An interreality study of race and homicide news coverage in Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Abstract

Building on ethnic blame discourse, the social threat hypothesis, and media bias theories, this article makes a quantitative interreality comparison between homicide news coverage and homicide statistics in Baton Rouge, Louisiana—a city with one of the highest homicide rates in the United States of America. Findings reveal that Whites made up 2% of homicide victims in 2018 in Baton Rouge, but represented almost 40% of homicide victims in the news. Press releases issued by local law enforcement also overrepresented White homicide victims, as did follow-up stories. Findings on homicide suspects showed that Whites and Latinos were overrepresented, and Blacks were underrepresented.

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“…We follow the strategy of a set of studies by Dixon and Linz (2000); Harkins and Dixon (2010); Dixon and Williams (2015); Dixon (2017) that used the comparison between depictions of crime and race on American television news to official crime report statistics, known as the inter-reality comparison technique. This technique is widely established, as well as in recent literature such as Klein and Hodges (2022) or Silcox (2022).…”