Quantifying Media Representation Dynamics Across 25 Years of News Reporting on Policing-related Deaths
Quick Answer
The study analyzes 4,000 Canadian news articles over 25 years on police-related deaths, revealing that state bureaucrats' perspectives dominate nearly threefold compared to civilians.
Quick Take
The study analyzes 4,000 Canadian news articles over 25 years on police-related deaths, revealing that state bureaucrats' perspectives dominate nearly threefold compared to civilians. The newly developed PerspectiveGap model highlights a growing but still limited civilian representation, with bureaucratic accounts being more clinical and procedural than emotional civilian narratives.
Key Points
- PerspectiveGap model reveals significant bias in media representation of police-related deaths.
- State bureaucrats' views appear nearly three times more than those of civilians.
- Civilian representation in reporting has increased in recent years.
- Bureaucratic accounts are often clinical, while civilian narratives are more emotional.
- The framework can be adapted to analyze media narratives in other jurisdictions.
Article Excerpt
From source RSS / original summaryarXiv:2606. 06812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We perform the largest known computational analysis of Canadian news narratives about police-involved deaths, spanning 4,000 articles from the last quarter-century. We develop a novel computational model, PerspectiveGap, grounded in prior sociological work on media representation of policing.
We find that reporting on police-involved deaths on average features perspectives from state bureaucrats at a rate nearly three times as much as perspectives from other members of the public, including relatives, community members, eyewitnesses, lawyers representing the family, or civil liberties groups. A considerable fraction of articles contain no points of view from civilian actors, though civilian representation has increased in recent years.
Qualitatively, we find that state bureaucrats' accounts of these deaths tend to be clinical and procedural, while civilian discourse carries considerably more emotional valence. The PerspectiveGap framework developed here can be contextualized to other jurisdictions, offering a scalable approach for analyzing how media systems construct narratives around policing and accountability.
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