The University of Maine DigitalCommons@UMaine Honors College Spring 2019 Terrorism in Context: The Stories We Tell Ourselves James Brown V University of Maine Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/honors Part of the Sociology Commons Recommended Citation Brown, James V, "Terrorism in Context: The Stories We Tell Ourselves" (2019). Honors College. 486. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/honors/486 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UMaine. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors College by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UMaine. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. TERRORISM IN CONTEXT: THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES by James S. Brown V A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for a Degree with Honors (Sociology) The Honors College University of Maine May 2019 Advisory Committee: Karyn Sporer, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Advisor Christopher Mares, Lecturer in English as a Second Language, Preceptor in the Honors College Holly Schreiber, Assistant Professor of Communication and Journalism Amber Tierney, Assistant Professor of Sociology Stefano Tijerina, Lecturer in Management ABSTRACT With no universally accepted definition of terrorism, the process by which the media labels an act as terrorism becomes inherently variable. In Western media, such variance is unilaterally skewed towards coverage of Islamic terror. This paper examined the similarities and differences in newsprint coverage of two unique terrorist attacks: The Boston Marathon bombing and the Charleston Church mass shooting. Data included 64 articles from The Wall Street Journal that were published in the seven days following each attack.