A Quantitative Content Analysis of Political Bias Impacting Mass Shooting Coverage: Comparing a Liberal News Outlet with Gun Archive Data for the Time Period 2014–2019

Mass shootings continue to plague the United States, even during a global pandemic. Superficial changes in an attempt to combat mass shootings have been made while avoiding systemic issues related to mass shootings. A potential systemic method to deal with mass shootings is to change how media cover...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author Chapman, Kate
Format Dissertation
LanguageEnglish
Published ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2021
Subjects
Criminology
Journalism
Political science
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Summary:Mass shootings continue to plague the United States, even during a global pandemic. Superficial changes in an attempt to combat mass shootings have been made while avoiding systemic issues related to mass shootings. A potential systemic method to deal with mass shootings is to change how media covers such events. Articles from the archive of the Huffington Post were selected from the observation period of 2014 through 2019. Variables related to three categorical groups were coded to determine how these events differed across the observation period. The results indicate that multiple variables of interest related to event-based statistics impacted the coverage of a mass shooting. Multiple forms of follow-up coverage of a mass shooting event were found to be statistically significant. Political bias was found to be present in multiple follow-up coverage categories outside of coverage of politician comment/action and political commentary coverage.
ISBN:9798780631705