# Quantifying racial disparities in media representations of gun violence at scale

## TL;DR

This study shows that media coverage of gun violence varies based on the racial makeup of the neighborhood where it occurs, reflecting racial stereotypes.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a large-scale computational methodology to quantify racial disparities in media representations of gun violence.

## Key findings

- Media attention is higher for police shootings in majority people of color neighborhoods.
- Incidents in majority white neighborhoods focus more on the people involved.
- Coverage in majority POC neighborhoods includes more racialized crime-related framing.

## Abstract

Media reports on incidents of gun violence differ significantly when the incident occurs in a majority white or majority people of color neighborhood, even after controlling for characteristics of the incident and neighborhood. We use computational linguistic methods to analyze over 35,000 articles, and introduce a methodology for analyzing both high-level and more nuanced trends in media reports. Our findings provide empirical evidence that there are disparities in how incidents are covered and framed in the news that echo certain racial stereotypes around crime and are associated with the racial composition of the neighborhood where they occur.

Previous research has documented racial disparities in gun violence news coverage in limited and small-scale contexts. This study curates and analyzes a large-scale dataset of news articles linked to specific incidents of gun violence to test for systematic race-related differences in representation across the US news media. Using computational techniques, we quantify how much media attention an incident gets, the topics and linguistic style of articles, and how participants in the incidents are framed. We find significant generalized disparities in media coverage and portrayal of incidents depending on whether they occur in neighborhoods that are majority white or majority people of color (POC), including increased media attention on police shootings if they occur in majority POC neighborhoods, greater focus on the people involved in incidents in majority white neighborhoods, and increased racialization and framing related to crime in majority POC neighborhoods.