Introduction
Journalists are excellent communicators when it comes to reporting about police shootings. They have demonstrated that the subject is prominent on the mainstream agenda for coverage in the press. Their language influences people’s views of causation, moral obligation, and broader ideas and conclusions about the world around them. Police shootings have been a contentious topic in the news for more than two decades. The media depicts Black people from a suspicious perspective, promoting stereotypes and contributing to the systemic bias against them within the United States police department.
The Role of Journalists in Messaging and Agenda-Setting
Journalists play an essential role in developing the appropriate messaging for the audience by providing meaning to the communications sent out. Agenda-setting refers to how the news media determines the amount and content of coverage on several topics, including police shootings. For instance, journalists’ perception of race in police shootings may influence how the problem is handled and communicated to the public.
Framing becomes a primary focus to understand how journalists see this topic. Framing emphasizes specific characteristics of a seen reality in a communication text to promote a particular description of a problem, causal interpretation, moral appraisal, and treatment prescription for the item discussed. It also refers to how people use interpretive schemas to organize and evaluate the information they receive daily (Thacker & Vermilya, 2019). Selection and salience are essential in framing studies and influencing an audience’s thoughts about an issue.
Framing and the Influence of Media on Public Consciousness
As a result, media framing contributes to the formation of public consciousness. People’s judgments are influenced by frames, which instruct them what information is meaningful and how to operate and engage in interactions with others and speech. Despite the fact that journalists may not realize it, framing is a crucial aspect of news article selection. While traditional journalists typically have no purposeful or political motives in framing topics, they play a role in choosing specific frames for attracting an audience.
In the case of Black Power leaders, it was discovered that the media routinely choose characters that deviate from most of society’s features, interests, and patterns to represent them (Thacker & Vermilya, 2019). The networks chose movement leaders to report on based on their abilities to be articulate, dramatic, bombastic, and imaginative in framing messages for disability. In a more recent case, Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement were positioned for disability in television stories on police shootings as the movement gained traction.
Media Coverage of Police Shootings and Frame Construction
Therefore, fatal police shootings are a highly mediated topic that the majority of people hear about via broadcasts on television, social media, and other kinds of media. The way various outlets portray this topic may influence how people see police shootings. This could imply that if shootings by cops dominate headlines in the media, the topic may become more prevalent.
There are internal and external elements that media organizations consider when selecting frames that appeal to their audiences. This is known as frame construction, and it is based on Scheufele’s method, which demonstrates that a journalist’s views, social/cultural rules, political actors, and occupational routines all influence how they work (Shrikant & Sambaraju, 2021). These elements are based on sociological research and use journalists’ attitudes, rituals, social conventions, political acts, and professional routines to explain how stories are framed in the media. This includes selecting and presenting the story to the audience.
Historic Tensions and Racialized Media Narratives
Even as the topic of Black males killed by police is widely mediated, there have been several front-page headlines in newspapers, TV broadcasts, and online portals regarding high-profile examples of Black men being killed by police. For the most part, high-profile cases, such as those involving Amadou Diallo or Eric Garner, among others, are told to the masses.
Trinkner et al. (2019) discovered that liberal, conservative, and African-American newspapers were more likely to blame society for police shootings in their analyses of the content of police shootings in newspapers. In their study, societal-level blaming was also associated with factors influencing racial relations in the US. There is a shattered past between Black Americans and law enforcement bodies that inhibits the two populations from cooperating.
Deep-Rooted Bias and the Legacy of Inequality
The breakdown in communication and lack of collaboration did not happen unexpectedly. According to studies, it is a historic disparity embedded into the fabric of the US, filled with preconceptions that have run deep for many years. Black men are more likely to be singled out by police as suspects or threats.
There is little to no accountability for police officers who kill nonviolent Black people, signaling that their lives are worthless, and this is strongly related to critical race theory. This apparent bias feeds the news story’s equation that includes the names of gunshot victims such as Walter Scott, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and George Floyd, among others. Research that applied critical race theory two decades after the murder of Rodney King discovered emergent themes that people still did not trust law enforcement (Trinkner et al., 2019). The findings also raised suspicions about law enforcement officers and linked them to brutality.
The Role of Critical Race Theory in Media Analysis
As a result, when investigating police shootings, complex variables such as race must be considered. Previous research on police shootings found that Black males were 21 times more likely than White males to be fatally assaulted by police officers. According to Feinberg (2020), race and ethnicity are the most contentious and divisive concerns when it comes to police use of force. Critical race theory helps us understand these events by moving beyond the simple overt stereotypes expressed through texts. The theory analyzes the language and images that produce, maintain, and modify social connections of meaning and power as racial realities.
Moreover, the concepts that define the critical race theory seek to explain how race and racism are rooted in the American psyche of African Americans and other people of color. Critical race theory has five tenets: race subordination, challenging the prevailing belief system, equality for all, practical experience, and multidisciplinary research. According to Trinkner et al. (2019), news reports depicting Black people as a threat or criminals create unfavorable stereotypes of them. Racial prejudice against Black males causes them to be perceived as essentially inhumane, criminal, and dangerous and invokes a debate of Blackness against Whiteness in American society.
Data on Police Shootings and Racial Disparities
Even though there is no public record of police killings in the US, the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) are disproportionately affected by police violence in the US. The Washington Post compiled information on every individual killed by on-duty police personnel in the country between 2015 and 2020. The data yielded 5367 fatal police shootings, and due to the lack of information on race/ethnicity or age, a total of 4653 deaths were used for analysis (Schwartz, 2020). The statistics, which came from local news sources, independent databases, and further reporting at the news outlet, contain information about the victims’ race, age, and gender, as well as any object in their possession that appeared to be a weapon.
The undertakings helped to shed light on the ongoing debate of racial profiling in the US police department. It emerged that Native Americans were threefold more likely than Whites to be killed, while Blacks were over 2.5 times and Hispanics were 29% more likely (Schwartz, 2020). Homicides among Asians were much lower than fatalities among Whites. In one out of every six lethal shootings, the victims were unarmed. Defenseless Black and Hispanic victims had much higher rates than White victims: more than three times as high and 45% higher, respectively (Schwartz, 2020). Also, Black and Native American people lost 3 to 4 times as many years of life as White people. The data imply that police brutality is influenced by pervasive anti-Black and anti-Indigenous reasoning.
The Rise of Social Media and the Black Lives Matter Movement
Within social media space, police shootings have attracted even more attention. After the unarmed adolescent Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by community security guard George Zimmerman in 2012, the Black Lives Matter movement was born, opposing racial brutality and discriminatory police (Thacker & Vermilya, 2019). While Martin’s killing was not at the behest of a sworn officer of law enforcement, it provided the media with a more significant reason to focus on police shootings. Meanwhile, the social media reaction to Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Missouri, generated the hashtag #Ferguson, sparking a nationwide discussion about policing, race, government, and justice. Other nationwide captions of Black males executed by police department officers include Alton Sterling, Keith Lamont Scott, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and George Floyd.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the media is critical in informing society of developments across different parts of the nation. Reporters can fashion the message to fit into specific narratives that promote certain narratives within the society, especially on the relation between police shootings and race. Numerous examples show that the police have unduly targeted Black people, and such cases are only reported in mainstream media if they attract massive attention. The evaluation of police shootings, media depiction, and racial stereotyping in the US demonstrates the theatrical nature of race. It illustrates how societal constructs, biases, and power dynamics shape opinions, bolstering racial divisions through structural injustices and media stories and influencing public perceptions and institutional responses.
References
Feinberg, S. L. (2020). Media effects: The influence of local newspaper coverage on municipal police size. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 26(2), 249–268. Web.
Schwartz, S. A. (2020). Police brutality and racism in America. Explore, 16(5), 280–282. Web.
Shrikant, N., & Sambaraju, R. (2021). “A police officer shot a Black man”: Racial categorization, racism, and mundane culpability in news reports of police shootings of black people in the United States of America. British Journal of Social Psychology, 60(4). Web.
Thacker, T.D., & Vermilya, J. (2019). Framing “Friend”: Media Framing of “Man’s Best Friend” and the Pattern of Police Shootings of Dogs. Social Sciences, 8(4), 107. Web.
Trinkner, R., Kerrison, E. M., & Goff, P. A. (2019). The force of fear: Police stereotype threat, self-legitimacy, and support for excessive force. Law and Human Behavior, 43(5), 421–435. Web.