Citizen Journalism and Public Cynicism toward Police in the USA
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Citizen Journalism and Public Cynicism toward Police in the USA Lana M. Browning 1 & Mara Merlino 1 & Johnathon Sharp 1
# Society for Police and Criminal Psychology 2020
Abstract The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of the source of media imagery on participant cynicism toward the police and explore the relationship between media source and the severity of sanctions imposed on police as a result of the portrayed actions. Participants (N = 93) completed a semantic differential scale measuring participants’ attitudes toward members of various occupations followed by a survey to measure baseline cynicism. Then, participants viewed a video of police behavior which was manipulated according to media source and completed a second cynicism measure and demographic survey. Participants were then asked whether to impose a sanction on the police officers. Results indicated that there were no differences in cynicism between groups prior to viewing the video; however, there were statistically significant differences in cynicism between groups after exposure to Citizen Video Journalism (CVJ) from different media sources revealing that cynicism was greater with the group that viewed CVJ from the social media source than from the broadcast media source. Furthermore, results indicated statistical significance between groups and severity of sanctions imposed on police after CVJ video exposure. Keywords Citizen video journalism . Cynicism . Police . Broadcast media . Social media
Introduction Media exposure in our society has evolved tremendously in the past decade. Today, exposure to media imagery comes in forms such as the television, social media, and citizen video journalism. With this large influx of diversity in receiving information combined with the increasing number of media-driven members of society, it is important to understand how media imagery exposure affects the attitudes of the public. More specifically, how exposure to negative media imagery affects the public’s attitudes toward police. The overall goal of this project was to gain a much-needed understanding between the role of negative media imagery and the criminal justice system. This study expanded on Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory that focused on the role of violence on how television cultivates conceptions about the risks of violence and creates feelings of mistrust. In its earliest form, cultivation theory concentrated mainly on media imagery via television; however, it laid a Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-020-09385-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Johnathon Sharp [email protected] 1
Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Kentucky State University, Frankfort, KY, USA
solid foundation to include new forms of media to be adapted in cultivation analysis (Morgan and Shanahan 2010). Broadcast media, which describes the traditional forms of media that include television, radio, and more recently Internet, has been the pr
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