Public health framing of firearm violence on local television news in Philadelphia, PA, USA: a quantitative content analysis.

BACKGROUND: Firearm violence is an intensifying public health problem in the United States. News reports shape the way the public and policy makers understand and respond to health threats, including firearm violence. To better understand how firearm violence is communicated to the public, we aimed to determine the extent to which firearm violence is framed as a public health problem on television news and to measure harmful news content as identified by firearm-injured people. METHODS: This is a quantitative content analysis of Philadelphia local television news stories about firearm violence using a database of 7,497 clips. We compiled a stratified sample of clips aired on two randomly selected days/month from January-June 2021 from the database (n = 192 clips). We created a codebook to measure public health frame elements and to assign a harmful content score for each story and then coded the clips. Characteristics of stories containing episodic frames that focus on single shooting events were compared to clips with thematic frames that include broader social context for violence. RESULTS: Most clips employed episodic frames (79.2%), presented law enforcement officials as primary narrators (50.5%), and included police imagery (79.2%). A total of 433 firearm-injured people were mentioned, with a mean of 2.8 individuals shot included in each story. Most of the firearm-injured people featured in the clips (67.4%) had no personal information presented apart from age and/or gender. The majority of clips (84.4%) contained at least one harmful content element. The mean harmful content score/clip was 2.6. Public health frame elements, including epidemiologic context, root causes, public health narrators and visuals, and solutions were missing from most clips. Thematic stories contained significantly more public health frame elements and less harmful content compared to episodic stories. CONCLUSIONS: Local television news produces limited public health coverage of firearm violence, and harmful content is common. This reporting likely compounds trauma experienced by firearm-injured people and could impede support for effective public health responses to firearm violence. Journalists should work to minimize harmful news content and adopt a public health approach to reporting on firearm violence.

Systematic disparities in reporting on community firearm violence on local television news in Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Objective: To better understand how community firearm violence (CFV) is communicated to the public, we aimed to identify systematic differences between the characteristics of shooting victims and events covered on television news and all shootings in Philadelphia, PA, a city with escalating CFV incidence. Methods: We compiled a stratified sample of local television news clips covering shootings that occurred in Philadelphia aired on two randomly selected days per month from January-June 2021 (n = 154 clips). We coded the clips to determine demographic and geographic information about the shooting victims and events and then matched coded shootings with corresponding shootings in the Philadelphia police database. We compared characteristics of shooting victims and shooting event locations depicted in television clips (n = 62) with overall characteristics of shootings in Philadelphia during the study period (n = 1082). Results: Compared to all individuals shot, victims whose shootings were covered on local television news more likely to be children and more likely to be shot in a mass shooting. The average median household income of shooting locations featured on television was significantly higher than the median household income across all shooting locations ($60,302 for television shootings vs. $41,233 for all shootings; p = 0.002). Shootings featured on television occurred in areas with lower rates of income inequality and racialized economic segregation compared to all shooting locations. Conclusions: Television news outlets in Philadelphia systematically over-reported shootings of children, mass shootings, and shootings that occurred in neighborhoods with higher median household income, less socioeconomic inequality, and lower rates of racialized economic segregation.