Nobody’s business? White male privilege in media coverage of intimate partner violence

ABSTRACT

Portrayals of celebrities perpetrating Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) are ideal for understanding the association between gender and racial privilege in representations of social problems. Unlike prior scholarship on framing of IPV, with celebrity perpetrators, race can be analyzed as an important aspect. Using 330 news articles about 66 celebrities, I find patterns of reporting consistent with male privilege that sanctions men’s violence against women, whereas the differential treatment of Black men fosters a racialized interpretation that pathologizes Black men. Black men's IPV is more often criminalized, with criminal imagery included 3 times more often in articles about Black celebrities than White celebrities. By presenting violence as an escalation of mutual conflict and excusing it due to mitigating circumstances, such as inebriation, White men's violence is justified 2½ times more often than Black men's IPV. These findings contribute to sociological understandings of racial privilege in the social construction of IPV.

Notes

¹Although the scope of the sample is restricted to IPV specifically, cultural references from mainstream society refer to IPV as “domestic violence,” a legal term used to describe violence between any members of a family. Therefore, in the article I use the terms interchangeably. Even though domestic violence is usually brought to public awareness because of physical acts of harm, IPV can take many forms of violence and abuse, which may include: physical violence; verbal, emotional, and economic abuse; and threats of harm (Centers for Disease Control 2012). Recognizing the importance of context for violent acts and the continuum of abusive behaviors, I adopt this broader definition of IPV throughout the analysis.

²Using Alexa, a website providing an analysis of Internet traffic, I identified the most frequently visited sites for celebrity news (excluding websites primarily geared to providing movie reviews): TMZ.com (US Rank 86), People.com (US Rank 204), and Eonline.com (US Rank 228). I repeated this process to identify top sports websites (excluding websites targeted to audiences outside of the United States and those limited to individualized sports, such as MLB.com), which resulted in the following sites: ESPN.go.com (US Rank 25), sports.yahoo.com (yahoo.com US Rank 4), and bleacherreport.com (US Rank 80). However, Yahoo Sports does not have a search bar that provides results restricted to their sports section. Therefore it was excluded and the next site listed was selected instead, msn.foxsports.com (US Rank 111).

³I used Google.com for the search engine and the celebrity name in quotes to generate the population of articles. Google uses PageRank, an algorithm based mostly on the number of links pointing to a page, to deliver the most relevant search results. Using a random number generator, I selected five articles from the first 100 articles populated by Google. Articles were excluded from the sample that were blog posts, social media results, captions accompanying a photo with no text, sites exclusively listing statistics for pro sports players, and informational websites such as Wikipedia, IMDB.com, and personal websites of the celebrities. Articles represent selections from diverse websites such as Eonline.com, NYTimes.com, TMZ.com, blacksportsonline.com, huffingtonpost.com and fighters.com, to name a few. Twenty-five percent of the articles quoted another news site as the primary source of information (often TMZ.com).

⁴I cannot assess differences in the overall quantity of articles written about each celebrity, as the analytic sample consists of five articles per celebrity. Thus, this analysis is limited to investigation of differences in the content of sampled articles only.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joanna Rae Pepin

Joanna R. Pepin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. She primarily researches romantic relationships and inequality, such as power between partners and the association between romantic partnerships and social stratification.