The Effect of Media Coverage on Mass Shootings

No 11900, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Can media coverage of shooters encourage future mass shootings? We explore the link between the day-to-day prime time television news coverage of shootings on ABC World News Tonight and subsequent mass shootings in the US from January 1, 2013 to June 23, 2016. To circumvent latent endogeneity concerns, we employ an instrumental variable strategy: worldwide disaster deaths provide an exogenous variation that systematically crowds out shooting-related coverage. Our findings consistently suggest a positive and statistically significant effect of coverage on the number of subsequent shootings, lasting for 4-10 days. At its mean, news coverage is suggested to cause approximately three mass shootings in the following week, which would explain 55 percent of all mass shootings in our sample. Results are qualitatively consistent when using (i) additional keywords to capture shooting-related news coverage, (ii) alternative definitions of mass shootings, (iii) the number of injured or killed people as the dependent variable, and (iv) an alternative, longer data source for mass shootings from 2006-2016.

Keywords: instrumental variable estimation; media effects; mass shootings; contagion hypothesis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C26 D91 F52 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2018-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul and nep-soc
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Published - final version published as 'News coverage and mass shootings in the US' in: European Economic Review, 2022, 148, 104221

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