Consider This from NPR - Changing the Way Media Reports on Gun Violence

Episode Date: January 29, 2023

Americans have grown accustomed to hearing about the latest mass shooting. And recently news coverage has been focused on two tragic events in California — Last weekend eleven people were killed and nine injured in Monterey Park near Los Angeles. And on Monday, seven people were killed and one wounded in Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco.In the past 72 hours alone, seventy-one people were killed and 114 were injured by shootings in different incidents all across the country - including another mass shooting this morning near Los Angeles. Three people were killed and four were injured. Beyond getting the facts right, which is crucial, news outlets put careful thought into how best to cover these stories. But as gun violence continues to rise, is it time for the media to rethink their approach? NPR's Michel Martin talks to Nick Wilson, the senior director for Gun Violence Prevention at the Center for American Progress. And Dr. Jessica Beard from Philadelphia Center For Gun Violence Reporting discusses ways the media can avoid retraumatizing survivors of gun violence.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu slash forward. Breaking news, a mass shooting following the end of a Lunar New Year's festival in Monterey Park, California. We have just learned there is now a total of 11 people dead as a result of Saturday's mass shooting in Monterey Park. Word came of yet another mass shooting, also in California, this time in the city of Half Moon Bay. There is still a week left in January, and there have already been 39 mass shootings from coast to coast.

It's just about impossible to ignore the recent news about gun violence. Eleven people killed and nine injured last weekend in Monterey Park near Los Angeles. On Monday, seven people killed and one gravely injured in Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco. But those were just the events that got the whole country's attention. In the past 72 hours alone, 71 people were killed and 114 injured by shootings in different incidents all over the country in just about every region of the country. That's according to the Gun Violence Archive. And that includes another shooting in Los Angeles early this morning where three people were killed and four others were wounded. Now, when we report on these horrible events, responsible members of the media put time and effort into thinking about how to cover these stories, not just to get the facts right, which is, of course, crucial,

but to consider how much to say, how much space and time to devote, and which details matter in any given story. But researchers are now beginning to say that that's not enough. With violence as prevalent as it is and the amount of news coverage given to violence, the way the media covers stories can unintentionally skew the way violence is perceived. There was work that came out in the early 90s by Shanto Iyengar looking at whether or not the way that news stories are told could affect the kind of attributions of responsibility that viewers or readers might make. So if you tell a news story about individual people, individual

problems, is it possible that you're actually going to encourage those readers and listeners to attribute responsibility and look for solutions at the level of the individual in the story? Danica Young is a professor of communications at the University of Delaware who studies how news stories impact public perception. Young says that research on the coverage of gun violence has found that news media tend to favor covering individual events and people, and often that kind of coverage is missing the broader thematic or contextual information,

information that places a shooting within the larger picture of gun violence in America. Young used the example of media coverage of the murders of 19 children and two teachers last year in Uvalde, Texas. As coverage shifted to the role of law enforcement, there was less thematic coverage of issues like the rates of gun violence by state or the history of gun regulation. She said as the focus narrowed, the bigger picture got lost. Those thematically framed stories contextualize what happened in Texas within a broader framework, a political framework,

a cultural framework. However, as the story sort of began to unfold, and we did learn about failures at the level of the Uvalde police and the school police in particular. Some of those stories really began to focus on the individual police as opposed to thinking more broadly about gun violence as an epidemic in the United States. Young challenges the media not to lose sight of the context of shooting events when pursuing the individual elements of a story. The question that I wish that all journalists would always ask themselves is, what is going to help Americans understand not just

this day, but this broader issue? Consider this. As the epidemic of shootings continues to touch nearly every corner of America, instead of just following the debate over gun violence in America, can media coverage actually influence that debate? All the best, most empathetic and ethical reporting in the world may not be able to negate that harmful reporting. That's coming up. From NPR, I'm Michelle Martin. It's Saturday, January 28th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees.

Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. One of the things that we worry about is that if we don't do something about the harmful reporting, you know, we won't succeed. Dr. Jessica Beard is a trauma surgeon at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia and the director of research for the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting. The organization works to improve the interaction between the media and individuals and communities affected by gun violence. Dr. Beard has firsthand knowledge of the toll that gun violence takes on the bodies of victims and on survivors. And she says that reporting that focuses just on the individual event not only changes how

the event is perceived, but can further traumatize survivors and affected communities. What we call this style of reporting is episodic crime reporting. So the episodic part means that it's focused on a single shooting event. And what sort of the media theory and research studies show is that focusing on a single shooting event kind of reinforces this idea of individualism, that it's the victim's fault. And of course, you know, there's an incredible stigma around being firearm injured and that, you know, you deserved it in some way. Like one of our participants in the study said, I wish they would have said innocent man

shot in North Philly, not just man shot in North Philly, because people just assumed that, you know, I was doing something that I shouldn't have been when, in fact, I was walking to the dentist. Dr. Beard says that the impact of neighborhood-based gun violence, which is far more common, is often overshadowed by the intense focus on mass shootings. One of the challenges with the overemphasis and the overcoverage on traditionally defined mass shootings, the mass shootings with these high body counts, is that those are exceedingly rare. They're about one percent of all shootings in the country. In our reporting, NPR generally follows the classification of

mass shootings as outlined by the Gun Violence Archive, which is an independent, not-for-profit organization that collects data and conducts research. They define a mass shooting as an incident where four or more people are shot or killed, excluding the shooter. Dr. Beard says that in Philadelphia, there are days when more than four people are injured or killed in gun violence incidents in neighborhoods across the city. The neighborhood mass shootings are much more common, but aren't covered as such. And so the challenge with overcovering that, we actually know, is that people think that they're more common than they are. When, you know, Americans were polled about what is the most common type of gun violence, they said mass

shootings. And that's a perfect example of how sort of media framing and all the tools that media use to tell the public something is important impacts the way that the public truly understands the burden of disease of gun violence. Dr. Beard says her research has also found that the media's reliance on police information also leads to misperceptions about neighborhood gun violence. When you watch TV news, you'll see a police officer being interviewed or you'll see crime scene, you know, imagery. When only that perspective is presented, then really that's the only person that the public is seeing responding to gun violence, right? So my perspective, for example, is completely missing from that narrative as somebody who responds to the, you know, medical trauma of gun violence. Of course, the community perspective is completely

missing from that picture. Missing is the incredible work that the community is doing to combat gun violence. And of course, the public health response is missing as well. Coming up, is there a better way to report on gun violence? This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward. Unfortunately, gun violence affects people in so many different ways. So we need to really talk

about the different policies that will help us with suicide or workplace conflict or school violence, retaliatory gang violence. And so there's no easy answer. Nick Wilson is the Senior Director for Gun Violence Prevention at the Center for American Progress. It's a nonpartisan but democratic-leaning policy institute that researches and promotes new ideas for policymakers. So I asked him if he had any new ideas for the media about how journalists could improve coverage of gun violence.

He acknowledged that it is not the easiest thing to cover holistically, but he said there are still a lot of stories that don't make the news that he thinks should be included in coverage around gun violence. I think people would be surprised to learn that most victims of gun violence survive, but there isn't much coverage of the long-term impacts on gun violence survivors and how their lives are disrupted, what kind of supports they need to recover. And this influences why victim services for gun violence survivors are inadequate and underfunded. Another example is gun violence is now the leading cause of death for children, but most of the focus is on shootings in schools, which skews our focus towards things like active shooter drills, law enforcement in schools, which skews our focus towards things like active shooter drills,

law enforcement in schools, and metal detectors. And there's less of a focus on shootings that happen in the community and the different policies that are needed, and especially investments to prevent these types of shootings. Do you agree that coverage has changed in any way in recent years? I ask because there's been a big push by some advocates and also by law enforcement, frankly, to emphasize the victims over the shooters. For example, some police departments don't even want to disclose the name of a shooter because they say that it just encourages them to seek notoriety. That is something that has sort of debated, but based on your research, what do you think? One of the most encouraging developments we've seen over the years

is more of a focus on the victims and the impact on the community and not giving a platform to the shooter. There's not one type of gun violence and not one motive, but one concern about mass shootings, in particular, where someone decides to kill as many people as possible, is they want to get their name out there. They maybe have a manifesto. They want to make an impact. And so by not giving the notoriety to the shooter, maybe that will make someone less likely to want to commit a mass shooting. I want to talk again about something you raised earlier, which is the difference between mass shootings and shootings which are more typical. You know, with mass shootings, we often talk about coverage often takes a very different tack. I mean, it focuses on policing. And this has become very partisan, as you know, and very sort of ideologically driven, as you know. We've seen that, you know, the conservative-leaning media outlets are often very focused on street crime,

particularly in major cities that are run by Democrats. And a lot of people experience that, interpret that as being racist and or partisan, right? On the other hand, the people who are living with this kind of experience are in fact living in fear and their quality of life is compromised. So I'm just wondering, what do you consider to be a more constructive way to talk about these issues, to cover these issues in a way that respects the impact on the quality of life of the people living with it, including victims, without necessarily trafficking in tropes that are being employed for partisan advantage or for basically reasons of kind of racist ideology. It is disappointing to see that the gun violence issue often becomes a political football. And especially when elections are coming up, we see a lot of disinformation and false narratives being spread for disingenuous reasons. reasons, one being that gun violence is only a big issue in large cities that are run by Democratic mayors or may have progressive prosecutors. Our analysis last year found that out of the 20 counties with the highest levels of gun violence, 13 of them are rural. And so it's

not just a city issue, but it's happening in all of our communities. That said, many major U.S. cities that are seeing population declines, have seen disinvestments, a long history of racism and redlining, they do have a large gun violence problem. And while mayors are doing the best they can, mayors don't make state gun laws. And even in states with strong gun laws, they often neighbor other states with weak gun laws. So someone in Chicago can drive to Derry, Indiana, buy as many guns as they want with no questions asked, and then bring them back into their communities. And so, so often with the recent shootings in California, there's a lot of talk about, well, California has the strongest gun laws in the country, so gun laws don't work. But what isn't mentioned is California's gun laws are very weak compared to other Western nations, and it has large borders with other states with weaker gun laws. So the focus really needs to be on Congress to pass stronger federal gun laws instead of the current patchwork of state gun laws that are with very porous borders. Here's where I

recognize, like I said, you're a researcher, you're not a practitioner, but I am interested in your opinion about what you would like to see the media do more of and what you would like to see the media do less of. I think the outcome of media coverage that focuses so much on these isolated, usually large mass shootings, can unintentionally spread a sense of hopelessness and cynicism that nothing can be done. But we do know that gun laws work and investments in communities work, and there are ways to prevent some of these shootings. So what I would like to see is, you know, I don't, I suspect that, you know, the next mass shooting, the media will continue to

come to the, flood the community, ask questions. What I hope is that they'll come back six months later, a year later, and follow up with the survivors, follow up with the community to really tell the story of how this has long lasting impacts on that community. And then ways that law enforcement, public health, educators, policies that they could adopt that could either prevent those shootings or improve the response and outcomes. So I really think the focus needs to be on policies and having more of a long-term approach. That was Nick Wilson. He's the Senior Director for Gun Violence Prevention at the Center for American Progress. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Michelle Martin.