Black Americans and the “crime narrative”: comments on the use of news frames and their impacts on public opinion formation

ABSTRACT

News framing choices remain critical components in the formation of political attitudes and public opinion. Early findings, which indicated that episodic framing of national issues like poverty and unemployment informed public opinion about minority group members, asserted that these framing choices often resulted in the attribution of societal ills to individuals rather than society at-large. Moving this analytical framework into the twenty-first century, I engage with literature on racial messaging to show that shifting social norms surrounding implicit versus explicit racism have transformed the ways that news frames function in mass media. As such, this essay examines the canonical theory of news frames as falling along a thematic-episodic continuum. Fundamentally, I argue that implicit and explicit racial messaging in news media coverage of crime could change the way viewers form opinions of Black Americans and criminality. Thus, it is critical to revisit longstanding theories of news frames to accommodate the present political moment.

KEYWORDS:

• Racial politics
• crime
• news frames
• Black Politics
• public opinion

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Cathy J. Cohen, Michael C. Dawson, John Brehm, Linda Zerilli, Justin Grimmer, Alysia Mann Carey, Marcus Board, and the editors and anonymous reviewers of Politics, Groups, and Identities for their vital insights and feedback on various iterations of this article. I would also like to thank the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago for their continued support of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Jenn M. Jackson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0049-515X

Notes

1 However, the decrease in television news consumption does not mean that viewers no longer consume news or are less influenced by political messages the news provides (Prior 2007).

2 This was the content analysis portion of Shanto Iyengar’s work. The field experiments were performed between June 1985 and September 1987.

3 See Shanto Iyengar (1991, Appendix A, 145). Coding of the news content is described in percentages but there is no investigation of how the varying percentages change the outcomes of the episodic news frame on viewer opinions and attitudes.

4 See James N. Druckman’s discussion of the role of “frames of communication” in influencing “frames in thought,” the former being a discursive process of selection and focus and the latter being a process of cognition. The intersection of these processes is what Druckman refers to as “framing effects” (2001, 227–228).

5 My primary intervention is on the episodic frame because Iyengar notes that the episodic frame is the most prevalent news frame leveraged by news sources. To add, it carries the greatest consequences for “blaming the victim” (1991, 46).

6 See also Tali Mendelberg’s experiment (The Race Card, Chapter 8). She specifically calls out “highly resentful people” who face issues when relying on their racial predispositions to make political decisions. The context of implicit and explicit messages then carries great meaning when recipients of the messages have varying levels of resentment.

7 These terms were utilized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Retrieved from http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/violent-crime/violent-crime-topic-page/violentcrimemain_final on March 8 2015.