Fighting the Frame: How Framing Police Brutality Influences How Audiences Assign Blame

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 14: Criminal Justice

Abstract

Framing has been a prevalent subject within contemporary society, and many scholars have examined its impact in the news media. Sociologists, in particular, have made great contributions to the concept; however, there is a significant lack of literature regarding the framing of police brutality in the news and its effects on the audience. This study theorizes an interaction between framing and blame in the context of police brutality and quantifies it using automated text analysis, sentiment analysis, grounded theory methods, and negative binomial regression. I find that the framing of police brutality by news articles influences how audiences assign blame to the groups involved, and findings indicate that this assignment may be influenced by party affiliation.

Author

• Kade Judge Davis, Morehouse College