Framing Use of Force: An Analysis of News Organizations’ Social Media Posts About Police Shootings

Abstract

This research is a systematic investigation of reporting on police use of force incidents by news organizations through social media. A sample of Tweets and Facebook posts appearing on the social media accounts of top news outlets ( N = 500) over the course of a year were analyzed. Rationalizations for use of force, characterizations of police and victims, and contextual framing were examined. Results revealed medium-based differences in challenging police actions as well as demonstrated the limitations of short-form social media in communicating news on complex issues. Implications of these findings for theory and journalistic practice are discussed.

To Protect and To Serve? Analyzing Entity-Centric Framing of Police Violence

“…Social scientists have experimentally manipulated framing devices related to police violence, including law and order, police brutality, or racial stereotypes, revealing dramatic effects on participants' perceptions of police shootings (Fridell, 2017;Dukes and Gaither, 2017;Porter et al, 2018). Criminologists have trained coders to manually annotate on the order of 100 news articles for framing devices relevant to police use of force (Hirschfield and Simon, 2010;Ash et al, 2019). While these studies provide great theoretical insight, their manual coding schemes and small corpora are not suited for large scale real-time analysis of news reports nationwide.…”

“…Legal Language. Similar to Ash et al (2019), we investigate frames which emphasize legal outcomes for police conduct. To capture this frame, we used a public lexicon of legal terms from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts 2021.…”

“…Passive Constructions. Prior works identify framing effects that arise from passive phrases in narratives of police violence (Hirschfield and Simon, 2010;Ash et al, 2019). In this work, we distinguish agentive passives (e.g.…”