Covering the Dawsons: Racial Variation in Newspaper Framing of Urban Crime

Abstract

This article uses newspaper coverage of a case from Baltimore, Maryland, to explore racial variation in the rhetorical framing of urban crime. In October 2002, seven members of the Dawson family were murdered in a house fire. The murders became an expression of Baltimore’s character and the lives of its residents. After analyzing 206 newspaper articles about the case, we find stark differences in the way the case, its causes, and its consequences are presented to readers. Newspapers with primarily white audiences—both “mainstream” and “alternative” papers—present the case as a horrific, singular instance, placing responsibility on the perpetrator. In contrast, articles in African American newspapers offer a complex web of explanation, calling attention to the structural inequalities and disparate access to state resources. Whereas white newspaper portray the Dawson family as martyrs in the drug war, black newspapers position the family as part of a wider of community of African Americans who are victims of slack policing, racial discrimination, and negligent social policy. We argue that these rhetorical differences are more than cosmetic. Rather, they provide a framework for better understanding the relationship between the press and policy makers. Differences in coverage of the case also contribute to our understanding of why blacks and whites have fundamentally different understandings of race in the United States.

The Current Community Context of Overdose Deaths: Relations among Drug Types, Drug Markets, and Socioeconomic Neighborhood Characteristics1

“…Increases in opioid overdose deaths, and fentanyl's involvement in them, have been pronounced throughout the nation (Jalal et al, 2018). The contemporary narrative of opioid overdoses stresses the reach into middle-class America (Fields and Newman 2020;Netherland and Hansen 2016;McLean 2017) while theories that emphasize the interrelationship of proneness to substance use and market availability suggest that lower-income communities might face the most severe consequences of the epidemic (e.g., Dasgupta et al, 2018). Our results show that overdose death risks from fentanyl are not equally distributed in the population.…”

Comparing Coverage of Black Protests in Mainstream Newswires and Black Newspapers

“…Huspek (2004) compares the coverage of local White and Black newspapers of the 1998 police killing of Tyisha Miller in Riverside, California, finding that Black newspapers gave extensive coverage of Black activists and allegations of evidence of racial bias among the police and broader racial conflicts in the community, while the White papers relied on official sources, printed details about the victim's life and state of mind that were irrelevant to how she had been killed, ignored details about the officers' lives and actions, and disparaged the Black activists who were protesting. Fields and Newman (2020) compare Black and White newspaper coverage of a Baltimore 2002 incident in which seven members of a Black family were murdered in a house fire. Papers with White audiences, both mainstream and alternative, tended to portray the even as a horrible singular incident with the family as martyrs in the drug war, Black newspapers discussed structural inequalities, disparate access to resources, racial discrimination, lax policing, and poor social policy.…”

Attributing Responsibility When Police Officers are Killed in the Line of Duty: An Ethnographic Content Analysis of Local Print News Media Frames

“…It also follows that, through the process of framing, news media stories tend to favor the interpretations of events and social issues advanced by some claimsmakers rather than others (Ericson et al 1991; Fields and Newman 2020). Thacker Thomas and Vermilya (2019) suggest that that way news media frame incidents substantiates existing social hierarchies.…”

“…Because most people have little direct interaction with the police and other criminal justice entities (Braga et al 2014; Davis et al 2018; Kort‐Butler and Habecker 2018; Surette 2015), the public relies on news media stories for information about crime and justice issues (Chermak 1994; Fields and Newman 2020), including the circumstances in which police officers are killed. It is within the contexts of such social crises that police and news media work collaboratively to help the public in making sense of police officer deaths (Manning 1997).…”