Extremism talk in the media: The Elite 8

Our recent study of how media cover violent extremism generated a lot of data about the awful links that media outlets portray between extremism and Islam, for example, and about how we can’t help but to respond to violence with violence. We’ll be talking about this A LOT once we’ve got all our data points ready to share. In the meantime, we wanted to get in on the March Madness action with our own version of the Elite 8: the eight most quoted sources in news articles about extremism.

So who gets quoted most often in major media coverage of violent extremism? Let’s go to the board.

#8 The president or a White House official (quoted in 46 articles)

 #7 The U.S. military (quoted in 48 articles)

#6 A member of an extremist group (quoted in 68 articles)

#5 An NGO (quoted in 94 articles)

#4 An analyst or “expert” (quoted in 107 articles)

 #3 A “local resident” (quoted in 111 articles)

#2 A “local official” (quoted in 166 articles)

#1 Another media outlet or journalist (quoted in 167 articles)

Surprised? We weren’t. Maybe we would have expected a little bit more from so-called experts, but we’ll write about that another time. Not surprised either? Tell us about it in the comments.