Gross, Kimberly2023-06-022006Gross, Kimberly. "Covering Crime in Washington, D.C.: Examining the Nature of Local Television News Coverage of Crime and its Effect on Emotional Response." Shorenstein Center Research Paper Series 2006.R-28, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2006.https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37375925This paper examines the nature of local television news coverage of crime and its effects on emotional response. Specifically, I present the results of a content analysis of two months of local television news coverage of crime from a network affiliate in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Consistent with what others have found regarding local television news, I find that most local news crime stories are episodic in nature and focus on violent crime, particularly murder. Moreover, there is a specific racial cast to this coverage – significant attention is given to black perpetrators while black victims are under-covered. Using an experiment that compared two types of crime stories taken from the content analysis to explore how coverage influences viewers’ emotional reactions, I find, contrary to my expectation, that a thematic story about violent crime generates greater and more varied emotional response than an episodic story dealing with a specific murder. When I vary the race of the perpetrator portrayed in the episodic story to try to examine the influence of the prevalence of visuals of black perpetrators in the crime coverage, I do not find differences in how participants in this study respond to the murder story based on the race of the perpetrator. I discuss the implications of my findings and suggest future directions for this research.en-USResearch Paper or Report2023-06-02