plot is not asserted or alleged, but assumed: “JFK
airport targeted in bomb plot.” In the Times article, the possibility of a massive death toll
is framed as the second-hand musings of a man described by one of his defenders as a
“two-bit grifter” (Buckley & Rashbaum, 2007); in the Associated Press article used by
the Tribune, the attack is meant to “kill thousands of people and trigger an economic
catastrophe.” It is the difference between an article about the normal functions of law
enforcement and a look at Apocalypse Next Week – exactly the distinction drawn by the
securitization frame.
As the preceding content analysis suggests, decisions like those reflected in the
airport story have become much more widely contested, at least in some sectors of news.
By desecuritizing the terrorism issue, at least for this one article, the Times widened the97space open to political debate. But the frame remains useful and potent – and, evidently,
readily accessible for the front page. In that sense, the airport plot is a smaller-scale,single-case version of the securitization frame as it appears in the Washington Post
toward the end of the study period described earlier.
As an effect on media, securitization appears in news texts; as an effect of media,
it can be found in news audiences. But as first Lasswell and then Buzan and hiscolleagues would ask: How does it work, what paths does it follow, what does it do, andwhom does it do it on? Before taking up those questions, this chapter will consider theantecedent stage: How the frame appears, and changes, in news texts.

News: The frame as an outcome
Is securitization in news texts the result of inattention (journalists allowing
newsmakers to dictate the frames in which news is understood) or overattention? The
short answer is both, a little, sometimes, and yes. Frames appear in media reports for avariety of reasons. They can be mandated from on high, though even in such a case thecounterframe can easily appear; all it takes is a moment of carelessness amid the press ofwork on the editing desk for the mandated “terrorists” to become militants again, or viceversa. Frames can appear, as points of textual style do, by guesswork and imitation (Bell,1991; Vultee, 2004). A frame can become preferred, at least temporarily, because it plays
to virtues of news practice: brevity, drama, conflict (Wolfsfeld, 2004; Wolfsfeld, Alimi,& Kailani, 2007). When a frame seems resonant or natural, it has no reason not to appear
in a news account. If a novice reporter on a weekend shift is assigned to cover a picnic
for military families for the Sunday local news section and the dominant discourse at the98event is about Iraq as a front in the “war on terrorism,” the Iraq-terror frame has the deck
stacked in its favor.
But not all framing is accidental, nor is it all conceived in the executive suites.
“Editors do not simply invent interpretive frames; they absorb them from the society inwhich they operate” (Wolfsfeld, 2004, p. 29). The language of news is what news
workers expect their readers and listeners to expect; it is a form of “audience design”(Bell, 1991). These audiences are not exclusively the elites who feed the mutual influenceof news and politics as described in indexing (e.g., Bennett, 1990) or “cascading
activation” (Entman, 2004); they comprise ordinary readers as well, and changes in thesort of news language that is influential in securitization framing is likely to occur more
quickly in popular media than in elite media (Bell, 1991). All in all, it would be unusual
for any news frame to be completely stable for any length of time. It is larger and more
lasting differences in framing, as described in Chapter 5, that suggest either changes
pushed by the professionals assembling the news or a sense among those professionals
that the national wind has shifted.
The data and examples from this content analysis suggest the occasional slip or
accident. But they also point to larger patterns of frame movement and thus to the firstpart of the puzzle: When the frame is the dependent variable, what is at work in the
independent variable? A reasonable explanation is that the variation represents the twokinds of change discussed above – roughly, change from above (as policy) and change
from below (sensed in the newsroom). The news outlets representing more distinct
audiences, the New York Post and the Washington Post, appear to address thoseaudiences with greater degrees of top-down and bottom-up change respectively, while the99newspaper whose mission is to offer a product whose taste is equally palatable whereverin the country it is sampled, USA Today, occupies a sort of middle ground.
As suggested in Chapter 5, the Washington Post does not represent a “liberal” or“antiwar” pole of some notional journalistic spectrum. It does not serve as an opposition
paper – but neither, as Bennett et al. (2007) suggest, did the out-of-power Democratic
Party serve as an opposition between the September 2001 attacks and the invasion of
Iraq. More likely, both party and paper are providing an index of the breadth of politicalspace available for debate. The Washington Post did not create that breadth, but by
amplifying an apparent change in the political environment (e.g., Wolfsfeld, 2004), it
occupied the resulting space. The Washington Post becomes more reluctant to speak of a“war on terrorism” in its own voice and more willing to introduce ambiguity about it, but
the war has by no means gone away (the Post, after all, remains the paper that mentions“war on terror” most often). Whether the conflict has been “desecuritized” – moved fromthe realm of existential threats back to the domain of normal legal-political workings – isa more challenging question. Desecuritization is less a frame than the absence of one, andthus it is harder to conceptualize and measure than its counterpart. But the Washington
Post’s coverage suggests that the consensus among political elites, audiences, and news
organizations that characterizes the ability to “speak security” was no longer universal by
the elections of 2004. The securitization frame around the “war on terrorism” is broken
for at least some readers of the Washington Post.
Who broke the frame – the media themselves, the elite audience, or the popularaudience – is a different question. Some decay in public support for military involvement
is predictable. Althaus and Coe (2007) suggest that the prominence and intensity of100

coverage, more than its tone, tend to bolster support, but that effect disappears after the
first year of fighting. In explaining a decline in support for President Bush and the Iraq
war, Aday (2007) found that the White House’s share of news time had not declined but
the tone of commentary offered by experts had become more negative. Both the popularand the elite elements of the audience, then, are making it reasonable for the news media
to create new “slots,” or reallocate existing ones, to accommodate dissent over U.S. goals
or performance in those conflicts.
Despite its appearance in the prestige press, such a break in consensus seems
unlikely to be a precise index of some groundswell of national sentiment. The implied
assent of the audience is essential to securitization, and for the dominant paper in thenation’s capital, the “audience” and “elite” points of the “media-elite-audience” triangle
are to some extent one and the same. A perceived change in this audience is by no means
the same thing as a perceived change in the homogenous audience that USA Today has inmind when it arranges to have its papers left outside hotel rooms in such places as San
Francisco and San Antonio. Nor is it the audience addressed by the frame movement
evident in the New York Post.
The New York Post is a “popular” newspaper in the sense of the British tabloids
or Fox News (which shares corporate ownership with the New York Post as well as thelargest-selling British tabloid, The Sun). To the extent that “popular” means shorter
articles and larger headlines, a popular orientation would lead naturally toward bigger
threats and less ambiguity – a welcoming culture for the securitization frame. But more isin play than that. “News is determined by values, and the kind of language in which thatnews is told reflects and expresses those values” (Bell, 1991, p. 2). Unlike the isolationist101press of the early 1940s, the popular press is oriented toward the classic “rally round theflag” effect (Mueller, 1973) and the concept that national political bickering stops at thewater’s edge. Indeed, as noted in Chapter 5, coverage in the New York Post evokes thetone of all-pull-together World War II coverage – certainly more so than the stridently
anti-Roosevelt coverage of the large Republican papers before Pearl Harbor. A popularpress is not by definition one oriented toward a conservative major party; witness theongoing support in The Sun for Britain’s Labour Party under Tony Blair.
At the same time, the New York Post’s orientation toward George Bush and his
sector of the Republican Party can hardly be ignored. And if patriotism and populism arevalues that editors and writers might infer from or about their audiences, there are strong
signs that the value of overt partisanship was directed from the top, at least in the case of
the Iraq war (Greenslade, 2003). Although the New York Post’s sense of its audience
helps account for the degree to which it speaks of the war in its own voice throughout the
study period, it is difficult to explain the transformation of the “war on terror” into the
War on Terror without taking into account the influence of senior editorial direction. A
formal War is securitization in its most orthodox garb. It involves the potential
suspension of social, cultural, moral, and economic norms for as long as the threat tonationhood lasts. The securitization frame remains strong in the New York Post – indeed,
grows stronger through the six-year study period – because the paper deems its values,
and those that by extension it shares with its audience, to be in continuing peril.
Those trends explain the widely divergent ending points of what had seemed, ina content analysis of a wide array of press models from the weeks after the September
2001 attacks, to be a widely held consensus view. Different attitudes within the102newsroom, different views directed from the glass offices, different senses of where theelusive audience’s attitudes are heading all suggest that five years on, very different
frames are available to news audiences – though probably not all at the same time to thesame audience.
A “war on terror” is only one example of a securitization frame, but it suggests
the way such frames can arise and can be strengthened or weakened. The degree to which
the frame is contested suggests the value it appears to hold for political elites and others
who want to control the lens through which framing magnifies or shrinks the different
elements of a news account. What is it exactly that they are contesting, though? If aconsensus frame can diverge as widely as the “war on terror” appears to have, is there
still an effect worth contesting?
Experimental evidence suggests that securitization – a frame that, whensuccessfully invoked, creates a shared understanding of an existential threat that admits toany means necessary in solving it – is an effective and powerful way of inducing news
audiences to organize their thoughts in a particular way. The discussion now turns towhat securitization can mean to the political actors who are able to invoke it.

Effects: The frame as an influence
The experimental portion of this dissertation presented eight articles, four eachin securitized and unsecuritized versions, to a student sample with the broad idea that
securitization could be summarized as a heuristic: a cognitive shortcut that helps people
make easier work of processing new information. The experiment measured both whatparticipants thought about the articles and what they remembered about the articles.
103

Is securitization a heuristic, and if so, what kind (or kinds) is it? First, it isimportant to note that not all things called heuristics are alike. Cognitive biases likeprimacy or recency, in which the order items appear in affects the way they areremembered, are different from “expert advice is good,” which like other persuasive
heuristics is a “learned knowledge structure” (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993, p. 342).
Securitization rests on a number of such learned structures: not only the idea of an
existential threat, but the idea of a consensus for endorsing extraordinary measures todeal with it. And, as the interactions predicted in Chapter 4 suggest, previously formed
attitudes toward government and toward the sources of information about security issues
are also expected to play a role.
What benefits or disadvantages accrue to the political actor who can securitize
an issue, and thus increase the chances that the issue appears within a securitization framein news accounts? Participants who are not oriented toward the government are lesssystematic – thus, more heuristic – when they approach securitized articles comparedwith nonsecuritized ones. Securitizing an issue does not make the government’s
supporters read harder; it seems to make the government’s opponents read less hard. A
reasonable if ambiguous explanation is found in Eagly and Chaiken (1993, pp. 330-332):
People want to hold “accurate” opinions while still spending their cognitive resources
wisely; they try to balance an interest in processing economically with an interest inprocessing carefully. A change in processing route for securitized articles suggests thatgovernment opponents are the ones for whom the frame contains all they need to know.
In the less ambiguous world of the childhood fable, the shepherd boy who cried “wolf”
has lowered the sufficiency threshold for his skeptics but not for his supporters.
104But this finding does not mean that the cry-wolf effect is the only processing
outcome produced by securitization. Those who saw the news media as more liberal thanthemselves also approached securitized stories more systematically than those who
consider themselves to the left of the media, and given that 82% of participants who fellto the right of the media were also in the pro-government category, the results suggest acontradiction. The findings could reflect a greater perceived need for information;equally, they could reflect distrust in the messenger. Given that in the context of thisexperiment, the political valence of the securitization frame appears to align with supportof the government and distrust of how the media are portraying the government’s
performance, the answer may be a combination of both ideas. Participants who saw
themselves as to the right of the media were slightly, but not significantly, more likely toreport a lower trust in the media to look out for their interests. It is possible that
securitization is a different sort of heuristic signal here, related to the effect of source
credibility (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). Those aligned with the securitizing side but
doubtful about the channel through which threats to security are portrayed are more
attentive when the securitization frame is not present – in other words, they seem to be
waiting for a cue that the media are applying the proper contextual frame fordevelopments involving political violence or immigration.
Of potentially more interest in the political arena is the persuasive outcome.
Among government opponents, securitizing a news article makes as close to nodifference as possible (p = .96) in trust in the government. Supporters of the government
are higher in trust under either condition, but especially so for the securitized articles.
Supporters, in short, do not need to process harder to perceive a threat to “our way of105

life” that the government is equipped, and obliged, to handle. They are inclined in that
direction to start with, and a boost from securitization, the sort of political cue that stands
out among others in the text (cf. Granberg, 1993), adds to the effect. Similarly,
securitizing an article makes no difference in trust to those who see themselves as left of
the news media, but it adds significantly to the already higher level of trust among those
who see the media as left of themselves. These results do not indicate a greater sense of
threat to personal well-being but a sense of threat to national and cultural well-being – theeffect that the Copenhagen School predicts that “speaking security” should have.
Securitization appears to work independently of what audiences perceive as thenation’s most important problem, of how much they expect to see an issue covered fromday to day, and of how closely they follow the news, even on security-oriented topics.
But it has some relation to where they follow that news. A full discussion of how andwhy news audiences that are oriented toward newspapers appear less susceptible to theframe – put another way, less willing to grant the assent on which securitization relies –than those that watch TV or rely on the Internet is beyond the scope or purposes of thisproject. Still, it is worth noting that securitization of news articles produces greater trust
among those whose main source is broadcast or Internet than among those whose main
source is print, and that those who name a specific organization as their source of news
are less affected by that securitization than those who offer a generic “TV” or “Internet.”
The effects of securitization on this study’s measure of trust in government
support the original conception of securitization as a tool of particular value to politicalactors, especially those standing behind the levers of power. But the mixed direction of
the cognitive effects remains puzzling: The frame appears to make processing less106

thorough in two disparate groups, those who distrust the government (which stands on thepolitical right for the issues and time period covered here) and who those see the media as
standing to the political left of themselves. When the skepticism runs from left to right, asfor the first group, the presence of the frame appears to be suggesting that the source ofthe message is crying wolf. When the skepticism runs from right to left, the absence ofthe frame suggests that the carrier of the message is failing to tell the whole or proper
story. Those kinds of skepticism are not necessarily incompatible; indeed, as noted in
Chapter 3, the heuristic-systematic model itself suggests that heuristic processing canoccur at the same time as systematic processing. But the incongruity points to a concernthat has been implied but not fully explored here: the alignment of securitization in thisstudy with a single side of the left-right divide. That concern suggests not only the limitsof this study and the promising ways in which securitization can be examined in the
future, but some aspects of the issue that are relevant to the practice of journalism.

Implications for the profession
It is important to note here that securitization is not necessarily the Dark Side of
security studies. The political camp that deprecates English-only laws or restrictions on
the provision of public services to immigrants – clear indications that the immigration
issue is being securitized – might welcome the securitization of energy or environmental
issues. And, as the literature reviewed in Chapter 2 suggests, the securitization of
HIV/AIDS brings benefits in one hand and threats in the other. For media professionals,
then, the relevant point of securitization is not that it is to be rooted out and destroyed
everywhere it occurs – or that it should be granted an automatic four-week pass in107moments of national crisis like the September 2001 terrorist attacks. It is that thepresentation of a situation as an existential crisis is likely to have collateral effects
beyond the immediacy, drama, and relevance that are valued in journalism practice andeducation alike as core elements of making a good story better. Those effects are not bydefinition a “wrong” outcome; indeed they can easily be conceived as representing
journalism at its highest and best. But those whose trust in government is bolstered by
securitization appear to be responding to the frame as much as – or in place of – thecontent within it.
As Wolfsfeld (2004) has noted in the study of peace processes, the needs ofpeace can often seem diametrically opposed to the needs of journalism. So, perhaps
incongruously, can the needs of war. As Churchill wrote to his information minister inJuly 1940, on the eve of the Battle of Britain:
The Press and broadcast should be asked to handle air raids in a cool way
and on a diminishing tone of public interest. The facts should bechronicled without undue prominence or headlines. ... It must be clear thatthe vast majority of people are not at all affected by any single air raid,
and would hardly sustain any evil impression if it were not thrust before
them. Everyone should learn to take air raids and air raid alarms as if they
were no more than thunderstorms (1949, p. 151).
If it sounds like a thinly veiled call for censorship, it might also sound like theresults of research into news coverage of natural and technological disasters, which haveoften noted a tendency to portray damage as more widespread and generalized than it isreal life (e.g., Wilkins & Patterson, 1991). And it suggests, again, that the contest oversecuritization is not a Manichean struggle of self-serving securitizers vs. truth-seeking
desecuritizers. Desecuritization, as Churchill’s memo makes clear, can be a goal of the108

party in power. Equally, securitization of an issue like water rights can easily be seen as agoal for political outgroups in parts of the Middle East.
It is difficult if not impossible to speculate in advance about which side of asecuritization debate would be the “right” one for a news organization to take. The
example of the purported plot to attack New York’s Kennedy Airport offers one potential
guideline: Some weight should be given to the option that creates or maintains the wider
space for legitimate democratic debate. To return to Wolfsfeld’s concept of news slots(2004), the New York Times’s desecuritization of the airport plot creates or makes
available a new set of slots in which “bomb plot” can be discussed at the same time as“terror plot.” The plotters’ low likelihood of finding support among Caribbean radicals,
the technical obstacles in the way of the plot’s success, and the effectiveness with which
law enforcement was able to monitor the group are as relevant to the story as the plotters’
religion and gaudy comments about “killing Kennedy twice.” Conversely, from
Churchill’s perspective, Britain’s plight in the early years of the Second World War had
to be securitized in the American public before elite opposition to Lend-Lease or the
repeal of the Neutrality Act could be overcome. If the mission of journalism in a
democracy is to encourage the best debate as well as the most information (e.g., Ettema,2007), a tentative answer can be suggested: The better frame is the one that keeps a wider
variety of news slots in play.
Nevertheless, securitization is the sort of frame that is likely to find favor among
the processes by which news is assembled into a news report. A “war on drugs” is more
dramatic, and from the headline writer’s perspective infinitely more succinct, than a slow
process of demand reduction and balancing penalties with inducements. As Wolfsfeld
109

(2004) suggested in his discussion of media and peace processes, political actors whowant to promote the slower, less dramatic processes of desecuritization cannot overlook
the needs of news – not by providing their own drama and immediacy, but byemphasizing a long-term view and working to keep expectations in perspective.
Noble as all that might sound, it remains ill-suited to testing by controlled
experiment. These concerns point to some of the limitations of this study, but at the sametime they underscore some of its potential to shed light on media performance in the
future.

Limitations and suggestions for future researchThis study tests an admittedly limited sample of securitizable issues: politicalviolence and immigration. Future studies should broaden the scope of issues across thepolitical spectrum and consider incorporating issues seen as more politically neutral, likedisaster preparedness, to see whether the relationship between securitization and progovernment orientation is maintained under conditions in which securitization represents
an anti-government frame. A broader test would also address the possibility thatmeasures limited to the acts of an outgroup – “the terrorists” or “the immigrants” –affecting an ingroup are indexing some other effect entirely. As Sears (1993) points out,measuring attitudes toward “judicial permissiveness” can invoke an underlying racerelated attitude too if a belief system connecting the two concepts is present. It is not hard
– indeed, on examining the open-ended responses to the “main point” question, it is quite
easy – to imagine how attitudes toward Arabs or Muslims become conflated withattitudes toward “the terrorists.”110

An improved “main point” measure, which would involve more detailed
instructions to participants and clearer links between the “bullet” identifier (Robinson &Levy, 1986) and the news report to which it refers, would allow for more precise
comparison between recall and recognition and thus would shed more light on how – andhow thoroughly – news articles are processed in the different conditions.
The construction of scales used in this study was anything but parsimonious.
Thus, while a good deal of information still lies waiting to be explained and examined –and might well shed further light on some of the issues discussed here – the long-term
study of securitization would benefit from more carefully designed questionnaires thatoffered more thoroughly tested a priori reasons for building well-grounded hypotheses. A
particular example is trust in the news media. The measure of media distance included inthis study is new and offers promise for future research, but a broader selection of mediarelated items would have allowed for the construction of scales that shed more light on
the interplay between media trust, media use, and a frame like securitization.
Where readers get their news appears to be related to how thoroughly their news
is securitized. The content analysis presented here is limited to newspapers, but it did test
three newspapers chosen as stand-ins for distinct forms of news presentation that arefound in other news media as well. Expanding the study of securitization into
broadcasting or new media offers another potentially fruitful avenue for future study. In
U.S. broadcasting, for example, the prestige press could be represented by National
Public Radio and the television news of the Public Broadcasting Service, thehomogenous national press by the news programs of the traditional broadcast networks,
and the popular/populist press by Fox News.
111

As Grabe and Kamhawi (2006) have suggested, demographic variables offer
another aspect of news processing and attention that could shed light on the effects of
how news is made and distributed. In matters of political violence as well as the natural
violence of hurricanes and earthquakes, if different news frames aid or hinder processing
in ways that interact with gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status, news producers
have all the more reason to reconsider the unintended consequences of framing.
If there is a final item to consider from the analysis of securitization as a new andspecific form of framing, it is the likelihood of those unintended consequences. Not onlyis the process of framing real; its results are real, too. Journalists who decline to choose aframe, or who think the frame that looks most like “news” is the only choice indicated byprofessional standards, are likely to end up with whatever the house is serving. However
palatable that might seem at the time, such a result could produce unforeseen
consequences that run counter to the best professional intent of the practitioners.

112

APPENDICES

Appendix A: Coding instructions for content analysis
Examine each article you code for the appearance of the phrases “war on terror”
or “war on terrorism.” Three variables reflecting how that conflict is conceived andportrayed will be coded: the voice in which the war is presented, the degree to which thearticle presents its status, and the location where the war is presumed to take place.
For the story’s voice, enter:
1 if the phrase appears in a direct quote
2 if it appears in an indirect quote or as reported speech
3 if it appears in the paper’s voice.
In ambiguous cases of whether the phrase is an indirect quote or the paper’s
voice, consider how far removed it is from the speaker. In a sentence like Bush said thewar on terror remained his greatest concern, it would be an indirect quote. In a sentence
like Ashcroft denied that his office had helped to draft the policies that allowed for
indefinite detentions in the war on terrorism, the phrase should be considered the paper’s
voice because the grammatical distance makes it impossible to attach directly to
Ashcroft. Parenthetical inserts should generally be coded as the paper’s voice, forexample: “There's a growing concern that (the war on terrorism) is going to affect theeconomy in a more prolonged fashion” than wars in the past, Barthel says. If two or
more different levels of the variable occur, enter the higher number. In cases where thedecision appears even or of multiple references, choose 3 rather than 2.
113

In cases where voice is impossible to determine, enter
4 for “other” or “can’t tell.”

For the status of the war on terrorism, enter
1 if the phrase appears as a proper noun
2 if the sentence suggests that the war is unambiguously real.
3 if the war appears ambiguous
4 if the phrasing suggests that the war is an artificial construct; it appears inquotation marks but in the writer’s voice.
A proper noun usage would be “War on Terror” or “War on Terrorism,” as in “In
his most direct attack this election season, Bush flatly charged that Democrats areincapable of effectively fighting the War on Terror.”
The war is considered unambiguously real in most cases where it appears withthe definite article or another determiner. In this example, it occurs in a source’s voice:Attorney General John Ashcroft said the arrests had been instrumental in “winning thewar on terrorism.” In this example, it is in the reporter’s voice: With the war on
terrorism shifting to a new phase of rooting out the Taliban leaders, General Franks said
there was a ‘50-50’ chance he would move his headquarters closer to the combat zone.
When the war is ambiguous, it might appear with an indefinite article or be
attributed solely to President Bush or his administration; it does not exist separately fromthem. Example: But having declared war on terrorism worldwide and begun recruiting
Arab nations to that cause, President Bush has restacked priorities.

114

The war is an artificial construct if it appears in quotes placed by the paper:“People have come to identify themselves more as Muslims in response to the U.S.-led‘war on terrorism’ which Egyptians feel is a discriminatory campaign,” she said.
Use 5 if none of these apply or the status cannot be determined.

For the location of the war, enter:
1 for Afghanistan and neighboring border areas of Pakistan, housing or thought tohouse the original targets of U.S. forces after the September 2001 attacks – but not Iraq.
(EX: On the plus side, some expect federal government spending, particularly for the war
on terrorism and a possible war on Iraq, to funnel money to businesses in the Washingtonarea – because there’s spending going on and this is distinguished from Iraq, this 2002
article is a 1. Often, “U.S.-led war on terrorism” will signal the phase involving combat)
2 for cases where the war involves Afghanistan as well as Iraq or other parts of
the Middle East where U.S. troops are maintained.
3 if it appears to be primarily in Iraq or the Mideast but not Afghanistan
4 if it appears to be occurring anywhere in the Middle East or the broader Muslim
world.
5 if it is a “global” war that might easily reach the United States. Use thiscategory when the phrase “global war on terror” appears; this is often the correct choicefor indications that the “war” began before the attacks on Afghanistan 10/8/01. NOTE,
though, that a story before those attacks can clearly place the “war” in Afghanistan. (EX:Immediately after 9/11 it voted the additional funds and powers the president sought for115

the war on terrorism – this is a 5 because the additional powers are intended to prevent
domestic attacks)
6 if a location cannot be determined. This category will occur more frequently
here than for the other variables.

116Appendix B: Questionnaires
Pretest1 Participant number
2 age
3 gender4 On a scale of 1 to 7, how would you describe your own politics?
Very liberal
Very conservative
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
5 How closely do you follow news about terrorism?
Very closely
Not at all closely
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
6 How closely do you follow news about Iraq?
Very closely
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]

Not at all closely[][]

7 How closely do you follow news about civil rights and civil liberties?
Very closely
Not at all closely
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
8 How much do you trust the government to look after your interests?
Very much
Not at all
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
9 How much do you trust the news media to look after your interests?
Very much
Not at all
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
10 How would you describe the politics of the news media?
Very liberal
Very conservative
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
11 Do you think the country is better or worse off than it was six years ago?
Very much better
Very much worse
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
12 Do you think the country is safer or less safe than it was in 2003?
Very much safer
Very much less safe
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
117

13 Do you agree or disagree: Sometimes, people who resort to violence have a legitimate
complaint?
Strongly agree
Strongly disagree
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
14 How good a job would you say the president is doing?
Very good job
Very bad job
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
15 How good a job are the Republicans in Washington doing?
Very good job
Very bad job
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
16 How good a job are the Democrats in Washington doing?
Very good job
Very bad job
[]
[]
[]
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17 How did you vote in the most recent presidential election?
Democratic
Republican
Other/none
18 How did you vote in the most recent U.S. Senate election in your state?
Democratic
Republican
Other/none
19 How did you vote in the most recent U.S. House election?
Democratic
Republican
Other/none
20 What are your main sources of national and international news? Enter as many as
three.
21 What do you think are the three most important problems facing the nation?

Questionnaire presented after each article
Q1.1 This story needs to be prominent in the news report
Strongly agree
Strongly disagree
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1.2 This story will probably be followed up tomorrow.
Strongly agree
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1.3 This story is part of a pattern that needs attention
118

Strongly agree
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1.4 This story will hit home with many Americans
Strongly agree
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Strongly disagree
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Strongly disagree[]

1.5 This story will probably get too much attention in the news
Strongly agree
Strongly disagree
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1.6 Americans need to hear a lot more about this issue
Strongly agree
Strongly disagree
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1.7 We need to know a lot more about this issue before we can make decisions on it
Strongly agree
Strongly disagree
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1.8 This makes me think differently about the balance between liberty and security
Strongly agree
Strongly disagree
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1.9 This sort of event represents a threat to our way of life
Strongly agree
Strongly disagree
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1.10 I knew what was important about this story by the second paragraph
Strongly agree
Strongly disagree
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1.11 The more viewpoints we have about this issue, the better
Strongly agree
Strongly disagree
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1.12 The government needs to take extraordinary measures to deal with this situation.
Strongly agree
Strongly disagree
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1.13 This issue is personally important to me
Strongly agree
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1.14 This story makes me worried
Strongly agree

Strongly disagree[][]
Strongly disagree

119

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1.15 This story makes me frustrated
Strongly agree
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Strongly disagree[]

1.16 This story makes me anxious
Strongly agree
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Strongly disagree[]

1.17 This story makes me feel patriotic
Strongly agree
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Strongly disagree[]

1.18 This story makes me concerned about the country's safety
Strongly agree
Strongly disagree
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1.19 I'm confident that our leaders will handle this properly
Strongly agree
Strongly disagree
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120

Appendix C: Experimental stimulus material
Article 1: Borderunsecuritized
SAN LUIS, Ariz. -- As commander of the N.C. Army National Guard’s work on
the border in Arizona, Lt. Col. Randy Powell is getting the chance to see the beginning of
the journey immigrants take into his police district in Charlotte, N.C.
“Like everywhere else, you’re seeing more and more interaction with illegal
immigrants,” said Powell, a 38-year-old sergeant in the Charlotte Police Department.
North Carolina has one of the fastest-growing illegal immigrant populations in
the country.
“If we’re doing our job right, hopefully we won’t see anything,” said Capt. Chris
Rogers, 39, of Cary. “We’re here to deter.”
The 200 troops of the Guard battalion began patrolling the border this week in an
attempt to stem the flow of immigrants from Mexico. They’re among the first of what
will become 6,000 Guard troops in Operation Jump Start, announced by President Bushover the summer.
Though the battalion is armed and experienced as border enforcers themselves,
having done similar work in Iraq, the soldiers here will be used solely as scouts.
It is their job to spend endless hours near the line with Mexico, radioing reports ofsuspicious movement to the Border Patrol. It’s up to the federal agency to catch illegal
immigrants.

121

securitized
SAN LUIS, Ariz. -- As commander of the N.C. Army National Guard’s work on
the border in Arizona, Lt. Col. Randy Powell is getting the chance to see the beginning of
the journey immigrants take into his police district in Charlotte, N.C.
“Like everywhere else, you’re seeing more and more interaction with illegal
immigrants,” said Powell, a 38-year-old sergeant in the Charlotte Police Department.
North Carolina has one of the fastest-growing illegal immigrant populations in
the country, and Powell sees the troops’ mission of protecting the border as another front
in the war on terrorism.
“We have to come to grips with the fact that our Border Patrol are now facing
infiltration by members of terrorist organizations like Hezbollah,” Rep. Ed Royce ofCalifornia said in a congressional debate last week.
The 200 troops of Powell’s Guard battalion began patrolling the border thisweek in an attempt to stem the human tide pouring into the country from Mexico.
They’re among the first of what will become 6,000 Guard troops in Operation Jump Start,
announced by President Bush over the summer.
Though the battalion is armed and experienced as border enforcers themselves,
having done similar work in Iraq, the soldiers here will be used solely as scouts. It is their
job to spend endless hours near the line with Mexico, radioing reports of suspicious
movement to the Border Patrol. It’s up to the federal agency to catch illegal immigrants.
“If we’re doing our job right, hopefully we won’t see anything,” said Capt. Chris
Rogers, 39, of Cary. “We’re here to deter.”122

Article 2: Colombia
unsecuritized
The Bush administration is moving to paralyze financially nine people suspectedof having links to a Colombian rebel group that the United States says traffics in drugs.
Six of the nine people suspected of links to the Revolutionary Armed Forces ofColombia (FARC) were indicted by a federal court in Washington as part of a narcotics
conspiracy, the department said.
“Today’s action underlines the importance of the legal system in holding
international criminals to account for their role in supplying cocaine to American streets,”
said Adam Szubin, director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets
Control.
The action by the Treasury Department means that any assets belonging to thosepeople found in the United States must be blocked and that Americans are forbidden to
do business with them.
The FARC, the largest rebel group in Latin America, is holding some 60
prominent hostages, including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, military
officers, and three American defense contractors. It says it will only release them inexchange for nearly 600 imprisoned rebels.
Colombia’s government recently broke off preliminary negotiations after
blaming the FARC for a car-bomb in a military base that injured more than 20 people,
insisting that the hostages would be freed by military operations.
The families of the kidnapped are united in opposing such rescues, fearing their
loved ones will be killed in the crossfire.
123

securitized
The Bush administration is moving to paralyze financially nine people suspectedof having links to a Colombian group that the United States says traffics in drugs andterror.
Six of the nine people suspected of links to the Revolutionary Armed Forces ofColombia (FARC) were indicted by a federal court in Washington as part of a narcotics
conspiracy, the department said.
“Today’s action exposes key figures in the violent underworld of the FARC, anotorious Colombian terrorist organization and one of the largest suppliers of cocaine toAmerican streets,” said Adam Szubin, director of the Treasury Department’s Office ofForeign Assets Control.
The action by the Treasury Department means that any assets belonging to thosepeople found in the United States must be blocked and that Americans are forbidden to
do business with them.
Three American defense contractors are among dozens of hostages held by the
FARC, listed by the U.S. government as a “foreign terrorist organization.” It says it will
only release the captives, who include a former Colombian presidential candidate, in
exchange for nearly 600 imprisoned rebels.
Colombia’s government recently broke off preliminary negotiations after
blaming the FARC, the largest rebel group in Latin America, for a car-bomb in a militarybase that injured more than 20 people.
The families of the kidnapped are united in opposing such rescues, fearing their
loved ones will be killed in the crossfire.
124Article 3: Fence
unsecuritized
MEXICO CITY -- Mexico said today that the U.S. proposal to build miles ofborder fence has the potential to damage relations between the two countries.
The Mexican Foreign Relations Department said it was “deeply worried” about
the proposal. The 700-mile fence along the United States’ southern border is intended tokeep migrants from entering the country illegally.
“The fence will be a step toward ensuring the rule of law in immigration,” said
Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-N.Y., chairman of the congressional conference committee thatcrafted a compromise on the bill.
The Census Bureau estimates that more than 4 million Mexican laborers are in
the country without documentation.
Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department said that only a comprehensive
immigration reform would stop millions of Mexicans from crossing the northern desert
and swimming over the Rio Grande into the United States.
“A partial measure that is exclusively focused on security does not deal withreality and represents a political answer rather than a viable solution,” it said in thestatement.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon has also opposed the wall.
securitized
MEXICO CITY -- Mexico warned today that the U.S. proposal to build miles ofborder fence will damage relations between the two countries and “increase tension inborder communities.”
125

The Mexican Foreign Relations Department said it was “deeply worried” about
the proposal. The 700-mile fence along the United States’ southern border is intended tokeep migrants from entering the country illegally.
“This is a last chance to ensure that America keeps a foothold on its own
frontier,” said Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-N.Y., chairman of the conference committee thatcrafted a compromise on the bill.
The Census Bureau estimates that nearly 5 million Mexicans are in the country
illegally.
Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department said that only a comprehensive
immigration reform would stop millions of Mexicans from swarming across the Rio
Grande. One resolution notes that illegal immigration contributes to overcrowded
schools, highway deaths and increased crime and points to illegal immigrants’ “lack ofsocial and personal health care standards.”
Mexican President Felipe Calderon has also opposed the wall, calling it“shameful” and comparing it to the Berlin Wall, which divided Germany.

Article 4: Iraq
unsecuritized
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- At least 44 Iraqis died yesterday in bombings, officials said,
including a coordinated car bomb attack that killed 25 in western Baghdad. Separately,
the U.S. military announced the deaths of seven American soldiers, raising the death tollin what is already one of the bloodiest months for the military this year.

126

The three car bombs in western Baghdad also injured at least 55 people, doctors
said. Three other attacks in Baghdad killed another 16 people, and a roadside bomb in thenorthern city of Kirkuk killed three others.
The seven Americans were killed in fighting in Anbar province. In Washington,
White House Deputy Press Secretary Scott Stanzel said President Bush grieves for eachmember of the armed forces who has died. “The president knows that this is a longstruggle,” he said.
President Bush has said the Iraq war is part of the United States’ post-Sept. 11
approach to threats abroad. Since last fall’s election, critics have increasingly questioned
his decision to concentrate on Iraq rather than al-Qaida.
Meanwhile, a video broadcast by Al-Jazeera television network showed the
deputy leader of al-Qaida saying the United States is negotiating with the wrong people
in Iraq and implying the U.S. needs to talk to his group.
Days earlier, intelligence officials warned U.S. news outlets not to get carriedaway by the announcement of an impending tape because the pattern of promoting
upcoming videos via the Internet had been used in the past to maximize media coverage.

securitized
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- At least 44 Iraqis died yesterday in bombings, officials said,
including a coordinated strike that killed 25 in western Baghdad. Separately, the U.S.
military announced the deaths of seven American soldiers, raising the death tollsignificantly in one of the bloodiest months for the military this year.

127

The three car bombs in western Baghdad also injured at least 55 people, doctors
said. Three other attacks in Baghdad killed another 16 people, and a roadside bomb in thenorthern city of Kirkuk killed three others.
The seven Americans were killed in fighting in Anbar province.
“The war on terror is going to be a long struggle,” White House spokesman
Scott Stanzel said in Washington. President Bush grieves for every soldier who has died,he said, but “we will be fighting for the security of the civilized world for many years.”
The Iraq war is part of the United States’ post-Sept. 11 war on terror. Going on
the offense against enemies before they could harm Americans meant removing the
Taliban from power in Afghanistan and seeking Saddam Hussein’s ouster in Iraq, Bushsays.
Meanwhile, a video broadcast by Al-Jazeera television network showed the
deputy leader of al-Qaida saying the United States is negotiating with the wrong people
in Iraq and implying the U.S. needs to talk to his group.
“In terms of the propaganda war, they are way ahead of us – they are 10 years
ahead of us,” said Stephen Ulph, a Mideast expert. “The Internet seems to me to be thereal center of gravity for the jihad movement.”

Article 5: Mideast
unsecuritized
JERUSALEM -- A Palestinian rocket fired from the Gaza Strip exploded near
the Israeli defense minister’s home today, critically wounding one of his guards andkilling a passer-by.
128

The rocket fell in the town of Sderot, about 150 yards from the home of Defense
Minister Amir Peretz.
Public Security Minister Avi Dichter told Army Radio that Israel must broaden
its operations to bring about “a complete halt” to rocket fire. “The armed forces arefamiliar with these situations,” he said.
One woman was killed and several other passers-by were slightly wounded byshrapnel.
Another rocket landed elsewhere in southern Israel this morning, the army said.
Militants affiliated with Islamic Jihad and the Palestinians’ ruling Hamas groupboth claimed responsibility for the first Israeli death from a Palestinian rocket attack
since August 2006. They said the rocket was to avenge the deaths of 18 civilians last
week in Israeli shelling of an apartment compound in the Gaza Strip.
The Gaza shelling, which Israel said was unintended, came after Israeli troops
wound up a weeklong incursion meant to curb Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel. But
the attacks continued.

securitized
JERUSALEM -- A Palestinian rocket fired from the Gaza Strip exploded near the
Israeli defense minister’s home today, critically wounding one of his guards and killing apasser-by.
The rocket fell in the town of Sderot, about 150 yards from the home of Defense
Minister Amir Peretz.

129Peretz planned to convene a special meeting of senior security officials to discuss
the terror crisis later in the day. “Terrorist organizations must pay a heavy price,” he said.
One woman was killed and several other passers-by were slightly wounded byshrapnel.
Another rocket landed elsewhere in southern Israel this morning.
Militants affiliated with Islamic Jihad and the Palestinians’ ruling Hamas groupboth claimed responsibility for the first Israeli death from a Palestinian rocket attack
since August 2006. They said the rocket was to avenge the deaths of 18 civilians last
week in Israeli shelling of an apartment compound in the Gaza Strip.
The Gaza shelling, which Israel said was unintended, came after Israeli troops
wound up a weeklong incursion meant to curb Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel. But
the attacks continued.

Article 6: Philippines
unsecuritized
MANILA, Philippines – At least 12 people were killed and 20 were wounded
when a bomb exploded during a town festival last night in the southern Philippines,
where security officials have been on alert for possible attacks.
Police said the bomb, believed to be made from a mortar shell and triggered
remotely by a cell phone, went off about 8 p.m. in front of the town hall of Makilala.
“We are trying to trace the origins of the bomb now,” said Federico Dulay, theprovince’s police chief. He added that police have several important leads.

130Such bombs have been used by extortion gangs in the past, but investigators aretrying to determine whether al-Qaida-linked groups like the Indonesian-based Jemaah
Islamiyah and its Philippine ally, the Abu Sayyaf group, were involved.
Another bomb injured five people earlier in the day in a public market in nearby
Tacurong, as U.S. and Philippine officials said they had received credible intelligencethat attackers may be planning to carry out bombings in the southern Mindanao region,
where the wife of a top Indonesian militant was captured last week.
The U.S. Embassy warned of possible attacks “over the next several days.”
Two Philippine security officials monitoring the area agreed, citing possible
retaliation for last week’s arrest of Istiada Binti Oemar Sovie. She is the wife of
Dulmatin, an al-Qaida-linked Indonesian militant who is suspected in the 2002 Bali
bombings that killed 202 people.

securitized
MANILA, Philippines – At least 12 people were killed and 20 were wounded
when a bomb exploded during a town festival last night in the southern Philippines,
where security officials were on alert for possible attacks by al-Qaida-linked militants.
Police said the bomb, believed to be made from a mortar shell and triggered
remotely by a cell phone, went off about 8 p.m. in front of the town hall of Makilala, inNorth Cotabato province.
“Nobody can do this except the terrorists,” said Federico Dulay, the province’s
police chief.

131

Such bombs have been used in the past by al-Qaida-linked groups like theIndonesian-based Jemaah Islamiyah and its Philippine ally, the Abu Sayyaf group, butinvestigators were trying to determine if other groups, like extortion gangs, wereinvolved.
Another bomb injured five people earlier in the day in a public market in nearby
Tacurong, as U.S. and Philippine officials said they had received credible intelligencethat a terrorist group may be planning to carry out bombings in the southern Mindanao
region, where the wife of a top Indonesian militant was captured last week.
The U.S. Embassy warned of possible attacks “over the next several days.”
Two Philippine security officials monitoring the area agreed, citing possible
retaliation for last week’s arrest of Istiada Binti Oemar Sovie. She is the wife of
Dulmatin, an al-Qaida-linked Indonesian militant and one of Asia’s most wanted terror
suspects for his alleged role in the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people.

Article 7: Miami
unsecuritized
MIAMI – Three men were questioned today after their cargo truck was stopped at
the Port of Miami in an incident officials blamed on “miscommunication.”
Authorities initially said the men – two Iraqis and one Lebanese national who arelegal permanent U.S. residents – had been caught trying to slip past a checkpoint at theentrance. The Port of Miami is the sixth busiest in the nation for cargo and among thebusiest for passenger entry.

132

A security officer became suspicious when the driver could not produce proper
paperwork in a routine inspection, police officer Nancy Goldberg said. The driver also
indicated he was alone, though security officers found two other men in the cab.
“Due to a miscommunication between the gate security personnel and the truck
driver, we believed there was a discrepancy,” Goldberg said. “It could have been alanguage barrier.”
The three men were still talking with police this afternoon but had not beenarrested, Goldberg said.
The truck was carrying automotive parts.
The port’s cargo area was shut down as the bomb squad moved the truck away
to X-ray it. No dangerous material was found, officials said.
“In an abundance of caution,” the FBI and the Department of Homeland
Security were initially called to the scene, Goldberg said.
Passengers in the cruise ship area of the port were unaware of the official bustle
in the cargo area until notified by reporters. “That’s not good to hear right before you aregoing on vacation,” said Connecticut resident Allie Tetreault, 23, who described herself
as “freaked out.”

securitized
MIAMI –Three Middle Eastern men were being questioned today after they were
stopped at the Port of Miami when authorities became suspicious of their documentationand the contents of their cargo truck.

133

The terror alert began after authorities initially said the men had been caught
trying to slip past a checkpoint. The Port of Miami is the sixth busiest in the nation for
cargo and among the busiest for passenger entry.
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security were called to the scene,
along with federal and local law enforcement officers, said police officer Nancy
Goldberg. The port’s cargo area was shut down as the bomb squad moved the truck awayfrom public areas of the port to X-ray it and scan it for radioactive materials.
“I feel freaked out,” said Connecticut resident Allie Tetreault, 23, who was
waiting to board a Caribbean cruise. “That’s not good to hear right before you are goingon vacation.”
A port security officer became suspicious when the truck driver could not
produce proper paperwork, Goldberg said, and security officers found the two other men
in the cab although the driver claimed to be alone.
Goldberg said it was possible there had been a “miscommunication.”
The three men remained in police custody for questioning, Goldberg said. They
had not yet been arrested or charged, and no radioactive materials had been found by thisafternoon. Goldberg said the truck was carrying automotive parts.
Officials said the men – two Iraqis and one Lebanese national who are legal
permanent U.S. residents – do not appear on any terrorist watch list.
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security were called to the scene “inan abundance of caution,” Goldberg said.
Passengers in the cruise ship area of the port were unaware of the official bustle
in the cargo area until notified by reporters.
134Article 8: Clericunsecuritized
The FBI has sent a bulletin to state and local law enforcement warning of
possible reprisals as the health of an imprisoned Muslim cleric fails.
Although the FBI said there is no credible indication that a plan for attacks is inplace, the agency sent the warning as Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman was treated in Missouri
for bleeding.
The sheik, who was convicted of plotting to blow up the U.N. Headquarters, afederal building, two tunnels and a bridge in Manhattan, has called for revenge should hedie in U.S. custody.
Abdel-Rahman’s death would raise his status to that of a martyr and refocus
interest on the United States among radical Islamists, says Bill Rosenau, an expert on
Mideast radicalism. “He was the seminal figure for terror in the ‘80s and ‘90s, andOsama bin Laden still talks about him,” Rosenau said.
But Steven Weber, director of the Institute of International Studies at the
University of California, Berkeley, doubts Abdel-Rahman’s death would be likely tospark another attack on the U.S.
“If Al Qaeda has significant assets in this country there is no reason to use themnow. They can attack the U.S. in Iraq and they would conserve those assets they havehere for another time,” he said.
The FBI sent out a warning bulletin to law enforcement under an “abundance of
caution” because of previous statements attributed to Abdel-Rahman that called forreprisals if he should die in an American jail.
135

securitized
The FBI has sent a bulletin to state and local law enforcement warning of
possible terrorist reprisals as the health of an imprisoned terrorist leader fails.
Although the FBI said there is no credible indication that a plan for retribution isin place, the agency sent the warning as Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman was treated in
Missouri for bleeding.
The Muslim cleric, who was the alleged architect of the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing, has called for revenge should he die in U.S. custody. He was convictedof plotting to blow up the U.N. Headquarters, a federal building, two tunnels and a bridgein Manhattan.
Abdel-Rahman’s death would raise his status to that of a martyr and refocus
interest on the United States among radical Islamists, says Bill Rosenau, a terror expert
with the RAND Corp. “Osama bin Laden has talked frequently about him and repeatedly
expressed his interest in seeing him free.”Abdel-Rahman was imprisoned long before the Sept. 11 attacks, but he hasremained important to many. “He was the seminal figure for terror in the‘80s and ‘90s and a real precursor of what was to come,” Rosenau said.
But Steven Weber, director of the Institute of International Studies at the
University of California, Berkeley, doubts Abdel-Rahman’s death would be likely tospark another attack on the U.S.
The FBI sent out a warning bulletin to law enforcement under an “abundance of
caution” because of previous statements attributed to Abdel-Rahman that called forreprisals if he should die in an American jail.
136

Sources of edited articles:
Border: Another front in war on terror (2006, July 29). The Charlotte Observer, p. B3.
Colombia: Bush administration clamps down on people with links to Colombian group.
Transmitted September 28, 2006, by The Associated Press.
Fence: Mexican government warns U.S. border fence will harm relations. Transmitted
September 29, 2006, by The Associated Press.
Iraq: Bombings kill at least 44 in Iraq; U.S. military announces seven soldier deaths.
Transmitted December 26, 2006, by The Associated Press.
Mideast: Palestinian rocket fire kills 1 Israeli. Transmitted November 15, 2006, by The
Associated Press.
Philippines: Police say bombing kills at least 12 in southern Philippines. Transmitted
October 10, 2006, by The Associated Press.
Miami: 3 detained at Port of Miami; authorities attribute situation to miscommunication.
Transmitted January 7, 2007, by The Associated Press.
Cleric: FBI issues warning to police after terrorist health scare. Retrieved December 15,
2006, from foxnews.com.

137

Appendix D: Recall and recognition questions
What was the main point of the story called BORDER?
What was the main point of the story called COLOMBIA?
What was the main point of the story called FENCE?
What was the main point of the story called IRAQ?
What was the main point of the story called MIDEAST?
What was the main point of the story called PHILIPPINES?
What was the main point of the story called MIAMI?
What was the main point of the story called CLERIC?
border
MQ1.1-1.4:
The program putting Guard troops on the border is called:a) Operation Good Fencesb) Operation Jump Startc) Operation Stopgapd) Operation Fence Busters
About how many Guard troops from North Carolina are participating?
a) 200b) 300c) 400d) 600Randy Powell is a police officer in which North Carolina city?
a) Caryb) Greensboroc) Greenvilled) Charlotte
Which border state are the troops working in?
a) Arizonab) Californiac) New Mexicod) California

138

colombia
The Colombian rebels’ hostages include three Americana) missionariesb) defense contractorsc) oil workersd) executives
Colombia’s government blames the rebels for bombing:a) power generatorsb) a bankc) a military based) a US consulate
The Colombian rebel group is known by the initials:a) FARCb) SWAPOc) UNITAd) DFLPThe Treasury Department office that took this action is the:a) Office of Terrorism Preventionb) Office of International Relationsc) Office of Foreign Assets Controld) Office of Narcotics and Drugs Control
fence
How long would the US-Mexico border fence be?
a) 400 milesb) 700 milesc) 900 milesd) 1100 miles
How many Mexicans does the Census Bureau estimate are in the US without required
documents?
a) between 2 and 3 millionb) between 3 and 4 millionc) between 4 and 5 milliond) between 5 and 6 million
Mexico’s president is:a) Vicente Foxb) Felipe Calderonc) Juan Ponce de Leon
139d) Luis Echeverria
A New York legislator helped to guide the compromise on this law. That legislator is:a) Peter Hoekstrab) Carolyn Heilbrunc) Charles Schumerd) Eliot Spitzer
mideastWhich Israeli official’s house was near the site where the rocket landed?
a) the public security ministerb) the Arab affairs ministerc) the defense ministerd) the finance minister
Which groups claimed credit for the rocket attack on Israel?
a) Islamic Jihad and the Popular Frontb) Hamas and Islamic Jihadc) Hamas and Al-Qaidad) Al-Qaida and the Popular Front
How many Israelis were killed in the rocket attack?
a) 1
b) 2
c) 18
c) 21
philippines
The bomb in Makilala was triggered by:a) a suicide bomberb) a cell phonec) a delayed fused) a computer battery
The Philippine militant group mentioned in this story is the:a) Abu Jihadb) Jemaah Islamiyahc) Jihad Islamiyad) Abu Sayyaf
Fears of more attacks were raised by the arrest of:a) an Indonesian militant’s wifeb) a Philippine guerrilla leader
140c) a wanted terror leaderd) a corrupt police chief
The bomb in the southern Philippines killed:a) at least 8 peopleb) at least 12 peoplec) at least 37 peopled) at least 44 people
cleric
The imprisoned cleric was convicted of:a) the TWA 847 attackb) the 1993 Trade Center bombingc) the Oklahoma City bombingb) a plot to attack New York landmarks
In which state is the cleric receiving medical treatment?
a) Missourib) Illinoisc) Virginiad) Florida
Which federal agency warned law agencies to be alert about possible reprisals?
a) NSAb) CIAc) USAIDd) FBI
iraq
Which network broadcast the tape by the al-Qaida leader?
a) al-Sahabb) al-Arabiyyac) al-Iqtisadiyad) al-Jazeera
How many American deaths are reported in this story?
a) 14
b) 9
c) 7
d) 2
Which important al-Qaida figure is mentioned in this article?
a) Ayman al-Zawahirib) Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
141c) Osama bin Ladend) Khalid Sheikh Muhammad
How many Iraqis were reported killed in the Baghdad car bombing in this story?
a) 16
b) 25
c) 44
d) 55
miami
What two countries are the men who are being questioned from?
a) Iran and Syriab) Iraq and Libyac) Iraq and Lebanond) Iran and Afghanistan
The truck was carryinga) auto partsb) X-ray equipmentc) agricultural productsd) household goods
The police officer said the incident began because of:a) an “abundance of caution”b) a “failure to communicate”c) a “freaked out” witnessd) a “miscommunication”
How does the Port of Miami rank among the nation’s cargo ports?
a) Fourth busiestb) Fifth busiestc) Sixth busiestd) Seventh busiest

142

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrahamsen, R. (2005). Blair’s Africa: The politics of securitization and fear. Alternatives, 30,
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VITA

Fred Vultee was born October 21, 1955, in Washington, D.C. He graduatedfrom high school in Greenville, N.C., in 1973 and from the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill in 1977 with a degree in radio-TV-film and journalism. He worked atnewspapers in North Carolina, Ohio, and Washington before joining the professional
practice faculty at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1999. Hecompleted at master’s degree at Missouri in 2004 and a Ph.D. in 2007.
Vultee’s research focuses on how news media perform in conflicts and crises,with a concentration on framing and media language.

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