The death tolls of attacks in Western countries pale in comparison to daily attacks in other parts of the world. Since the beginning of 2015, the Middle East, Africa and Asia have seen nearly 50 times more deaths from terrorism than Europe and the Americas, yet they somehow fail to get the bigger coverage. In a few frenzied days in late June and early July, three Islamic-State-linked attacks killed over 350 people. On June 28, three attackers detonated their suicide vests at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport and killed 45 people. On July 1, Bangladesh suffered its worst terrorist attack in history when gunmen killed 20 hostages at a Dhaka restaurant. On July 3, nearly 300 died in a busy Baghdad shopping district. This graph from Washington Post shows daily terrorist attacks with at least five non-militant deaths since Jan. 1, 2015 all around the world. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/the-scale-of-terrorist-attacks-around-the-world/
I'm posting this as a sort of follow-up instead o new thread. Which Countries’ Terrorist Attacks Are Ignored By The U.S. Media? The recent terrorist attack in Nice drew international attention, including in the U.S., where President Obama spoke from the White House, just as he had after November’s attacks in Paris. “We see our kids in the faces of the young people killed in Paris,” Obama said the following month. But this month has also seen attacks in Baghdad and Dhaka, Bangladesh, both of which Obama briefly mentioned in his address after the killings in Nice. Likewise, the attack in Paris was preceded by one in Beirut the day before. Yet those incidents received little attention — at least, until the subsequent attacks in France brought them into the spotlight — and the news media appeared to largely pass on covering these cities with the kind of live updates and in-depth human interest stories we saw after Paris and Nice. The Rand Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents contains data on 40,129 terrorist attacks that took place from 1968 to 2009. Each incident is logged with a date, location, the number of injuries and fatalities, and a brief description of the attack, among other details. The author of the article analyzed the data based on coverage by The New York Times, with 31 countries with enough data to study. Results show that in 11 (Egypt, France, Greece, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the U.K., the U.S. and the West Bank/Gaza), a terrorist attack was statistically significantly more likely to be covered in the Times than an attack of the same magnitude that occurred elsewhere; in six (Afghanistan, Colombia, India, Iraq, Kashmir and Thailand), attacks were statistically significantly less likely to be covered. Another interesting finding is that the odds ratios are significantly correlated with GDP per capita. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/which-countries-terrorist-attacks-are-ignored-by-the-u-s-media/
One of the best sentences in the history of statistical analysis: GDP per capita is the best single predictor of odds ratio I could find (r-squared = 0.64), although a number of other variables I tried―e.g., rarity of attacks, trade with the U.S., percentage of Sporcle users who remembered the country on a world map quiz―were also predictive. (Beckman↱) As to the rest of the report, yeah, that'll take a bit more effort to comprehend. Thank ye. ____________________ Notes: Beckman, Milo. "Which Countries' Terrorist Attacks Are Ignored By The U.S. Media?". FiveThirtyEight. 19 July 2016. FiveThirtyEight.com. 20 July 2016. http://53eig.ht/29VsZhj
