How Political Ideology Shapes Discussions of Safety Interventions on Television News Networks, 2020-2023

• In Event: Exploring the Social Construction of Crime and Justice by the News Media

Abstract

The year 2020 undoubtedly brought global recognition to desires among citizens to utilize non-policing solutions to promote the safety and vitality of communities across the United States. Responding to these developments, television news networks attempted to interpret these calls for enhancing the delivery of municipally-funded services for their core audiences. Despite the increasing body of scholarship on support for defunding police as an alternative safety intervention, research investigating the behaviors of television news networks in shaping these preferences remains largely underdeveloped. What language have television news networks used to represent the defund mandate, and how do these representations vary by the political orientation of each network? This study addresses these questions using a novel adaptation of word embedding regressions to analyze more than 16,000 transcripts from individual news segments web scraped from the publicly-available Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer dataset from January 1, 2020 through December 31, 2023. We hypothesize that (1) all television networks have primarily framed the mandate to defund as a singular outcome of change since 2020 and that (2) the temporal implications of defunding have been represented differently by left-leaning, centrist, and right-leaning television networks. Preliminary findings will be discussed.

Authors

• Demar F. Lewis IV, University of Maryland

• Daniel Fredes García, University of Maryland