Quantifying Media Representation Dynamics Across 25 Years of News Reporting on Policing-related Deaths

2026-06-04

AI Summary

This study addresses the structural imbalance between official and civilian perspectives in Canadian news coverage of police-involved deaths over the past 25 years. Drawing on sociological theory, we propose PerspectiveGap—an extensible computational framework that integrates natural language processing and computational social science methods—to identify and quantify speaking actors and their discursive features across 4,000 news articles. Our analysis reveals that official voices appear approximately three times as frequently as civilian ones, with many reports entirely omitting civilian perspectives. Although civilian representation has modestly increased in recent years, their discourse exhibits greater emotional intensity, whereas official narratives remain procedural and clinical. This work presents the first large-scale quantification of the power–civilian perspective gap in media storytelling, offering a novel paradigm for research on media equity.

Abstract

We perform the largest known computational analysis of Canadian news narratives about police-involved deaths, spanning 4,000 articles from the last quarter-century. We develop a novel computational model, PerspectiveGap, grounded in prior sociological work on media representation of policing. We find that reporting on police-involved deaths on average features perspectives from state bureaucrats at a rate nearly three times as much as perspectives from other members of the public, including relatives, community members, eyewitnesses, lawyers representing the family, or civil liberties groups. A considerable fraction of articles contain no points of view from civilian actors, though civilian representation has increased in recent years. Qualitatively, we find that state bureaucrats' accounts of these deaths tend to be clinical and procedural, while civilian discourse carries considerably more emotional valence. The PerspectiveGap framework developed here can be contextualized to other jurisdictions, offering a scalable approach for analyzing how media systems construct narratives around policing and accountability.

Problem

• media representation
• police-involved deaths
• news narratives
• perspective disparity
• accountability

Innovation

• PerspectiveGap
• media representation
• police-involved deaths
• computational narrative analysis
• discourse bias