Race and Mental Illness: Does Media Framing of Mass Shooters Impact Punitive Attitudes?

• In Event: 4155 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 6. Guns and Mass Shootings

Abstract

The media play an active role in constructing the public’s understanding of reality, which in turn can have consequences for people’s beliefs and behaviors. The media are especially influential in shaping public opinion about crime, particularly regarding which racial and ethnic groups are most criminogenic. Although scholars have spent considerable effort in demonstrating bias in the framing of people of color’s crimes, they have paid much less attention to how the media frame white criminals’ offenses and the consequences of this framing. Emerging literature suggests that when white men commit egregious offenses, the media employ strategies to distance the blame from the offender that are not available to offenders of color, such placing the blame on the white shooter’s poor mental health rather than his criminogenic tendencies. However, little is known about the consequences of such disparate framing. We address this gab by employing an experimental design to investigate the impact of disparate media framing of mass shooters on punitive attitudes towards men of different races and ethnicities. We randomly assign participants to read one of ten vignettes mirroring a typical news article on a mass shooting. We manipulate two variables in the vignettes, race/ethnicity and mental health framing, to test their impact on punitive attitudes. We ask two questions: (1) how does inclusion of mental illness as a causal explanation for a mass shooting impact the public’s punitive attitudes toward that shooter? (2) Does that impact depend on the race/ethnicity of the shooter? We find that framing a shooting as stemming from mental health consistently lowers punitive attitudes of respondents, but we fail to find any independent race or interactive effects. This suggests that increasing the media’s consistency in framing of crimes may help to decrease racial/ethnic gaps in punitive attitudes.

Authors

• Laura Frizzell, The Ohio State University

• Sade Lindsay, The Ohio State University