The Media Needs to Stop Reductive Reporting
By: Jared Willis
Tags: Racism, Reductive Reporting, The Hate You Give, Bias, Police Shooting

In each of the reports about police involved shootings, a biased label was placed either in the headline or in the body of the paragraph to describe the victim of the shooting. One has to wonder why the media feels obligated to prejudice their audience. This is called reductive reporting.

Reductive Reporting by the media distills down a victim’s entire life and actions into one brief and biased opinion. This description is predominantly negative when the victim was shot by police officers. “Gang banger”, “gang member”, “drug dealer”, “suspected gang leader”, “drug addict”, “suicidal” are terms that one might find in a reductive report about a police involved shooting. Normally, such reporting doesn’t include terms like, “father”, “community leader”, “teacher”, “mentored. These monikers seem to justify to the reader or the viewer that the shooting of the victim was justified.

Whether the shooting is justified or not is beyond the scope of responsible journalism. Journalists are to report facts in an unbiased manner. By irresponsibly placing negative descriptors about a victim in the report, especially the initial reports, the media essentially biases itself and it’s audience against the victim.

Since the media machine is driven by ratings with future advertisement revenue in mind, one has to wonder whether this style of reporting plays to target demographics. Does reductive reporting help suburbians feel safe since it helps to reinforce the idea that “criminals” like drug dealers and gang members only live in the city far removed from the suburbs. That has to be the answer:

No police shooting in my neighborhood because there’s no criminals in here. How do I know there’s no criminals in my neighborhood? Because there’s no police shootings. Police shootings only happen where there’s criminals. And, only those being shot are criminals.

Suburbanites feel justified — the media even agrees or is at least complicit in the above thoughts. The aberrant recursiveness of this thought process continues to fuel racial tensions nationwide.

Perhaps it’s the human need to be able to digest horrible incidents. No sane or empathetic person likes to rejoice in another human’s sorrow. Even worse is when the sorrow is caused by the people society puts their trust in to protect us. Hence the need to have a form of justification following the reporting of the incident so that people can rationalize the fatal and permanent actions of a police officer.

The novel, The Hate You Give, by Angie Thomas, follows the protagonist, Starr, in the wake of her best friend’s shooting by a cop. The cop pulled over their vehicle for a broken taillight and ended up shooting Starr’s friend, Khalil over what he thought was a gun — ended up being a hair comb. What the media reported was that Khalil was a “suspected” drug dealer and gang banger.

What followed was the reactions one might come to expect after that form of reporting. “Well, he was going to get killed anyways.” Or, “The police shot a drug dealer.” Each of those statements removes humanity from the victim, making the incident digestiblefor viewing audiences.

Until we stop reductive reporting, victims of police shootings will continue to be dehumanized down to their worst possible act. That victim, though, had dreams, a family, and possibilities. No one should be reduced. They may have done a crime, but that does not mean they are no longer victims of police shootings.