A Murder and Protests, the Capitol Riot, and the Chauvin Trial: Estimating Disparate News Media Stances
The 13-month period spanning the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020, the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, Chauvin’s conviction for the Floyd murder on April 21, 2021, and his sentencing on June 25, 2021, were momentous events for policing in the United States, in part due to the sustained media attention given to police practice, conduct and function. Using advanced natural language processing methods, we analyze the different responses of three major media outlets, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, to these seminal events. The differences that we document are consistent with the partisan divide in the viewership of the three outlets.
Daniel S. Nagin is Teresa and H. John Heinz III University Professor of Public Policy and Statistics at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University, and Max Planck Legal Fellow. He is an elected Fellow of the American Society of Criminology, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and American Academy of Political and Social Science, the recipient of the American Society of Criminology’s Edwin H Sutherland Award in 2006, the Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2014, Carnegie Mellon University’s Alumni Distinguished Achievement Award in 2016, and the National Academy of Science Award for Scientific Reviewing in 2017 and 2021 President of the American Society of Criminology.
Ashique KhudaBukhsh is an assistant professor at the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). His current research lies at the intersection of NLP and AI for Social Impact as applied to: (i) globally important events arising in linguistically diverse regions requiring methods to tackle practical challenges involving multilingual, noisy, social media texts; and (ii) polarization in the context of the current U.S. political crisis. In addition to his research having been accepted at top artificial intelligence conferences and journals, his work has also received widespread international media attention that includes coverage from the BBC, Wired, Salon, The Independent, VentureBeat, and Digital Trends.
