Title
Salient Frames in Police Brutality Coverage
Abstract
Newspapers use frames to determine what facts are used in stories, and how the chosen facts are
worded. While frames are not exactly enforcing a bias, they do affect how readers view incidents
and issues reported in articles. This paper addresses salient frames in local and national
newspaper coverage of police brutality cases in three shootings of black men over the past three
years. A few questions guided my research: What frames appear most often within the first week
of police brutality news stories? How do the frames differ across local and national papers? What
specific frames occur most often at a local and national level? I performed qualitative content
analysis to find salient frames in stories, and quantitative analysis to discover how often each
frame was used in each story. All three events showed “race” and “videos” or “protests” as the
most salient frames at a national level, and “community” and “family and friends” as the most
salient frames at a local level.
Suggested Citation
Bloomquist, Madison.
(2017).
Salient Frames in Police Brutality Coverage.
Retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy,
https://hdl.handle.net/11299/189083.