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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06812 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06812/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [NRC VAD Lexicon v2: Norms for Valence, Arousal, and Dominance for over 55k English Terms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23547/) (2025)
- [F-coref: Fast, Accurate and Easy to Use Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04280/) (2022)
- [To Protect and To Serve? Analyzing Entity-Centric Framing of Police Violence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05325/) (2021)
- [Multi-Modal Framing Analysis of News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20960/) (2025)
- [Developing Speech Processing Pipelines for Police Accountability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06086/) (2023)
- [Does Local News Stay Local?: Online Content Shifts in Sinclair-Acquired Stations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07060/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We perform the largest known computational analysis of Canadian news narratives about police-involved deaths, spanning 4,000 articles from the last quarter-century. We develop a novel computational model, PerspectiveGap, grounded in prior sociological work on media representation of policing. We find that reporting on police-involved deaths on average features perspectives from state bureaucrats at a rate nearly three times as much as perspectives from other members of the public, including relatives, community members, eyewitnesses, lawyers representing the family, or civil liberties groups. A considerable fraction of articles contain no points of view from civilian actors, though civilian representation has increased in recent years. Qualitatively, we find that state bureaucrats' accounts of these deaths tend to be clinical and procedural, while civilian discourse carries considerably more emotional valence. The PerspectiveGap framework developed here can be contextualized to other jurisdictions, offering a scalable approach for analyzing how media systems construct narratives around policing and accountability.