This is hidden brain.
Im Shankar Vedantam.
For the past few weeks, weve been looking at how race, religion, and identity intersect with the criminal justice system.
Previous episodes have looked at the effectiveness of the broken windows policing strategy, the effects of implicit bias on shootings of unarmed black men by police officers, and how music, specifically rap music, shapes the way judges and jurors think about crime.
Today, we shift our attention to terrorism.
In a speech in early February, President Donald Trump talked about the dangers of what he called 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.
He criticized the media for not adequately reporting on the threat.
It's gotten to a point where it's not even being reported, and in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it.
Is the president correct?
Is the media failing to report accurately on terrorism?
Is political correctness keeping us from grasping the true danger we face?
Political correctness kills.
It causes, it will cause death.
You can't fight something effectively that you can't talk about.
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.
How the media cover terrorism and what effect this has on us.