Study reveals nationwide racial bias in media reporting on gun violence

Mass shootings in white-majority neighborhoods received roughly twice the news coverage of mass shootings in neighborhoods where a majority of residents were people of color, according to new research.

The study also found that coverage of police-involved shootings was disproportionately high in communities of people of color.  

The study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, Northwestern University and the University of Washington documented bias in gun-violence reporting in a large-scale, nationally representative sample of news media coverage. 

Researchers analyzed nearly 36,000 news stories reporting on individual shootings, finding significant differences in the volume of coverage and characterization of the incidents based on the racial and ethnic composition of the neighborhood in which they took place. The researchers also found that the language describing incidents of gun violence was systematically different depending on the neighborhood’s majority population. The study took place from 2014 to 2023.

“These disparities are more generalized than previously documented, and they exist nationwide,” said Rob Voigt, an assistant professor of sociology in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis and co-author of the study.

Connecting reporting on gun violence to neighborhoods, lives 

In reports of gun violence that took place in neighborhoods where a majority of residents were people of color, the incidents were often framed in terms of race and crime. For instance, when Tamir Rice was shot and killed by police in 2014 in Cleveland, some news outlets referred to 12-year-old Rice as a “Black male with gun” rather than a boy playing with a toy gun.

The research team connected 35,991 local and national online media reports on shootings during the period of the study to detailed incident data and analyzed their content with a variety of computational methods, including large language models. They then compared these figures to census data that show the racial breakdown of the neighborhoods where each incident took place. Each news report covered one incident of gun violence.

By linking these two types of data — media framing and the details of the incidents and people involved — researchers said they were able to draw broader conclusions about how media represent the perpetrators and victims of gun violence. 

The language of disparity in gun violence reporting

The study found significant race-based bias in both the mentions and portrayal of people involved in shootings. For example, 62% of mentions of race in articles about incidents of gun violence refer to people of color. 

Researchers also found that reports on incidents in white-majority neighborhoods put more focus on shooters. These articles were also more likely to describe shooters in terms of their social roles beyond the incident, such as being a student or someone’s family member. These articles were more likely to quote authority figures as well, researchers said.

One excerpt from a story reporting an incident in a majority-white neighborhood described, for example, the shooter’s background and medical issues: “[The shooter] is a former Marine who suffered from a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, his stepfather said.” Reports about shooters in neighborhoods of color didn’t have such details about shooters, researchers said. 

Yet another excerpt from a news report on an incident in a neighborhood where a majority of residents were people of color said: “There, [the victim] ignored commands to drop his .50-caliber handgun, turned the gun on himself and committed suicide.”

“Media coverage of such incidents can perpetuate harmful biases, extending the impact beyond the immediate trauma of those involved,” Voigt said.

The study was published on Jan. 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Co-authors were Ruth Bagley and Andrew Papachristos at Northwestern University and Susan Burtner at the University of Washington.