Black Americans and the “crime narrative”: comments on the use of news frames and their impacts on public opinion formation

Abstract

ABSTRACTNews framing choices remain critical components in the formation of political attitudes and public opinion. Early findings, which indicated that episodic framing of national issues like poverty and unemployment informed public opinion about minority group members, asserted that these framing choices often resulted in the attribution of societal ills to individuals rather than society at-large. Moving this analytical framework into the twenty-first century, I engage with literature on racial messaging to show that shifting social norms surrounding implicit versus explicit racism have transformed the ways that news frames function in mass media. As such, this essay examines the canonical theory of news frames as falling along a thematic-episodic continuum. Fundamentally, I argue that implicit and explicit racial messaging in news media coverage of crime could change the way viewers form opinions of Black Americans and criminality. Thus, it is critical to revisit longstanding theories of news frames to accommodate the present political moment.