Blackness and Criminality in N.C.'s Media System (2024)

Undergraduate: Susie Webb

Faculty Advisor: Francesca Dillman-Carpentier
Department: Hussman School of Journalism and Media

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Ample evidence of disproportionate representation of Black people in crime news exists_x000D_
prior to the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, but relatively little research examines this representation post-2020. There is also little research on race representation in the media content of police departments. In this two-part study, I examine how news organizations and police departments from the same regions in North Carolina portray crime suspects in their online content. Tweets from eight police organizations and crime news from online/broadcast news organizations are analyzed for their images of crime suspects. Findings show that there was a drastic drop in mugshots posted by news outlets and by police on Twitter in 2021 compared to 2019. Furthermore, whereas among the police tweets data there was a statistically significant higher percentage of Black suspects compared to white suspects posted, that finding wasn’t observed in the crime news data. In fact, in 2021 there were statistically more white people posted than Black among the crime news data. Still, both the police social media and crime news images reflect the disparately high proportion of Black people in North Carolina’s criminal justice system compared to general population demographics. Findings of this research contribute to the understanding of how media systems perpetuate the association of Blackness and crime through images.