Partisan Bias in the Reporting of the Parkland School Shooting
Completely contradictory narratives have formed over the framing of and reactions to mass shootings
By: Mila Seppälä
I began working on my PhD dissertation at the University of Turku in Finland in 2019 while I was a researcher in a project that examined how the U.S. and Finnish media reported on mass shootings. The Helsingin Sanomat Foundation had just funded the project in the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting in 2018 and the historically large March For Our Lives protest marches that the Parkland students organized.
I was an American studies student conducting my degree in political science, and at the time I had only vague ideas about what my dissertation would be about. I was just excited to get the opportunity to work on a real research project after I had graduated from my master’s program. After the project though, I had made up my mind. I wanted to study the gun control movement in the United States, or the gun violence prevention movement as I later came to know it.
I turned the research I had done at the TRAGE project into my first dissertation article. Unfortunately, the article was lost in a two-year limbo at an editor’s desk. In between, something called COVID-19 happened. I moved to the U.S. for a year and then back to Finland.
For these reasons and many others, it was only last year I managed to find a home for my article titled “Partisan Media Bias in the Framing of the Parkland School Shooting and the March For Our Lives Movement” at the Journal of Mass Violence Research.
The JMVR is a great new journal dedicated to sharing rigorous, non-partisan, and multidisciplinary research related to mass violence, sponsored by the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government. I especially appreciated how well they looked after junior scholars, which is often not the case.
Using a collection of national newspaper articles with both left-wing and right-wing political leanings, I examined the influence of partisan bias on the reporting of the Parkland school shooting and the March For Our Lives activist movement that followed it.
I found two completely contradictory narratives about how the shooting was framed and how the activists and their message about gun control was framed.
71% of the time, left-leaning media referred to policies that would regulate guns positively while government inaction and the political influence of the gun lobby were blamed for the recurrence of mass shootings. Left-leaning media were even more positive about Parkland activists. 78% of the time, they framed them positively and represented them as having the generational power necessary to change the trajectory of gun politics.
In turn, right-leaning media framed gun control policies negatively 70% of the time and countered them with the need to focus instead on school security, which almost always was synonymous with arming teachers. They also blamed the FBI, the county police department, and other local school officials for allowing the mass shooting to happen. Curiously, right-leaning media were moderately more positive toward the activists themselves compared to the policies they suggested. Still, 59% of the time they framed the youth activists negatively, depicting them as naïve, brainwashed, or just too young to participate in politics.
Previous research has found mental illness and violent popular culture to be featured prominently in media reporting of mass shootings as the potential cause for why such things happened. In the case of Parkland, mental illness was not featured often in the narratives, violent popular culture even less so.
It would seem that mass shooting reporting has solidified around the conversation about gun control and along arguments that support such policies or are diametrically opposed to it, such as arming teachers.
Overall, the results of my research are not surprising or new to anyone who pays attention to news media. In fact, it might be more surprising to know that the partisan bias that we see so clearly reflected here is a relatively new phenomenon. Thus, comparatively little research has been done on the influence of partisan bias particularly on mass shooting reporting.
Still, when I began my research, I already worried I might be too late with my contribution. In the four years it took to get my research published, my worries grew exponentially. However, I was comforted by my PhD supervisor saying that repetition is the key to all social sciences. Social problems are as complex as the humans that produce them, and in order to confidently say anything about a problem there needs to be countless studies done that consider all the different factors that can influence it.
Most people’s understanding of events such as school shootings is entirely built by the media that reports on them. As media studies scholar Andy Ruddock says, “school shootings are literally unimaginable and unexecutable without media” (2012, 13).
Even now, when more people get their news from social media rather than by following the reporting of legacy media, our understanding of the events and the arguments about gun control are shaped by the decades of reporting that have come before.
To both researchers and activists, my study attempts to offer nuance to the discussions over how mass shootings are framed, how gun control narratives take shape in media, and what opportunities and difficulties there are for advocates hoping to get their message through.
References
Ruddock, A. (2012). School Shootings and Cultivation Analysis: On Confrontational Media Rhetoric and the History of Research on the Politics of Media Violence. In G. W. Muschert & J. Sumiala (Eds.), School Shootings: Mediatized Violence in a Global Age (Vol. 7, pp. 3–24). Emerald Group Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2050-2060(2012)0000007005.
Seppälä, M. (2024). Partisan media bias in the framing of the Parkland school shooting and the March For Our Lives movement. Journal of Mass Violence Research. https://doi.org/10.53076/JMVR53552.
Mila Seppälä is a PhD candidate at the John Morton Center for North American Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. In her dissertation, she examines the gun violence prevention movement in the United States.
Photo via The Network for Public Health Law.