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

A computational analysis of 4,000 Canadian news articles spanning 25 years found that state bureaucrats' perspectives on police-involved deaths appear nearly three times as often as those of civilian actors, according to a study posted to arXiv this month [1]. The study introduces PerspectiveGap, a computational model designed to measure whose voices dominate news narratives about policing-related fatalities [1]. Researchers applied the model to articles published over the last quarter-century and reported that the median article devoted 33.3% of its passages to state bureaucrat perspectives, compared with 11.8% to civilian-based accounts [3]. Civilian actors in the study included relatives, community members, eyewitnesses, lawyers representing families, and civil liberties groups [2]. A considerable fraction of the articles contained no civilian points of view at all, though the study notes that civilian representation has increased in recent years, particularly between 2020 and 2023 [1][3]. The authors also observed significant variation across news outlets in how often civilian-centric coverage appeared [3]. Qualitatively, the analysis found that state bureaucrats' descriptions of deaths tended to be clinical and procedural, while civilian discourse carried considerably more emotional valence [2][4]. The researchers frame this imbalance as a question of epistemic authority — who gets to narrate deadly-force incidents — and cite prior sociological work arguing that police "arguably remain the first authorities to speak about, and therefore frame, the issues in most mainstream media accounts of crime" [3]. The PerspectiveGap framework was built to be portable. The authors state it can be contextualized to other jurisdictions, offering a scalable method for examining how media systems construct narratives around policing and accountability [1][2]. The project's code has been made publicly available on GitHub [3]. Related computational work on U.S. media has shown that high-profile police killings can influence how news outlets frame other deaths, and that protest activity often precedes shifts in media framing decisions [5]. The Canadian study extends this line of inquiry by quantifying representation gaps over a longer time horizon and across a different national media ecosystem.