WS More or Less: Counting Terror Deaths
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BBC
4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 22 August 2016
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With high profile attacks in Brussels, Nice and Munich, you might think that 2016 has been a particularly bad year for terrorism in Europe. But what happens when you put the numbers in historical context and compare them with figures for the rest of the world? More Or Less hears from Dr Erin Miller of the Global Terrorism Database and Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker.
(Image: A man wrapped in a Belgian flag holds a candle as people gather at a makeshift memorial on Place de la Bourse two days after a triple bomb attack hit. Credit: Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, this is Tim Harford. This is the shorter World Service edition of More or Less. |
| 0:05.0 | First broadcast on Friday the 19th of August. |
| 0:08.0 | Our subject this week is Global Deaths from Terrorism. |
| 0:12.0 | Hello and welcome to More or less on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:16.0 | We are your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life. |
| 0:19.0 | And I'm Tim Harford. |
| 0:21.0 | A terror attack in Brussels. |
| 0:24.0 | The city is rocked by explosions at the airport and the metro. |
| 0:27.0 | More than 30 people are killed. |
| 0:30.0 | Terror at a shopping mall in Munich. |
| 0:32.0 | Police are hunting for three gunmen after what they call a shooting rampage. |
| 0:37.2 | 84 people are dead and many injured after a terror attack in southern France. |
| 0:44.0 | These appalling attacks are fresh in the memory, |
| 0:47.0 | but we wanted to get a sense of the longer historical view. |
| 0:50.4 | Has 2016 been a particularly bad year for terrorist attacks or does it just feel that way? |
| 0:55.0 | Well our reporter Simon Mabin has been on the case. What have you found Simon? |
| 1:00.0 | Well, we've been working with colleagues from the BBC's Newsbeat program and from BBC monitoring. |
| 1:05.0 | That's the part of the BBC that looks at news reports from around the world. |
| 1:08.8 | Our aim was to count the number of terrorism deaths in Europe in 2016. To compare them to the historical record, |
| 1:16.2 | we've used the University of Maryland's global terrorism database. It's the most comprehensive |
| 1:21.0 | set of terrorism data out there. |
| 1:23.4 | But it's not as simple as just counting the number of deaths. |
... |
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