BOSTON UPDATE: Boston Globe Reports on Its Own Bombing Reporting, Sort Of

The Boston Globe’s coverage of the Marathon bombing “was marked by an overload of inflammatory themes, words, phrases, and passages,” according to a media content analysis commissioned by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s defense team.

Predictably, however, the Globe’s portrayal of the study is, well, a little selective.

The findings of the analysis, conducted by Edward J. Bronson, a trial venue expert and professor emeritus at California State University-Chico, are laid out in a sworn declaration filed on Aug. 7. It’s part of the defense effort to get the trial moved from Boston.

The analysis was done in conjunction with a survey which sought to measure the levels of bias regarding Tsarnaev’s guilt in the four cities where the trial could be held: Boston, Springfield, Manhattan, or Washington, D.C. Bronson recommended the trial be moved to Washington.

In its description of the declaration, however, the Globe provides us with some of Bronson’s blander conclusions. For instance, we’re told that the phrase “terror” and “terrorist” and related terms were used more than 1,400 times in the Globe’s reporting on the marathon bombing. Terrorist was used more than 620 times, although often not to characterize Tsarnaev. Rather, it was used in phrases like “terrorist attack.”

“EXTREMELY PREJUDICIAL”

The newspaper, to its credit, did include this one: “The inflammatory coverage of the Boston Bombing case, even viewed solely through the Globe’s content, was overwhelming and thus extremely prejudicial,” Bronson wrote.

But that’s about it. The Globe then spends a good deal of ink highlighting the few limitations of the analysis Bronson acknowledged in his declaration, standard practice for any content analysis. For instance: “In a footnote, Bronson conceded that many of the more than 2,420 Globe articles he cited were not about the bombings but only referred to them.”

In other words, the Globe got a lot of mileage out of the story by shoehorning it into unrelated articles.

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