This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
There's a phrase politicians often use to describe certain acts of violence, radical islamic terrorism.
Radical islamic terrorists are determined to strike our homeland, as they did on 911, as they did from Boston to Orlando to San Bernardino.
In a speech in 2017, President Trump criticized the media for failing to report.
Accurately on terrorism, not even being reported.
And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesnt want to report it.
Is the president correct?
Has the media held back in its coverage?
Is political correctness keeping us from grasping the true danger we face?
This week, we step away from the politicians and the pundits to look at the empirical evidence, social science research, into how the american media actually cover terrorist attacks.
We will also look at what effect that has on our perceptions of terrorism and our attitudes toward the muslim community.
New research has found that there are indeed systematic biases in coverage, but not in the way President Trump suggests.
A perpetrator who is not Muslim would have to kill, on average, about seven more people to receive the same amount of coverage as a perpetrator who's Muslim.
In the second half of the show, we look at another side of the political correctness question about where we draw the line between what's free speech and what's hate speech.
Today on hidden brain, what our language says about our politics.
In 2014, two terrorist attacks occurred six months apart.
They had eerie similarities.
In both cases, two police officers were shot and killed.
In both cases, a third victim was shot as well.