Haley Gomes: The Effects of Media Framing on Public Opinion of Police Brutality

Through this research study, I aimed to understand the role of news framing in public opinion formation, specifically related to police brutality and police reform. It is crucial to understand how news media outlets are affecting the American people’s opinions on such relevant and important topics in our society at the moment. People rely on media companies to tell them what to think about current events, yet, oftentimes, these companies are framing the issues a certain way to gain clicks, readers, and viewers. Emotional episodic framing has become preferred over the less exciting, contextualized, thematic framing because it is much more captivating for consumers (Iyengar, 1996). Despite the benefits episodic framing may have for the news media companies, it can have serious consequences on the American public and opinion formation. The episodic frame is much less comprehensive than the thematic frame; therefore, often it does not give consumers the context they need to fully understand the issue and how it connects to other political topics (Iyengar, 1996). It is particularly important to further understand the effects of framing on serious issues like police brutality and police reform, not only because they are relevant right now, but because they also give us a broader understanding of the effect on public opinion of crime and race.

800 randomly selected Americans were randomly assigned into one of four groups. A selection of news articles was written for participants to read prior to taking a survey asking about their opinions on social issues and policies. Each article was about a man killed by police; however, each article was written in both episodic and thematic frames and included either a white or black victim. Then, participants were asked to respond to a survey with questions about how they perceived the police killing. Specifically, they were asked about their opinions on police brutality, the responsibility they attribute to the victim, and police reform.

The results related to the effects of the thematic and episodic frames were mostly ambiguous and did not give us a clear understanding of how these frames may affect public opinion of police brutality. The results, on multiple occasions, were the complete opposite of what the literature suggested and what was hypothesized. This was more evident in the questions and statements specifically related to the killing of John Taylor as compared to general policy questions. These results could perhaps be due to the fact that the episodic news articles provided many more details about the killing as compared with the thematic article. So, those who read the thematic article may simply not have had the necessary details to decide how they attributed responsibility or how they evaluated the killing more generally. There were clearer results from the questions asking about police reform and policy. Those who read the thematic article were more likely to support a reduction in use of force by police officers, supporting the idea that the thematic frame is more persuasive for policy evaluations (Iyengar, 1996 & Gross, 2008). Overall, the thematic frame seemed to be more persuasive for policy evaluations, but the evidence from the thematic-episodic comparisons is not well-defined.

The data relating to public opinion on race elicited clearer results. There is much evidence to support the fact that people who read about a white victim express stronger opposition to the killing of John Taylor, police use of force, the police’s right to shoot, and the police in general. It is clear that there is a significant gap between how Americans view police brutality and police reform when the race of the victim is changed. Much of this was already expected based on the mass of literature on the topic of the black crime narrative. Despite it being expected, it is surprising and telling nonetheless. In some cases, the answers of those in the black victim groups versus the white victim group were starkly different, indicating a serious problem with how Americans view police brutality and black Americans.