Quantifying racial disparities in media representations of gun violence at scale

Abstract

Previous research has documented racial disparities in gun violence news coverage in limited and small-scale contexts. This study curates and analyzes a large-scale dataset of news articles linked to specific incidents of gun violence to test for systematic race-related differences in representation across the US news media. Using computational techniques, we quantify how much media attention an incident gets, the topics and linguistic style of articles, and how participants in the incidents are framed. We find significant generalized disparities in media coverage and portrayal of incidents depending on whether they occur in neighborhoods that are majority white or majority people of color (POC), including increased media attention on police shootings if they occur in majority POC neighborhoods, greater focus on the people involved in incidents in majority white neighborhoods, and increased racialization and framing related to crime in majority POC neighborhoods.