Corporate news coverage of gun violence in the United States skews heavily toward mass shootings. The establishment press almost never reports on community-level gun violence, defined by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions as incidents involving “non-intimately related individuals in cities.”
Although community gun violence reflects the deep-rooted inequities of systemic racism—including redlining, exclusionary zoning, and mass incarceration—mass shootings, which represent roughly 1 percent of U.S. gun violence, “Soak up about 95 percent of the oxygen in terms of the national conversation on gun violence,” Michael Anestis, of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University, told The New York Times last year. This skewed coverage shapes the public’s understanding of American gun violence, undermining popular support for community programs that treat it as an urgent public health issue.
Corporate reporting on gun violence often marginalizes community-based solutions, because journalists typically favor sources with official, bureaucratic statuses, such as current and former law enforcement officers and elected officials. As a result, the establishment press typically fails to treat community leaders and activists, whose statuses are unofficial, as newsworthy actors or commentators, negatively impacting coverage of community gun violence.
The following case study of community gun violence in Chicago, as reported between April and June 2022, illustrates problematic patterns in news coverage that correspond to broader conventions in reporting of gun violence that a colleague, Sam Peacock, and I documented in a quantitative analysis of differences between corporate and independent news coverage of community gun violence.
In May 2022, a gunman fatally shot sixteen-year-old Seandell Holliday in downtown Chicago’s Millennium Park. Within days, then Mayor Lori Lightfoot imposed a 10 p.m. curfew for the city’s minors, which the Chicago City Council later voted to make permanent, drawing harsh criticism from local officials, such as Alderperson Roderick Sawyer, who insisted the policy was vague and would only serve to alienate Black and brown youth.
That summer, sixty-five local advocacy groups, including A Just Harvest and the Chicago Community Bond Fund, protested the curfew, urging Lightfoot to invest in noncarceral, community-based programs. The Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) budget for 2023 increased to $2 billion, up roughly $340 million since 2019.
Prior to Holliday’s tragic death, the Chicago Tribune ran several pieces about Chicago’s “downtown violence.” However, these reports highlighted how gun violence in the city’s center might affect tourism or tax revenue and put additional pressure on CPD. That summer, the Chicago Tribune often framed gun violence in specific communities as a threat to Chicago’s city center, instead of a concern in its own right. By contrast, the local nonprofit Chicago newspaper South Side Weekly argued in 2017 that Chicago daily papers often pay “lip service to the idea that the city’s gun violence crisis has systemic origins, but still [treat] this violence as an endless series of random acts.”
In September 2020, Lightfoot had launched the “Our City, Our Safety” plan, which set aside roughly $411 million to pursue a “holistic approach” to reducing Chicago’s gun violence by investing in affordable housing, jobs, education, and other community resources. The plan specifically focused on fifteen Chicago neighborhoods with higher rates of violence, including West Pullman and North Lawndale, but by July 2021, as West Pullman experienced a rise in gun violence, it had seen none of Lightfoot’s promised funds.
In 2021, Lance Williams, an urban studies professor at Northeastern Illinois University, told the Chicago Sun-Times that the Lightfoot administration may have acted prematurely in rolling out such a lofty plan without the resources to “make it actionable.”
While downtown shootings spiked in 2022, gun violence in downtown neighborhoods such as the Loop and River North still accounted for a small percentage of the city’s overall gun violence. Nevertheless, coverage of violence in these neighborhoods, which are predominantly white, accounted for 15 percent of the Chicago Tribune’s reporting in our quantitative analysis of forty-six stories published between April 14, 2022, and June 24, 2022. By contrast, shootings on Chicago’s South and West Sides accounted for less than 10 percent of the Tribune’s stories, despite constituting a substantial proportion of the city’s gun violence.
In 2020, Black Americans were victims in 61 percent of all gun homicides, yet they represented 12.5 percent of the total U.S. population. In 2021, 80 percent of gun-related homicide victims in Chicago were Black, despite Black people making up 28 percent of the city’s total population.
Chicago’s decades-long history of disinvestment in public infrastructure on the city’s South and West Sides has resulted in a major crisis that disproportionately affects Black and brown people. The migration of businesses and middle-class residents out of central U.S. cities beginning in the 1940s resulted in reduced revenues for city governments. Jobs in manufacturing vanished, leading to concentrated poverty and homelessness in central city neighborhoods. Frustration and grief over discriminatory policies and a lack of funding and adequate leadership culminated in widespread violence across the nation’s major cities between 1963 and 1968, peaking shortly after the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
But instead of investing in public housing, schools, and other core community institutions, the federal government “responded with punitive social policies” that compounded the plight of central city residents.
Covering mass shootings as though they’re the most frequent type of gun violence further marginalizes communities that experience gun violence on a near-daily basis.
In June 2022, the local nonprofit news site Block Club Chicago covered Sawyer’s push for a new city ordinance to help launch the Office of Neighborhood Safety, which would oversee and draft a “comprehensive, long-term plan to address violence.” Sawyer’s proposal overhauled the existing Community Safety Coordination Center that Lightfoot had launched the previous year and followed Lightfoot’s “Connected Communities Ordinance,” a proposal to expand development near public transit. Sawyer called Lightfoot’s system a “flash in the pan” that lacked proper funding.
Along with a handful of city alderpeople, members of the local youth organization Good Kids Mad City introduced the Peace Book Ordinance, which would set aside 2 percent of the Chicago Police Department’s annual budget to fund a “youth-led violence reduction organization” focused on “reducing intercommunal violence and overpolicing.”
In May 2022, Block Club Chicago reported that Chicago’s West Side neighborhoods saw a 58 percent reduction in gun violence as a result of violence interruption programs. In the fall of 2021, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, declared gun violence a public health emergency and pledged $50 million to violence interruption programs for the following year. This was a direct result of the tireless work of community outreach organizations such as Centers for New Horizons and the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago.
According to Pritzker, the $50 million, from state and federal funding, will be used to support grants for community programs that tackle the systemic causes of gun violence, including “institutionalized racism in housing, health care, job opportunities, and family support services.”
The lack of news coverage of community-level gun violence fosters a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. Community-based solutions and direct preventive programs exist in cities all over the country, but it’s taken years for governmental support to catch up.
Cure Violence Global, originally launched as CeaseFire in Chicago’s West Garfield Park neighborhood in 2000, was the first to enlist the help of violence interrupters, often local paraprofessional health workers trained to identify and mediate conflict. Within its first year, the program led to a 67 percent reduction in interpersonal gun violence. More than two decades later, in 2022, Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which allocated $250 million for community-based violence prevention initiatives, such as violence interrupting programs.
But when The New York Times and The Washington Post covered the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, articles focused entirely on specific gun legislation in the bill, never mentioning funding for violence intervention programs geared toward combating community-level gun violence. This narrow focus erased the community advocates and organizations doing the difficult and often under-resourced work of creating systemic change.
Establishment news outlets repeatedly cite politicians and government officials as the most significant sources on gun violence, and this framing prevents readers from learning about those who are imagining solutions to gun violence outside of gun legislation. Covering mass shootings as though they’re the most frequent type of gun violence further marginalizes communities that experience gun violence on a near-daily basis and, moreover, leaves them without access to proactive, lifesaving support.
Editor’s note: This is a shortened version of a long-form article that originally appeared in the series “Dispatches from Project Censored: On Media and Politics.”