Subtle shifts: how the news shapes perceptions of deadly police-civilian encounters
Creators: name: Waran, Vidhi
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2024

description: My research examines how issues of racialized policing are discussed in partisan news sources and how the information provided in news articles has the power to impact reader sentiment regarding deadly confrontations between police and civilians. The impetus for this research was an incident in May 2020, which was broadly covered in the media and sparked a national reckoning on racial justice. On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year old black man was killed after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for over nine minutes. Black men being killed by police is not a novel development, however, the resulting news coverage and public response made this incident unique. Partisan news outlets have subtle differences in how they cover fatal police-civilian interactions. Over time, repeated exposure to these differences can cause readers to develop increasingly polarized opinions about the same incident (Klein, 2020; Cummings, 2022). For my study, I used a mixed-methods approach, conducting a qualitative content analysis for the first part and conducting a quantitative survey experiment for the second part. I began with a content analysis of 42 news articles of the George Floyd incident from four different news sources: Vox, CNN, Fox, and Breitbart. The Pew Research Center (2020) indicates that the former two sources appeal to those who lean politically left and the latter two sources appeal to those who lean politically right. As compared to right-leaning sources, left-leaning sources tended to provide more extensive coverage about the Floyd-Chauvin incident. The key findings from the content analysis that informed the survey experiment were: 1) there was a lack of victim-humanizing details about Floyd, though the literature indicates that humanizing details can impact readers’ perceptions of favorability and empathy (Li &amp; Shi, 2022) and 2) there was a lack of articles that included information on the prior complaints against Chauvin, and the literature indicates that misconduct history can change perceptions of police legitimacy and trust (Cruz, 2015). Guided by my qualitative findings, I designed a survey experiment with a 2x2 fully-crossed design with four vignettes describing a fatal interaction with a police officer. The manipulations for the vignettes were: one control vignette that simply described the interaction, one vignette that added humanizing details about the victim, one vignette that included officer misconduct history, and one that included both the victim-humanizing details and officer misconduct history. After a randomly assigned vignette was displayed, respondents (n=1,337) received survey questions assessing their opinions about the interaction (i.e. who was to blame, whether either party should have reacted differently, how appropriate the police response was, and recommended disciplinary action). Key findings from the survey experiment were that the inclusion of humanizing details about the victim and the officer’s misconduct history increased support for the victim and increased blame for the officer. When combined, the effect was most powerful - having access to both the victim-humanizing details and officer misconduct history in the same vignette resulted in the least blame attributed to the victim and the most blame attributed to the officer. Demographic details including gender, race, political ideology, and prior experience with unfair treatment by police significantly changed how respondents answered the survey questions, including how they apportioned blame to the victim and the officer. Key implications from my findings highlight the importance of providing relevant, comprehensive information in news articles, establishing a practice of transparency around police misconduct, and engaging the public in open discourse about media literacy and implicit biases.