Tourism, Security and Safety From Theory to Practice

The International and National Mass Media
The majority of security crises around the world are documented and brought to
the awareness of tourists by the mass media (Wahab, 1996; Frisby, 2002; Thapa,
2003). Fodness and Murray (1997) suggested that what really influenced tourists’
choice is not so much the type of the information source but rather its determinants
and qualities. Indeed, the mass news media, in particular, has a major role not only
in conveying information on security issues but also in interpreting it. Hence, it
plays a crucial role in the creation of public opinion and the opinion of individu-
als. It is claimed that the opinion or image created in the wake of the news media
is shaped by the frequency of its report and interpretation and by the type of media
used (Wood and Peake, 1998). In fact, in the case of terror events, which are the
most detrimental causes of security-generated tourism crises, the mass media is
heavily utilized and manipulated to put across political and ideological manifesta-
tions (Buckley and Klemm, 1993; Weimann and Winn, 1994; Hall and O’Sullivan,
1996; Weimann, 2000; Pizam and Smith, 2000). When such terror events involve
targeting tourists and tourism facilities, the mass media plays an even more influ-
ential role in shaping tourists’ perception, awareness, and attitudes toward these
affected destinations. Moreover, in cases of recurrent and frequent security situa-
tions, the media’s continuous coverage and interpretation of the conflict deepens
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the fixation of a long-term negative image of such affected destinations (Iyengar
and Kinder, 1987). Countries such as Israel, Egypt, Colombia, and others have
been experiencing this outcome, namely, a strong and persistent negative image
that maintains a very low tourist demand and lack of propensity to invest in their
deteriorating tourism sector (Wahab, 1996; Mansfeld, 1999; Pizam and Smith,
2000). Further advancement of information technologies used by the global media
means that security events will be continuously brought to potential tourists in real
time and in the most graphic way (Pizam and Smith, 2000). These sensational live
reports are often regarded by the travel industry as the cause for hysterical and dis-
proportionate travel behavior—mainly in the way of trip cancellations (Schiebler
et al., 1996; Lepp and Gibson, 2003). Such mass media coverage deepens the
exclusion of affected destinations from the global tourist map unless other infor-
mation and communication modes are to be used to balance the lead of the media
as a security information provider (Baral et al., 2004).
Sönmez (1994) and Sonmez et al. (1999) also recognized the importance of
mass media in affecting a destination’s image, and called for further research
examining the relationship between the two. However, Sönmez and Graefe
(1998b), in their study, discovered that media is just one of the external factors that
shape international tourists’ risk perceptions. Therefore, since awareness and per-
ception of risk are eventually interpreted and translated into some kind of behav-
ior, it is vital to understand not just their relationship but to examine the relative
and inter-relative role of the media vis-à-vis other factors that contribute to the
overall destination perception.