Two recent studies examining how local media report on gun violence revealed that Philadelphia TV news stations are failing to produce public health coverage of firearm violence. And they found that these stations routinely overreport on shootings involving children, mass shootings and shootings that happen in wealthier areas with majority white residents.
The studies — analyzing news clips over a six-month period in 2021 — were led by Jessica Beard, M.D., Ph.D., a trauma surgeon at Temple University and the director of research at the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting. The research builds on Beard’s previous work and is partially funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Study methodology and results
The analysis examined “how reports of community firearm violence are framed on local television news in Philadelphia and the downstream effects of that coverage on the general public’s perception of the issue,” according to a news release from Temple University.
Both studies compiled news clips covering shootings in Philadelphia from the city’s four local stations on two random days per month from January to June 2021. Those 154 clips were then coded based on demographic and geographic information and matched with shooting data from the Philadelphia Police Department database.
For one of the studies, researchers compared the characteristics of victims and where the shootings happened and found that victims covered by local TV news were younger, more likely to be children and more likely to be injured in a mass shooting.
The shootings covered were also more likely to occur in “areas with a higher median household income, lower rates of socioeconomic inequality and lower rates of racialized economic segregation,” according to the study and the news release.
Those findings “reveal that segments about community firearm violence on local television news are neither demographically nor geographically representative of both who — and where — is most disproportionally impacted in Philadelphia,” Beard said in a statement.
Harmful reporting practices
In the second study, researchers analyzed the TV news reports to examine the harmful elements used in the coverage and to determine whether the reporting included any public health framing.
Harmful elements identified by the study included a visual of the crime scene, no follow-up reporting on the shooting, law enforcement as the only source used, reporting the number of gunshot wounds, the clinical condition of the injured person, the relationship between the victim and the shooter, the name of the hospital where victims were treated and video from the shooting.
These elements were used in the majority of the clips reviewed by researchers, according to the study.
The public health framing included reporting on larger data and trends, discussing the root causes of violence and solutions and using public health experts as sources. This framing was often missing from the analyzed reports, researchers found.
That study “demonstrates that these segments also frequently contain harmful elements and lack the context necessary for a deeper understanding of the issue,” Beard said in the statement.
“These news stories may be the only window into community firearm violence that the general public has, and they often are not getting a complete picture, but instead one that research has indicated can lead audiences to blame victims, reinforce racist stereotypes and undermine effective public health responses.”
In her statement, Beard acknowledged strides being made in journalism to address the concerns layed out in her research. The findings, she added, will help build a foundation for reforming news coverage.
“In the past, guidelines were developed in cases of suicide, mass shootings, sexual assault, abuse, and crime involving minors, and newsroom practices were revised. Fortunately, new guidelines are being developed for reporting on community firearm violence,” she said.
The Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting, for example, recently published a toolkit on minimizing harmful reporting on community firearm violence.
