Media Coverage of Mass shootings and Attitudes Towards Muslims

Using television news coverage of American mass shootings, I examine how Muslim perpetrators of violence are covered differently in liberal and conservative media. Furthermore, I examine the consequences of this coverage, including its effects on prejudice towards Muslims and beliefs about the extent to which Muslims are responsible for acts of violence. In Study 1, I show that between 2010 and 2020, television news networks allocated more coverage to Muslim than non-Muslim mass shooters, even when statistically controlling for other factors influencing coverage (e.g. fatalities, location). The increase in coverage for Muslim shooters was larger for more politically conservative news networks. In Study 2, I test whether news coverage of Muslim mass shootings can increase negative attitudes towards Muslims. Across five different experiments with a total of 3331 participants, I did not find evidence that this is the case. The remaining studies examine whether media coverage can impact beliefs about the role Muslims play in mass shootings. In Study 3, I find that public beliefs about mass shootings mirror the picture presented in television news: people overestimate the percentage of mass shooters who are Muslim, and this overestimation is largest among frequent viewers of news networks that allocate more coverage to Muslim shooters. Study 4 used an experiment to demonstrate that exposure to news coverage of a Muslim mass shooter increases the extent to which people overestimate the percentage of mass shooters who are Muslim. Study 5 replicates this finding by comparing responses to media coverage of the 2021 shootings in Boulder, Colorado and Atlanta, Georgia, two contemporaneous mass shootings with Muslim and Christian perpetrators. Finally, Study 6A and 6B find that, because many people assume an unidentified mass shooter is likely to be Muslim, exposure to news coverage of an unidentified shooter also increases the extent to which people overestimate of the percentage of mass shooters who are Muslim. Overall, I demonstrate that major news networks provide systematically different media coverage of mass shootings when the perpetrator is Muslim. This coverage fuels misperceptions about the role Muslims play in causing mass shootings and may misdirect efforts to effectively address mass violence