In recent years, public health scholars and policymakers have been calling for increased research on the public health implications of gun violence. However, scientific research on this issue has been stifled by a 1996 budget rider that eliminated Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) funding for gun research. In this study, we examined newspaper coverage of three mass shootings that took place over a 20-year period before and after the passage of this budget rider. We found that sources and frames provided by news media to contextualize gun violence shifted markedly over time, progressing from episodic and individual-level frames to broader thematic societal-level concerns, with increased discussion of mental health but limited discourse explicitly related to public health.
The problem of school shootings has attracted extensive media attention, especially since the Columbine shooting, a watershed event that pushed the issue of school shootings to the forefront of media coverage. This paper examines the themes present in British editorial coverage of school shootings in the decade between April 1999, the month of the Columbine shooting, and April 2009, using ideological analysis to identify themes present in British editorial newspaper coverage. Articles were drawn from the Times of London and the Independent. Major themes that emerged were widespread disgust with a disordered and unhealthy American gun culture and firearms legislation, a focus on gratuitous and violent entertainment media, and a frustration with unethical media coverage of these tragic events.The 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, was not the first of its kind. Dozens of similar shootings preceded it, both in the United States and Europe. But the Columbine shooting was notable in one striking way: It was the first to play out before live audiences on cable news. The themes present in the prolonged media narrative that emerged in the wake of the shooting set the stage for coverage of future school shootings that soon followed. It was, in many ways, an analog to the paradigm shift that accompanied news coverage of the first Gulf War-the exhaustive, cyclical, round-the-clock news coverage that followed the shooting represented a permanent change in public discourse about school shootings. Columbine marked a watershed in coverage of these kinds of tragedies.Another thing that set Columbine apart was its scale. At the time, it was the deadliest school shooting in American history, and European media-especially British media-were quick to decry an ''epidemic of teenage gun violence'' (Whittell, 1999),
This article reports the results of a training program developed and delivered under a state grant by the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota for the news and advertising employees at the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
This study uses discourse analysis to examine the arc of cable news media coverage of the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque", a proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan that sparked widespread controversy. This article analyzes both the nature and duration of mainstream cable news coverage of the controversy and the major arguments put forth by those both supporting and opposing the center in the politically charged post-September 11 media environment. Google Trends data were employed to examine the duration of the controversy both in terms of broader media coverage and search volume for the term "Ground Zero Mosque" online. This study found several consistent trends in terms of the sources present in cable coverage opposing the center, as well as a very narrow set of talking points that underline the presence of what other researchers have identified as an Islamophobic network of individuals and organizations present in American mass media discourse.
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