Cultural violence in news coverage of the George Floyd murder: Exploring media depictions of police brutality toward Black-Americans

Abstract

The 2020 killing of George Floyd by officer Derek Chauvin sparked one of the largest protest movements in the United States. Chauvin was ultimately convicted of murder—a rare but necessary step to police officer accountability for wrongdoing. The media play an important role in framing the public's attitudes surrounding high-profile cases involving police killings of unarmed civilians. The current study investigates media narratives surrounding the Floyd case for evidence of cultural violence, which occurs when direct, physical violence becomes institutionalized, accepted as normative, and legitimized. We looked for evidence of cultural violence across 300 articles from three U.S. newspapers (i.e., New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Star Tribune). We coded for cultural violence themes, which we operationalized as the seven mechanisms of moral disengagement, that is, the process of convincing oneself that ethical standards do not apply. Cultural violence was prevalent across all news outlets (i.e., it occurred in 88.9% of articles in the overall sample). These findings have implications for how media framing influences attitudes surrounding high-profile police brutality cases involving Black victims, and psychological theory related to violence, morality, and racism.