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.