Whose Lives Matter? Race, Space, and Devaluation of Victims from Black Neighborhoods in Homicide Reporting

• In Event: 4233 - Urban Sociology

Abstract

This article explores the complex ways in which certain racial groups are devalued in society by examining victim and neighborhood racial disparities in news reporting of homicide victims. To do so, we built a database of homicide victims killed in Chicago in 2016 (n=764) and collected all news articles written about those victims within the same year (n=5,092) to measure the relative newsworthiness of homicide victims along two lines: the amount of coverage they received and the tone of the articles describing their homicide. This dual-measure of newsworthiness provides an improved metric with which to analyze the relative value of homicide victims’ lives using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, compared to prior research which only considers the amount of coverage victims receive. While a number of previous studies use OLS regression to study victim- and incident-level characteristics that influence newsworthiness, we use Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM), which allows us to include neighborhood characteristics that could influence relative newsworthiness of victims. We find that victims killed in predominantly black neighborhoods received significantly fewer news articles than those killed in predominantly white neighborhoods, net of individual victim race. Further, both individual and neighborhood racial characteristics influenced the tone in which victims were discussed in the articles, with white victims and those from majority white neighborhoods being discussed in more humanizing terms. The results from this analysis suggest that there are factors at play that lead to the devaluation of black lives in news reporting, with victims who were discussed in more humanizing terms receiving more coverage, suggesting they are deemed more newsworthy. Whether propagated by reporters’ personal perceptions of different homicide victims or their perceptions of the public’s feelings of relative newsworthiness of different victims, the process of devaluation of black lives is made visible through this mixed-methods analysis of homicide reporting.

Authors

• Kailey C. White, University of Chicago

• Forrest Stuart, Stanford University

• Shannon Morrissey, University of Chicago