By The Media Accountability Project

Media depictions of gun violence deeply influence how we perceive the individuals perpetuating or victimized in incidents, whether we feel safe, and how society collectively racializes crime and violence. The language that the media uses to describe individuals involved in gun violence incidents has evolved but remains deeply and problematically tied to race and other identities, as seen by the different connotations of “domestic terrorist,” “thug,” and “individual suffering from a mental illness” used to describe gun violence-involved individuals of different ethnicities and races. The impact of these depictions on the public can be profound, as differences in portrayals of gun violence, based on the race of those involved and where incidents occur, may reinforce harmful racial stereotypes and influence public support for gun reform policies. Most research examining gun violence in the media, 1-3 however, tends to overwhelmingly focus on deadly mass shootings and school shootings—fatalities that comprise only a fraction of firearm deaths—and overshadows more common forms of violence that routinely devastates cities across the United States, especially in Black and Latino communities. To better understand the way that media representations of shootings are influenced by race and place, Community Justice partnered with researchers at Northwestern University and the Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research and Science (CORNERS) to collect large portions of the U.S. media landscape on gun violence and analyze it using advanced computational and statistical methods. The goal of the project is to determine the extent to which racial differences among the individuals and communities where gun violence occurs create real, measurable differences in the way that incidents are reported and ultimately viewed. By understanding the relationship between race and media coverage of gun violence incidents, this Media Accountability Project aims to help news outlets, journalists, educators, and community stakeholders build more just

Chicago: Media Accountability Project, Northwestern University, 2024 14p.