Written All Over Their Faces: Neutrality and Nonverbal Expression in Sandy Hook Coverage

Abstract

During crises, it’s challenging for journalists to keep their emotions out of reports. While broadcast journalists try to keep linguistic messages neutral, nonverbal behaviors are difficult to conceal. Graber’s stages of crisis coverage theory discusses routines of covering crisis and preventing verbal bias but doesn’t examine nonverbal bias. This study examines the neutrality of nonverbal expressions conveyed during the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School through the lens of the stages of crisis coverage theory. This study provides insight for understanding the responses news organizations should have in terms of crisis coverage. By examining the ways that the influence of emotional events have on the nonverbal expressivity of journalists during crisis, researchers can better understand the ritualization of the nonverbal neutrality standards of the profession and make recommendations on potential ways that the field could adapt their current crisis plans to consider nonverbal communication displays more explicitly. Further, by combining crisis planning, media ritualization practices, and journalistic nonverbal expression, this research provides further insight into how performance by media during a crisis can influence cultural meaning about the event for viewers. The findings in this study also suggest the stages of crisis coverage theory was not upheld by broadcasters in this context, calling for reexamination of the theory’s uses and applications to all crisis coverage.

Media and Mass Shootings: Field Theory in CNN News Coverage of the Columbine High School and Parkland High School Mass Shootings

“…Likely the enduring norm of emphasizing the perpetrator has its roots in the newsworthiness long-established in mass shooting coverage (Muschert & Carr, 2006). Journalists, in their effort to move from the difficult emotions of the reporting (Deavours, 2020) would naturally seek to produce more explanatory pieces. Yet it is in those explanatory pieces that journalists would find themselves seeking the antecedents for the shooting event in the shooters background (Pelled et al, 2021).…”

“…Certain norms have shifted with the development of technology (Ferrucci & Perreault, 2021), notably the emphasis on live coverage (Kananovich & Perreault, 2021Matsa, 2017. This has had implications for coverage of crisis events over time with a greater degree of misinformation tending to be shared between confirmed reports (Deavours, 2020). Deavours (2020) compared the Sandy Hook school shooting with news coverage of 9/11, with an interest in the journalistic norm of neutrality-a norm journalists struggled to enact not only in the dissemination of the facts of the event themselves but also given concerns for their own safety in onscene reporting situations (Henrichsen, 2021;Lisosky & Henrichsen, 2009).…”

News Media Coverage of Gun Violence: A Systematic Review

“…Many of the studies have as their primary goals the identification and enumeration of the narrative frames used in coverage of shooting incidents. In fact, of the 52 studies addressing our second research question, 60% (n = 31) are of this variety, and nearly all study mass shootings (Alaimo, 2022;Altheide, 2009;Beard et al, 2019;Boulahnane, 2019;Carlson, 2016;Cassidy et al, 2018;Chyi and McCombs, 2004;Deavours, 2020;Durosky et al, 2023;Emelu, 2023;Hagan et al, 2002;Hodges, 2015;Holody and Daniel, 2017;Holody and Shaughnessy, 2022;Holody et al, 2013;Keenan and Greene, 2019;Lawrence and Birkland, 2004;McGinty et al, 2014;McKeever et al, 2022;McWhorter, 2022;Meyer, 2020;Mills, 2017;Morse, 2023;Mosqueda et al, 2023;Mourão et al, 2021;Muschert and Carr, 2006;el Nawawy and Elmasry, 2018;Obasogie and Newman, 2016;Stone and Socia, 2019;Turetsky and Riddle, 2018;Valcore and Buckler, 2020) Of those 31 studies, 77% (n = 24) study a single shooting incident and examine, in most cases, five or fewer media sources (Alaimo, 2022;Altheide, 2009;Boulahnane, 2019;Cassidy et al, 2018;Chyi and McCombs, 2004;Deavours, 2020;Emelu, 2...…”