Terror attacks by Muslims receive 357% more media attention in US, study finds

A new study by the University of Alabama found that terrorist attacks committed by Muslim extremists receive 357 percent more US press coverage than those committed by non-Muslims, reports The Guardian.

The researchers reached their final statistic considering factors like target type, number of fatalities, and whether or not the perpetrators were arrested.

Terrorist attacks committed by non-Muslims, or in case the religion of perpetrator was unknown, received an average of 15 headlines, while those committed by Muslim extremists made 105 headlines.

The findings were based on all terrorist attacks in the US between 2006 and 2015 according to the Global Terrorism Database.

The disparity in media coverage is particularly out of sync with the reality given that white and right-wing terrorists carried out nearly twice as many terrorist attacks as Muslim extremists between 2008 and 2016, The Guardian report said.

However, not all headlines have the same audience. “We broke it down by the two different types of sources and found that the over-coverage is much bigger among national news sources than local papers,” lead researcher Erin Kearns explained.