Media bias against Muslims in terrorism coverage

The Monkey Cage published a post that claimed that "U.S. media outlets disproportionately emphasize the smaller number of terrorist attacks by Muslims". Such an inference depends on the control variables making all else equal, but the working paper on which the inference was based had few controls and few alternate specifications. The models controlled for fatalities but the Global Terrorism Database used for the key reference also lists the number of persons injured, and a measure of total casualties might be a better control than only fatalaties. For example, the Boston Marathon bombing is listed as having 1 fatality and 132 injured, but the models in the working paper would estimate the media coverage to be the same as if the bombing had had 1 fatality and 0 injured.

Moreover, as noted in the comments to the post, the Boston Marathon bombing is an outlier in terms of the outcome variable (20 percent of articles were devoted to that single event). But the working paper reported no model that omitted this outlier from the analysis, so it is not clear to what extent the estimates and inferences reflect a "Muslim perpetrator" effect or a "Boston Marathon bombing" effect. And, as also noted in the comments, proper controls would reflect the difference in expected media coverage for terrorist attacks in which the perpetrator was killed at the scene versus terrorist attacks in which there was a manhunt for the perpetrator.

Finally, from what I can tell based on the post and the working paper, the number of articles for the Boston Marathon bombing might include articles published before it was known or credibly suspected that the perpetrators were Muslim. If so, then the article count for the Boston Marathon bombing might be inflated because media coverage of the bombing before the religion of the perpetrators was known or credibly suspected cannot be attributed to the religion of the perpetrators.

My request for the data and code used for the post was declined, but hopefully I'll remember to check for the data and code after the working paper is published. In the meantime, I asked the authors on Twitter about inclusion of articles before the suspects were known and about results when the Boston Marathon bombing is excluded from the analysis.