The Different Coverage of a Terrorist Attack - Essay Example

The group has been noted to target mainly Turkish officials and generals. A 1980 assassination of the former Turkish prime minister was blamed on this group and it was linked to the coup that almost wrecked Turkey the same year (Zion, 2013).

Aladdin Yuksel, the governor of Ankara, was one of the domestic voices that reacted to the attack. Yuksel condemned the act, and offered condolences to the family of the deceased, and affirmed that Turkey would remain astute in the fight against terrorism. Turkey’s Interior Minister, Muammar Guler, released the findings of the initial investigation into the attack that claimed that the suicide bomber was a member of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Part-Front. Jay Carney, the United States White House spokesperson, said that there was no clarity on the motivations underlying the attack. However, Bruce Hoffman, a specialist in terrorism at the Georgetown University in Washington retaliated with skepticism at how the Turks linked the attack to the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Part-Front (Associated Press, 2013).

Time Inc., The Times of Israel, Haaretz, and The New York Times have selected sources that covered the attack. Piotr Zalewski is the author of the story of the attack in Time Inc., which is based in New York, and it publishes more than one hundred and twenty magazines. Ilan Ben Zion wrote about the bombing in The Times of Israel, which features online news from the Middle East and is based in Jerusalem. Haaretz was started in 1918 and is owned partly by a Zionist and partly by a Russian-Israeli businessperson. The coverage of the bombing on Haaretz was by its associate press. The New York Times was started in 1851 and is a preferred news site, and Tim Arango and Sebmen Arsu were its reporters who covered the bombing.

Time Inc. and The Times of Israel reported that the bomb blew off at 1.15 pm on Friday, February 1, 2013. Haaretz differed with other sources citing that the incident took place at 1.13 pm. Time Inc., The Times of Israel, and The New York Times all reported that the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Part-Front (DHKP-C) could be responsible for the bombing. Haaretz did not cite a particular group but reported that both Kurdish rebels and Islamic militants could have been responsible for the attack. Time Inc. differed from other sources by citing that the DHKP-C claimed responsibility for the attack and it even provided an excerpt of a statement that was supposedly posted online by the group saying that the group targeted the United States’ embassy because it interfered in Syrian affairs. Both Time Inc. & The Times of Israeli identified the bomber as Ecevit Sanli but Haaretz and The New York times did not cite specific individuals. However, Time Inc. said that the bomber was a forty-year-old whereas The Times of Israeli said that he was thirty (Arango & Arsu, 2013).

Printing errors can account for the difference in how the selected sources wrote about the bombing. It is also possible that the reporters of the different sources got information from different sources. The ideological inclination of the sources could be a factor in the varying coverage.