Media Framing of Capital Punishment and Its Impact on Individuals' Cognitive Responses

Abstract

It is well known that mass media have the ability to frame a sociopolitical issue in specific ways, which can have considerable impact on the public's thoughts and perceptions regarding the issue. Through analyzing coverage of capital punishment in the New York Times since 1960 and then conducting an experiment in which we assessed individual-level responses to differently framed news stories, we show (a) the dramatic emergence of a new “innocence frame” within the past 10 years that accentuates imperfections in the justice system, and (b) the much greater impact of this frame on individuals' thoughts—in particular on those who favor the death penalty—when compared to the traditional morality-based frame. We suggest that the latter finding can be explained because individuals tend to resist changing their interpretations of issues based on arguments that contradict their core moral or religious beliefs; however, they seem quite receptive to new information along dimensions that they previously had not considered. This research also implies that U.S. trends toward lower sentencing rates and eventual public opinion changes are likely to continue as long as media and public discussion remains focused on questions regarding flaws in the justice system.

Notes

¹We used abstracts contained in the New York Times Index instead of full-text articles for the sake of feasibility. Under the right conditions, this is a proper method (see Edy, Althaus, & Phalen, 2005).

²Thanks to Cheryl Feeley for doing the bulk of this work for her senior thesis and for allowing us to use and update the data she collected.

³We based these dimensions and component arguments on the theoretical understanding of the capital punishment issue gained from historical research and on conversations conducted with staff at The Justice Project in Washington, DC. Thanks to the staff of The Justice Project, especially Laura Burstein, Director of Communications, and Peter Loge, former director of the Campaign for Criminal Justice Reform.

⁴Between 1973 and 2003, 114 individuals were exonerated from death row, and more than half of these people have been released since 1995 (Death Penalty Information Center, 2006).

⁵Although most New York Times articles were shown to focus on dimensions of constitutionality, we consider morality the traditional frame in society because, as stated in the introduction, it has been the more general, “public” way of debating capital punishment. Constitutionality arguments, as might be implied, tend to focus on extremely specific and/or esoteric matters (e.g., a particular state's laws vs. Supreme Court opinions) that seem more pertinent to be debated in the realm of experts in the legal and judicial fields and likely are not as common to the everyday arguments upon which the general public typically considers the death penalty.

⁶Between reading the three articles and being asked their opinion on the death penalty, participants were instructed to list up to five arguments that they recalled from each article. These recall measures served to confirm the saliency of the framing manipulations and yielded three reassuring conclusions. First, recalls were a function of the frame received: Those receiving different frames differed significantly in their recollections, showing simply that they had indeed read the articles and understood them. Second, treatment effects were similar regardless of a participant's opinion of the death penalty; the recall process (in contrast to attitude justification) was unaffected by the psychology of projection effects or cognitive dissonance. Third, the magnitude of recall effects was similar across all three treatments.

Note that we recorded participants' opinion toward the death penalty after exposure to the stimulus. We employ this measure as a valid proxy because a single brief stimulus likely would have at most a negligible impact on opinion toward this issue, being deeply rooted as it is in core values. We acknowledge that prior framing research has shown that even a brief stimulus can affect opinion toward some issues. However, our purpose was to study how even a brief framing stimulus affects cognition and the retrieval of arguments, not whether it would affect or change overall opinions or attitudes. Therefore, although recognizing the opinion measure as a weakness, we do not believe it greatly compromises the overall results and/or conclusions of our study.