What’s the Story? The Impact of Race/Ethnicity on Crime Story Tone for Female Offenders

Abstract

We examined how a female offender’s race/ethnicity influenced the tone of a crime story. Our thematic content analysis of front-page articles from four nationally available U.S. newspapers suggested that stories about minority female offenders were more likely to have negative tones, overall, than were stories about white female offenders. This finding held even after we considered the type of offense committed and the degree of front-page news coverage. The more negative depictions of minority females may explain their harsher treatment by the criminal justice system.

Appendix A. Measurement of the Overall Story Salience Variable

Our measure of a story’s salience considered attributes related to a story’s physical placement on the front page as well as several other physical characteristics. It is important for one to consider a multitude of features that may work in tandem to enhance an article’s salience. In order for us to construct our overall measure of story salience, we borrowed some methodological insights from previous researchers (i.e., Buckler & Travis, 2005; Budd, 1964; Chermak, 1998; Grabe et al., 2006; Johnstone et al., 1994; Mawby & Brown, 1984) to create a 13-point scale that summarized the amount of visual attention given a particular front-page story. The more important indicators of story salience received more points (i.e., such indicators carried more weight).

Table 4.3 presents the distributions for the seven variables used to create our 13-point scale as well as the number of points assigned to each variable’s attributes.

Table 4.3 Measures of story salience and point values (N  =  159)

First, a story’s placement above the center fold on the front page is one of the most important measures of physical prominence (Budd, 1964; Chermak, 1998; Grabe et al., 2006). This is because the top portion of the newspaper is what is displayed in newsstands or is likely to be visible when a newspaper is merely lying around (e.g., on a coffee table, at a convenience store check-out, or under the door of a hotel room). A story positioned above the fold, therefore, gets the most attention from readers or from those who merely have an opportunity to glance at it. Because placement above the fold is the most important determinant of story salience in our study, stories received four points if they were located above the center fold (47.8% of stories) and zero points if they appeared below the center fold (52.2% of stories).

Stories with photographs also attract more attention than stories without photographs (Budd, 1964; Grabe et al., 2006; Mawby & Brown, 1984; Thorson, 1995), and readers are more likely to be drawn to stories that are accompanied by larger photographs than by smaller ones. Therefore, when a photograph was present, we coded its size; larger photographs received more points.¹⁰ Specifically, Table 4.3 shows that stories with small photographs received one point (21.4%), stories with medium-sized photographs received two points (9.4%), and stories with large photographs received three points (13.8%). If a story did not have any photograph, it received zero points (55.3%).

The placement of a story on the front page was also taken into account. Stories that are aligned on either the left-hand side of the page or in the center are more likely to be the lead stories of the day (Budd, 1964; Mawby & Brown, 1984; Pollak & Kurbin, 2007). In addition, individuals in American society read from left to right, so these are the stories that readers are likely to notice more quickly. Therefore, two points were assigned if the article appeared on the left side of the paper or in the center of the page. A total of 109 stories (68.6%) received two points (40.3% originated on the left side of the page and 28.3% were located in the center of the page). The remaining 50 stories (31.4%) were aligned on the right side of the page and received no points.

We also considered the amount of space devoted to a story’s headline because others have noted that this relates to a story’s prominence (see, for example, Grabe et al., 2006). Therefore, we assessed and coded whether the headlines were small, medium, or large based on their size relative to other headlines that appeared in a given newspaper.¹¹ Small headlines accompanied 60 (37.7%) articles and medium headlines appeared with 71 (44.7%) stories. Points were not assigned to stories with small or medium headline sizes (82.4%) because they are not as prominent as stories with large headlines. The 28 stories with large headlines (17.6%), in contrast, received two points.

Table 4.3 further indicates that the second headline characteristic we considered was its width, defined as the number of columns it spanned. Because the majority of papers we reviewed had six columns on the front page, we considered stories to be prominent when their headlines spanned at least half of the front page (i.e., three or more columns). While headline width is an important factor to consider in the measurement of salience, it does not have as much influence as other features. This is partly because the font size of headlines may be relatively small even when the headline spans three or more columns. Therefore, consistent with other research, we assigned one point to stories with relatively wider headlines. Only one-third of headlines were three or more columns wide; these stories were assigned one point. Those with smaller headlines (66.7%) were assigned no points.

The final indicator of crime story salience reflected the number of paragraphs that appeared on the front page. In our study, the number of paragraphs on the front page ranged from one (21 stories, or 13.2%) to 24 (1 story, or 0.6%). The mean number of paragraphs was 5.51 per story, with a standard deviation value of 3.01. These statistics, along with the values reported for skewness (1.48) and kurtosis (7.97) indicated that this variable was not normally distributed. In order to address these issues, Table 4.3 indicates that we grouped stories with fewer than six paragraphs (48.4% of all stories) into one category and stories with more than six ­paragraphs (51.6%) into another. Because the longer stories were more noticeable, they received one point; shorter stories received no points.¹²