All the Terrorism Fit to Print: 614,802 News Articles on 1,551 Militant Groups

614,802 news articles from the New York Times, Associated Press, and Times of London are mapped to 1,551 militant groups from 1970 to 2019. Created by Colin J. Beck, the collection provides 6,110 group-year observations based on the Global Terrorism Database. It includes replication code and data for social science research published in 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyzing shifts in media attention toward specific militant groups using the 1970-2019 timeline
• Comparing reporting patterns between the Associated Press and the New York Times for the same group-year observations
• Investigating the relationship between Global Terrorism Database events and their visibility in mainstream news

Strengths

• 50-year longitudinal coverage from 1970 to 2019
• Large-scale corpus of 614,802 news articles
• Direct mapping to 1,551 militant groups in the Global Terrorism Database

Limitations

• Geographic bias toward Western media perspectives (NYT, AP, Times of London)
• Restricted to English-language sources only
• Potential for media silence where GTD-listed groups receive zero coverage in the selected outlets

Provenance

Source

Colin J. Beck, Harvard Dataverse

Collection Method

Aggregated from news archives and cross-referenced with the Global Terrorism Database

Time Range

1970-2019

Freshness

Last updated in February 2026; temporal coverage ends in 2019.

Geography

Global