Tweeting about Crime in Pandemic Times: US Legacy News Media and Crime Reporting During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Crime and Social Control in Pandemic Times
ISBN: 978-1-80382-280-8, eISBN: 978-1-80382-279-2
ISSN: 1521-6136
Publication date: 6 April 2023
Abstract
Purpose – This study explored how the pandemic shaped or shifted legacy news reporting about crime, focusing on Twitter posts as visual elements of the crossmedia landscape.
Methodology/Approach – Drawing a purposive sample of tweets about crime and the pandemic posted from March 2020 to December 2021 by major TV news outlets, the qualitative media analysis (QMA) scrutinized how tweets constructed narratives about crime. The analysis considered images, text, and their juxtaposition within tweets and over time.
Findings – This study found that news organizations partnered the pandemic and crime in the American discourse of fear. Tweets acted as crime news snapshots, which magnified a sense of instability and uncertainty. Tweets constructed a collective malaise that could contribute to users’ sense of ontological insecurity.
Originality/Value – The spectacle of crime churned through news organizations’ tweets, dissociating crime from the complex social context of the pandemic. Attention to the liquidity of images and information in the crossmedia landscape revealed fluctuating social meanings and disorientation.
Keywords
Citation
Kort-Butler, L.A. (2023), "Tweeting about Crime in Pandemic Times: US Legacy News Media and Crime Reporting During the COVID-19 Pandemic", Deflem, M. (Ed.) Crime and Social Control in Pandemic Times (Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Vol. 28), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 123-139. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1521-613620230000028009
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2023 Lisa A. Kort-Butler
Introduction
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, a quarter of Americans reported using social media more often than before the pandemic (Ritter, 2020). Three quarters of users described social media as an important way they stayed connected to others and their communities. In later polls, about half of Americans reported getting news from social media sites at least sometimes during 2020 and 2021 (Shearer & Mitchell, 2020; Walker & Matsa, 2021). Consumers now report a preference for digital sources but they are rarely exclusive, reporting they get news across digital space and from legacy sources like television and print (Matsa & Naseer, 2021). In this crossmedia landscape, consumers may be exposed to more news but can also be selective in what topics they follow and to what extent (Näsi, Tanskanen, Kivivuori, Haara, & Reunanen, 2021).
As people consume news, they are exposed to and select into frameworks for processing that information (Dolliver, Kenney, Reid, & Prohaska, 2018). Newsroom norms and profit imperatives push journalists and their outlets to emphasize the sensational on the one hand and to maintain the normative cultural narrative on the other. Crime news regularly fulfills this need in legacy media (Näsi et al., 2021). The complexities and ambiguities of social problems are “symbolically mined for moral truths,” linked to the audience’s preexisting understandings of the problem, and normalized by repetition (Altheide, 2013, p. 233). In digital space, however, legacy media must meet the demands of rapidly changing topical trends and the need for clicks (Natale, 2016). The crossmedia landscape facilitates “the pervasive digital representation of crime,” that may be less reflective of static moral truths and more reflective of “life’s inherent instability” (Wardman, Lee, & Mythen, 2017, p. 122).
In the context of an historic public health crisis, however, news organizations may have reassessed the role of crime news in their repertoires. For example, news could have shifted toward a public health framing of crime (Krieger, 2020). In this chapter, I examine the churn of crime stories “tweeted” by legacy news organizations during the pandemic. First, I provide an overview of the research on mediated representations of crime and the social media landscape, followed by a discussion of the implications of the crossmedia landscape for understanding social media discourse about crime. Then, I present the findings from a QMA of legacy news organizations’ Twitter posts that explicitly or implicitly reported on the nature of crime in pandemic times. Finally, I discuss how legacy news organizations partnered the pandemic and crime in a discourse of fear while the fluidity of the crossmedia landscape constructed a broader sense of insecurity.
Literature Review
Mediated Representations of Crime
Crime news reporting is incomplete and decontextualized, relying on episodic framing that strips social context and simplifies complex social issues to individualistic causes (Chagnon, 2015). News media has long been critiqued for misrepresenting crime in ways that over-represent violent crime, demonize offenders and victims from marginalized groups, defame communities, valorize police, and mischaracterize statistics (Kappeler & Potter, 2018; Surette, 2015). News media inform the audience that certain conditions are undesirable, many people are affected by it, and the primary contributing factors are identifiable. Commentaries tend to reiterate existing narratives and remind the audience that society has agents and procedures in place to remedy the problem (Buckler, Griffin, & Travis, 2008; Frost & Phillips, 2011). Through repetition across outlets and time, the media actively contribute to crafting the dominant social narrative about crime, which promotes fear and encourages public reliance on the criminal justice system (Altheide, 1997). This problem frame, especially as it crosses the media landscape, becomes a resource that the audience can use to interpret new information they encounter about crime.
The problem frame thesis envisions a relatively unidimensional flow of ideas and images from producer to viewer that is crafted by powerful interests, financial motives, and newsroom values. However, in the crossmedia landscape crime news production is perhaps better understood as a convergence of several interdependent ideologies held by various actors, who themselves have imperfect partially constructed versions of reality (Chagnon, 2015). The production of crime news is shaped by what these interdependent actors “know” about crime – a knowledge itself shaped by the discursive process of news production. Moreover, cultural criminology emphasizes that the relationship between media and audiences is non-linear, and that the integration of media into people’s everyday lives blurs the distinction between media experiences and real-life experiences (Phillips & Chagnon, 2021).
Whereas consumption of TV is passive, consumption of online media is more active and interactive (Näsi et al., 2021). People are able to seek out news outlets, search for specific topics, comment on pages or posts, and share content. Social media sites bridge the space between the “passivity” of legacy media and the “activity” of online media. Users can follow legacy news outlets across social media platforms, set preferences on how/when to see posts – as well as have posts promoted into their personal timelines by platforms’ algorithms – and comment on or share web-based stories or tweets. The internet in general and social media in particular creates a space for dissemination of crime news, a forum for public discussion of crime, and a place for users to actively craft their own narratives about crime (Phillips & Chagnon, 2021). If engaging, sharing, and adding-on to news items gains participants social capital through their own personal and virtual networks on the one hand (Altheide, 2013), then it also creates a more fluid movement of news and constructed ideologies about crime on the other (Chagnon, 2015).
The News on Social Media
As a routine source of news, the internet is converging in popularity with TV news (Gottfried & Shearer, 2017). About half of Americans now report getting news from social media sites (Shearer & Mitchell, 2020; Walker & Matsa, 2021). Social media consumers may use it as a means to access content from other sources, such as a TV news clip or an article from a news site (Lee, 2020). People who rely on social media also report relying on other news sources, including legacy media and online news sites, essentially building media repertoires for tailoring their news consumption (Pollard & Kavanagh, 2019). Pew Research Center’s survey of Twitter users indicated that two-third got news from the site (Mitchell, Shearer, & Stocking, 2021). A majority of users who get news on Twitter reported that it increased their understanding of current events, yet one-third reported it also increased their stress levels (Mitchell et al., 2021).
Armstrong and Gao (2010) found national news media most commonly tweeted about public affairs and international news. Because revenue depends on pageviews, public affairs news is far less profitable than sensational content (Nelson, 2021). Social media algorithms favor popular content, pressuring news outlets to post content that appeals to these algorithms in order to generate clicks. For legacy news media, the performance of online “clickbait media” has also increased pressure toward eye-catching content and entertaining stories to capture audience attention (Munger, 2020).
Social media editors must balance journalistic values and social media logics, trying to report “facts” but also entice further engagement (Lischka, 2021). A story’s newsworthiness is shaped by elements including conflict, controversy, drama, cultural relevance, attention-grabbing audio-visual elements, and shareability (Harcup & O’Neill, 2017). The presence of an image in a tweet increases user attention to and engagement with the post (Li & Xie, 2020). The content most likely to capture attention appeals to curiosity and hot topics, or stirs anxiety and anger (Adornato, 2016; Berger & Milkman, 2012). Russell’s (2019) analysis of news organizations’ tweets found that most included links to articles posted on their websites, a blurb about the article, and an image.
Social Media and the Story of Crime
Visual framing is
the process of selecting some aspects of a perceived reality, highlighting them above others by means of visual communication, and making them salient, meaningful, and memorable, so that certain attributions, interpretations, or evaluations of the issue … are visually promoted. (Geise, 2017, p. 1)
Images in the crossmedia landscape serve as “the locus of a complex interface among humans, networks, technologies, and global flows” of information and ideas (Brown & Carrabine, 2019, p. 194). Tweets are curated by news organizations’ social media staff from the already curated space of broadcast or web articles, then made into smaller bites of images and information. Moreover, tweets and their associated images are themselves images, essentially pictures with captions that can be shared directly or screen-grabbed for sharing elsewhere. Just as images may illustrate text in order to boost engagement, a tweet’s text tells the viewer what is supposed to be happening in the picture.
Images of crime are thus made spectacle, which further separates the realities of crime from their social context (Hayward, Hayward, & Presdee, 2010; Presdee, 2000). As images are abstracted by social media content creators, their display further manipulated by algorithms, and clicked on or shared by users (and thus manipulated again), they are at once decontextualized from reality but made real by audiences-as-actors in constructing stories about crime. For news media dependent on clicks, tweets are also intended to be provocative in order to nudge users to the website, its articles, videos, and advertisers.
This study scrutinizes the liquidity of this provocation over digital space (Wardman et al., 2017), and how the provocation itself constructed a narrative or narratives about crime during this particular historical moment in which people turned to social media for news and social connections. News reporting about crime has demonstrably cultivated fears (Morgan, Shanahan, & Signorielli, 2015). Polls during the pandemic reflect heightened social anxieties (e.g., Panchal, Kamal, Cox, & Garfield, 2021). At the same time, reporting about public health issues directly and indirectly related to the pandemic dominated headlines and airwaves. Whether or not – and how – this shaped framing of crime news was the primary subject of this research project.
Methodology
Cultural and visual criminologists advocate for a methodological orientation attuned not only what is depicted, but how such depictions are rendered and in relation to what social processes, normative structures, and cultural undercurrents (Pauwels, Brown, & Carrabine, 2017, p. 64). The fluidity of images, information, and narratives across the media landscape also necessitates an approach attuned both to enduring themes and shifting storylines (Phillips & Chagnon, 2021). In this spirt, I relied on QMA (Altheide & Schneider, 2013). QMA places emphasis on descriptive, conceptual, and contextual data to discover how mediated materials communicate meaning. QMA assumes meaning is present in various modalities, such as text, formatting, and images, as well as in the positioning of one piece of information among others. Coding protocols are oriented conceptually rather than categorically. The procedures for data collection, analysis, and interpretation are reflexive, deliberating over observations as the process unfolds and adjusting coding schema to conceptual nuances.
Twitter-based research frequently relies on scraping or crawling techniques that gather large numbers of tweets based on set search parameters (e.g., Han, Yang, & Piterou, 2021). My approach was more targeted because of the interest in legacy news sources and their use of images. I selected news accounts for the major network news providers (@ABC, @CBSNews, and @NBCNews), two major cable news providers (@CNN, @FoxNews), one non-profit televised nightly news program (@PBSNewsHour), and the major news provider @AP. Using Twitter’s advanced search functions, a research assistant and I performed keyword searches for “crime or violence or theft” in tweets for each of these accounts, setting date restrictions from March 1, 2020 through December 31, 2021. These searches provided context for the accounts’ general crime-related tweets. Our initial review of the body of tweets revealed a broad pattern in which crime reporting appeared alongside pandemic concerns.
We then performed a refined search focused on the confluence of the pandemic and crime reporting, with search terms pairing “crime (alternately: violence; guns)” with “covid,” “pandemic,” and “coronavirus.” This article focuses on this set of searches. To keep our focus on street crime as it is typically understood and on the pandemic, we decided to not include tweets about the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capital Building, as it was mostly tweeted about in political rather than strictly criminal terms and was not generally linked to the pandemic. Similarly, we encountered few tweets in these feeds framing the protests after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 that focused on street crime per se, so we decided not include tweets about the protests unless they specifically dealt with crime and the pandemic. If the exact tweet appeared more than once in an account, we selected the earliest posted date. Our search parameters also yielded tweets that were linked to the same news article but used different tweet texts. In this case both tweets were included in the sample. Altogether, this purposive sample included 156 tweets (ABC = 33; AP = 9; CBS = 21; CNN = 29; Fox = 9; NBC = 34; PBS = 21); nearly all included images.
The coding protocol was developed in an iterative, interactive process. Theoretically and observationally derived concepts guided initial stages of the process but others were expected and allowed to arise during the study. After research assistants and I cataloged tweets (i.e., link to tweets, date posted, tweet text, and embedded link to article), we reviewed the tweets and created a largely open-ended coding rubric. We regularly met during the coding process to review tweets and discuss recurrent and emergent themes. This also facilitated consistency across our observations. The finalized protocol coded for: the main topic of the tweet; the type of image in the tweet (stock image, photograph, illustration, or video); a detailed description of the main elements image or video (e.g., who and/or what, location, and activity represented); and the presence of “trigger” language in the tweet or in the image itself (i.e., words that could provoke emotion).
Findings
By design, Twitter is driven by trending topics. The news organizations’ tweets did not generally sustain focus on more than one or two issues at a time and over time, leading to an ebb and flow, and even forgetting, of topics and emergent narratives about crime. Tweets linked to a mix of reporting and commentary pieces. Although the news organizations varied in how and to what extent they covered topics, there were general patterns. Early in the pandemic, an emergent topic was concern about domestic violence. Attention to hate crimes targeting Asian Americans and people of Asian/Pacific Islander (AAPI) descent arose in 2020 and again in 2021. By mid to late summer 2020 and through 2021, attention turned more intentionally to pandemic-related crimes on the one hand and crime and violence increases on the other.
The Shadow Pandemic
Concerns about domestic violence and its potential relationship to the pandemic were mostly confined to 2020. Amid the shutdowns of spring 2020, concerns were raised about a “shadow pandemic”: the potential for increases in domestic violence. The hidden nature of this problem was regularly represented by images of women in shadow profile (see, e.g., NBC News, 2020). These shadow women were alone, seemingly secluded inside rooms. Other images depicted lone women seated curled up on the floor or hard chair with faces buried behind their arms, hands, and knees. These women often appeared to be white. The “horrifying global surge” and “spike in domestic violence” led to “grim predictions” that seemed to come to fruition. Tweets offered as explanations for domestic violence “stay-at-home” orders that “forced” women (and children) to be “cooped up” or “trapped at home” with their abusers. These orders, in conjunction with “isolation,” were implicitly blamed for preventing people from accessing support services.
A few counterparts to these tweets highlighted people who could come to the aid of at-risk women, including police and crisis workers. No tweet profiled or mentioned perpetrators, nor offered any common explanation for why perpetrators would be more likely to abuse people under the circumstances. Consistent with the problem frame, the social ill was identified and the reliance on designated social authorities was generally reinforced. Although tied to the pandemic, the issue of domestic violence was mostly compartmentalized from other crime-related tweets. The exception was two tweets in summer 2021 that mentioned both domestic violence and gun violence/control.
Stop Asian Hate
Other than tweets regarding crime and violence more broadly, tweets about crimes targeting AAPI people were the most common in the sample. Indeed, the first tweet in the sample depicted a police car in motion: “An Asian woman was punched in the face … in what is being investigated as a possible coronavirus bias crime.” In 2020, a cluster of tweets posted about reports of targeted crimes and federal bureau of investigation (FBI) warnings about a “surge in hate crimes.” The images accompanying the tweets rarely centered AAPI people or only did so from a distance. Tweets reporting on incidents tended to use backgrounds, such as a subway car, a bus exterior, or a street in a city’s Chinatown (see, e.g., PBS NewsHour, 2021a). One showed video footage of a perpetrator. Law enforcement or government announcements of “racist attacks” reaching an “alarming level” likewise featured shots of press conferences or building exteriors.
Steady attention to “skyrocketing” hate crimes accelerated after a spree shooting in Atlanta in March 2021 that targeted AAPI women. In fact, the topic dominated sampled tweets in the spring period surrounding the introduction and passing of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act. Some images associated with these tweets highlighted AAPI business owners, protestors, or activists, such as a woman holding a sign reading “stop Asian hate.” But the tweets often centered politicians speaking or holding press conferences, such as President Biden condemning “‘vicious’ hate crimes against Asian Americans who he said were ‘attacked, harassed, blamed and scapegoated’ for the pandemic.” Compared to other tweets in the sample, tweets about these hate crimes more commonly identified a specific cause, namely the “political rhetoric surrounding COVID-19” and, as Representative Jerry Nader was quoted: “political leaders who have demonized China.” However, the topic was also compartmentalized. The tweets focused on these hate crimes as distinct from other pandemic-related crimes and crime trends more broadly.
Troubling New Reality
Another category of tweets concerned the pandemic’s role in facilitating crimes. First, a subset of tweets featured grift and fraud schemes around personal protective equipment (PPE) and vaccines. Tweets in the early months of the pandemic raised flags about potential issues. One about Trump’s executive action on PPE stockpiling was illustrated with a person in PPE carrying a biohazard bag on a background of large COVID cells. Another drew comparisons between governments’ attempts to acquire equipment and the risk for fraud to an “organized-crime thriller,” paired with a picture of a person next to some sort of machinery, implying it was a clandestine workshop. A photo of masked state troopers standing in a hospital parking lot staged for COVID testing emphasized that the “spread” of the virus was related to the spread of criminal “transgressions that capitalize on fear, panic and the urge to lay blame,” burdening police “trying to protect vulnerable citizens.” Tweets in the first few months of 2021 and sporadically the rest of that year were more specific. These tweets featured a mix of imagery. In some, if a suspect was identified for a crime, that person’s mug shot or picture was featured. In others, if a specific fraud was mentioned a matching stock image was used: vials for stolen vaccines, cards for fake vaccine cards, a briefcase of money for those “swindled” by pandemic aid cons. Other than fear or panic, none of these tweets identified causes for these crimes.
Second, pandemic-based situations were cited as creating opportunities for criminals and problems for police. The public’s use of masks and gloves created a “troubling new reality for law enforcement” that allowed “robbers to blend in.” With courts closed and some people being released from jail/prison to alleviate disease transmission, police claimed “offenders … can commit crimes with impunity.” School closures could “fuel [a] rise in juvenile violent crime.” Reopening cities and businesses fostered “brazen property crimes.” Such problems were illustrated with stock images of police and police cars (see, e.g., ABC News, 2020) or with still shots from a surveillance video of a crime in progress. These tweets pointed squarely at how pandemic restrictions could be taken advantage of by would-be criminals, but did not name specific criminal incidents even when they were depicted.
Third, in the early months of the pandemic a few tweets remarked on federal reports about the potential for extremist groups “exploiting” the pandemic to “bolster racist and anti-government narratives” and “incite violence,” as well as the potential for “frustrated individuals” to act violently. In this case, the warnings appeared to be correct. Tweets, particularly by fall 2021, announced a “spike in violence and threats” against healthcare workers, teachers, and government officials. Images in these tweets tended to center those being targeted or harassed; however, when protestors were featured the scenes were crowded with signs or people yelling at those targeted. Two images featured armed white men in tactical gear posing at state buildings or public venues. These tweets tended to frame such threats as about “more than masks” and the pandemic mitigation factors issued by hospitals, schools, and governments. They were also contingent on politicized narratives (e.g., critical race theory and anti-government sentiment). Like other tweets in this category, specific perpetrators and acts were not mentioned; rather, general threats posed by pandemic-related factors were emphasized.
A Tale of Two Pandemics
The purposive sampling yielded tweets that took advantage of a pandemic metaphor to define and describe crime more broadly. The first parallel (April 2020) drew attention to the disparate impact both the virus and gun violence had on African American communities specifically or cities in general. Communities faced “a double scourge” and mayors had to “fight a double public health crisis.” Yet neither used images of ill health. While the former tweet featured a picture of Chicago Mayor Lightfoot, the latter depicted two police vehicles behind police tape on a city street (see, e.g., CBS News, 2020). The nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 led to tweets about “two deadly pandemics: racism and coronavirus” and “police killing black people is a pandemic.” The first tweet was paired with a picture of a mostly white group of protestors with one person holding a sign reading “wake up white America.” The second featured a video clip of a news anchor interviewing an African American author. Responding to protests New York Mayor De Blasio was quoted saying “We can’t go on like this” in reference to systemic racism and the pandemic. The image, however, featured a night scene of multiple police in helmets, a fire truck, and a large blaze filling the street behind them.
By late summer and early fall 2020, a subtle but definite shift continued. The parallel language of pandemic faded. Tweets instead listed the co-occurring problems of coronavirus, violence, policing, and/or protests. The spreading pandemic was framed as partial context for other social issues worsening, such as economic recession. Protests, “social unrest,” and changes in policing were also introduced as contributing factors to the “spikes,” “surges,” and “spasms” of gun violence that created “crisis” in hospitals and cities affected by increasing coronavirus cases. The accompanying images also intimated danger, some of it racialized: crime scenes being tagged by police; a young black woman crouched in grief on a city sidewalk; black women at a protest; a hospital ambulance bay; and a video clip featuring statistics, protests, and police at crime scenes with the chyron announcing “murder rates soar in major U.S. cities.”
By the end of September 2020, “grim statistics” described deaths from coronavirus exceeding gun violence, drug overdoses, and the Vietnam War, illustrated by a US map made up of people’s faces who had died from the illness. In mid-July 2021, New York Governor Cuomo was quoted describing gun violence as “life and death, like COVID. This is an epidemic.” “Gun violence: America’s other epidemic” was accentuated with an image of three bullet holes in a windshield. The final tweet in the sample to use parallel language appeared in November 2021, declaring a “crime pandemic,” emphasizing the point with a surveillance camera still of what appears to be burglary in progress involving several black men. It made no mention of COVID-19.
From Coronavirus to Crime
In the early months of the pandemic, news outlets were seemingly unable to rely on the standard problem frame for crime news. A cluster of tweets focused on firearm sales and whether gun shops could remain open as essential businesses. “Americans panicked by coronavirus” were contributing to “long lines and runs” on weapons and ammunition. Images depicted people (who generally appeared white) queued at the counters of gun shops, shooting ranges, or guns arrayed for display. Other than panic and “coronavirus concerns,” the tweets themselves offered no explanations for sales or the specific need for gun shops to be open.
Another puzzle with which news outlets contended was a possible decline in crime due to pandemic-related shutdowns. At the end of March 2020, crime in New York had “dropped off the face of the map.” The accompanying video listed a few points about the spreading illness. As the crime information came on screen, footage rolled of police placing barricades on the street. A tweet about crime “plunges” in Los Angeles was accompanied by the image of a lone police vehicle on a sunny but empty boardwalk amusement park. These crime drops were linked to the lockdowns. Then, tweets in April and May 2020 noted purported “upticks” in car thefts in cities “even as violent crime has dropped dramatically.” One such tweet was paired with a stock photo of a broken car window. These later tweets did not attribute changes to pandemic-related restrictions.
The end of May 2020 brought widespread protests, and no other tweets in the sample were about the pandemic and a decline in crime. Just as the dual pandemic narrative faded, so too did hesitation about framing crime news in familiar ways. Indeed, one tweet in July 2020 made it clear: “Behind President Trump’s push to shift Americans’ campaign-year fears from coronavirus to crime.” The image was Trump at a White House briefing. The same organization also tweeted in September that Trump’s wager on “fears of violence and unrest” was not reflected in polls. Nonetheless, while this particular news organization pointed at the then-president, the tweet signaled the return of a fear of crime narrative in the sample throughout the rest of 2020 and 2021. Concerns about surges and spasms in crime turned into warnings about “elevated violence” particularly in “major cities.” The only break in this narrative occurred around the signing of the hate crime legislation.
Carrying forward themes about America’s troubling new reality, one category of tweets loosely linked the pandemic as a key factor in the purported increase in crime and violence rates. A story about homicide increases in cities was paired with a picture of a small protest lead by black women and quoted a pastor who drew such connections: “The pandemic … accentuated extreme poverty” which “just breeds more and more violence, especially in poor, low-income communities.” Another tweet cited “experts” who claimed “idleness caused by the COVID-19 pandemic shares the blame with easy access to guns” and depicted black women grieving over a casket.
Another category of tweets listed the pandemic alongside other factors as contributors in increased violence, similar to the theme above regarding the pandemic and co-occurring problems. Like those tweets, these also prominently featured police and crime scenes. Some pointed to police “staffing shortages” due COVID-19 along with “lingering distrust in communities of color” following the summer 2020 protests. Others blamed “criminal justice reform” though “advocates say it’s too early to know” because the United States was “still suffering” from the pandemic. Tweets also recalled “record gun sales” and “gun stockpiling” that – paired with “pandemic pressures” – contributed to climbing murder rates.
In contrast, a third category distanced the pandemic from purported increases in crime and violence. A few tweets echoed conservative politicos “fed-up” with those who blamed “crime surges on COVID reopenings.” Rather, “crime spikes are about left-wing policies, not COVID.” Others more subtly implied the pandemic alone could not be blamed. Violence was “on the rise” in July 2021 even though “COVID-19’s surge ha[d] ebbed.” Indeed, “authorities saw the swell in violence spurred on by COVID’s hardships coming – before the pandemic even got into full swing.” To explain an increase in gun deaths “experts” said, “it’s not enough to point to the pandemic or increased sales. It was a perfect storm.” Again, police imagery was paired with the former two tweets, while the latter tweet was punctuated with a cemetery-like memorial field filled with vases of white flowers (see, e.g., ABC News, 2021). Whether loss of life from COVID or violence was being commemorated was unclear.
A fourth category proffered generic connections between the pandemic and crime, framing it as background context for the increases. One tweet claimed the “pandemic changed mass shootings and gun violence in America.” The “surge of gun violence … impacted cities … in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.” In contrast to those tweets suggesting no connection, a tweet quoting White House spokesperson Psaki said there were “a ‘range of reasons’ for increase in crime stemming from COVID pandemic.” The tweets in this category had no imagery in common, but respectively mirrored the general progression from COVID to crime: a memorial event; police and a crime scene; and political reactions.
Throughout these tweets ran an undercurrent of anxiety and insecurity. There was little sense of progress or hopeful outcomes, just “waves of isolation and grief” (see, e.g., PBS NewsHour, 2021b). “Surges” were used to describe both COVID and violence. The images were a mixture of politicians, crime scenes and police (some real, some stock photos), guns, and mourning sites. Images of the demonstrations occasionally included in this mix – which could signal efforts for positive change – were tinged with doubt or misgivings because of purported violence and “bloodshed.” No suspects or offenders appeared, nor did specific victims. Instead, when people appeared they were women: black women activists; black and white women grieving; and an isolated white woman. The overarching impression was that this worrisome rise in crime and violence was just happening around the country (but especially in cities) making people (especially women) vulnerable, and leaders were scrambling to address it along with – or in spite of – the pandemic.
Discussion
Lischka and Garz (2021) observed that curation algorithms serve as bureaucratic mechanisms that can enforce news similarity in social media feeds. In this study, there was a degree of synergy in content and style across news organizations’ tweets. There were common themes and approaches to tweeting about crime and the pandemic, siloing crimes like domestic violence and hate crimes, while intersecting certain aspects of the pandemic and crime (e.g., dual pandemics and grifts) then parceling these relationships as time progressed. News organizations’ tweets on crime in this unprecedented era appeared – at least initially – to wrestle with how to integrate “routine” crime reporting styles into the unfolding drama of the pandemic. Tweets drawing parallels between the coronavirus pandemic, certain types of crime, and the social issues of systemic racism and gun violence facilitated a transition back to typical reporting that emphasized crime and violence. Altheide’s (1997) problem frame was present in constructing some aspects of crime during the pandemic. Tweets described widespread, undesirable issues, and used urgent language. Images of policing accompanied an array of topics, including those paralleling the pandemic and other social issues. In short, COVID-19 and crime became partners in the discourse of fear, and tweets implied a well-worn remedy to frightening social problems.
Although there was topical similarity, a dominant static narrative about crime was more difficult to discern, consistent with Phillips and Chagnon (2021) discussion of how the increasing liquidity of images and information across mediums contributes to fluctuating social meanings, disorientation, and social instability (p. 164). Rather than a relatively cohesive narrative recounting a common story about crime in pandemic times, legacy news organizations’ Twitter posts unspooled the spectacle of crime. Trepidation and crisis of the criminal sort were weaved throughout tweets and accompanying images/links. Politicians and pundits wrung their hands and postulated about causes and solutions. Victims or targets, when illustrated, were frequently alone or in despair. Offenders were largely absent – almost specters – who could take advantage of a situation and do harm. The threat of encroaching crime, too, was vague – almost shadowy – and ultimately untethered from the complexities created by the pandemic.
The spectacle of crime churned through news organizations’ tweets effectively obfuscated crime from the complicated, shifting social context of the pandemic. During the time frame under study, news organizations implied the pandemic had destabilized everyday life (at least in the short term) and the shadow of crime was spreading, but the connection between the two was intermittently and inconsistently drawn. Tweets offered a multitude of crime news snapshots and these snapshots conjured a sense of instability and uncertainty: people were experiencing waves of isolation and grief alongside fears of violence and unrest, building into a perfect storm for bad things to happen in this troubling new reality.
In this manner, the tweeted spectacle of crime also constructed a collective malaise, which could contribute to users’ sense of ontological insecurity (Elchardus, De Groof, & Smits, 2008; Wardman et al., 2017). Dramatic social changes spur glossy recollections of better, safer times (Farrall, Gray, & Jones, 2021). This may explain why research focused on internet and social media news has found inconsistent effects of consumption on more narrowly defined attitudes about crime and justice (Intravia, 2019; Rosenberger, Dierenfeldt, & Ingle, 2021). Instead, the social context in which content is presented, the media across which it flows, and the algorithms and user interactions that define and redefine content, create an experiential and emotional reality for audiences in constructing beliefs and fears about crime. A sense of “existential precariousness,” feelings of unsafety, and anxieties about the future provoke a broad sense of insecurity above specific concerns about risk or victimization (Valente & Pertegas, 2018, p. 162), insecurities which may be unevenly channeled into fear of crime.
As to the limitations of this study, analysis focused on the major legacy TV news outlets with large Twitter followings. Smaller cable and streaming news outlets and local TV news productions may have different production/reporting processes and social media presence. Local TV news in particular may have been more responsive to local pandemic issues, and of course report on local crime, so that their tweets may be more attuned with ongoing and “breaking” events.
Twitter’s advanced search algorithms may have missed tweets or not included relevant tweets, while our search terms may have unintentionally excluded tweets on relevant topics. Although the QMA coding process is interactive and collaborative, different researchers may discern other themes or unique relationships among them. Open-source data based on the readily accessible Twitter search function facilitates the work of other researchers who are interested in building upon the analysis described in this article.
This study cannot comment on whether users recognized the themes presented here. Indeed, latent meaning is embedded into media-crafted narratives about crime (Kappeler & Potter, 2018). It is also important to remember that users can be selective in what they view, when they view it, and that algorithms tuned into these selections additionally shape what appears in people’s feeds (Lischka & Garz, 2021; Näsi et al., 2021). Future research could consider examining user replies to and retweets of the content to understand how language and images spur reaction and response.
Conclusion
For legacy news media, tweets need to be provocative in order to move the user to the website, its content, and advertisements. Online content – designed for clicks – is moving the news media landscape in new ways, even as it relies on old tropes. After the early months of the pandemic, legacy news organization settled into the problem frame in their tweets reporting on crime-related news. Crime is an easy topic in uneasy times, comfortable for both news organizations and audiences in maintaining a sense of reality – even normalcy – while dovetailing with traditional morality tales (Altheide, 2013). In this sense, crime news tweets reckoned with the pandemic by partnering them in a discourse of fear for which resolutions are known – police and the justice system (King, 2021).
Yet the body of tweets did not clearly define a “crime problem,” its causes, and how to interpret it. Legacy new media’s tweets took advantage of the existing problem frame while entering a fluid space in which that frame could be disassembled and reconstituted by algorithms and users (Phillips & Chagnon, 2021). Even as tweets reported on potential increases in crime, they did not settle on nor sustain a meaningful link to the pandemic. Rather than tweets sustaining a particular narrative or narratives about crime and the pandemic, they manifested the spectacle of crime through captions and images in social media space, with disorienting effect. Tweets about crime in pandemic times, while leaning on established and comfortable frames, also had the broader effect of provoking the insecurities posed by an uncertain social era.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Grace Kelly and Peter Educate for their assistance. This research was supported by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Behavioral Health Program of Excellence.
- Prelims
- Introduction: Toward a Criminology of the Pandemic
- Part I: Domestic Violence and Crime
- Chapter 1: The COVID-19 Pandemic, Domestic Abuse, and Human Rights
- Chapter 2: Families Under Confinement: COVID-19 and Domestic Violence
- Chapter 3: Domestic Violence During COVID-19: Insights from Guatemala
- Chapter 4: Stay Home, Stay Safe? Short- and Long-term Consequences of COVID-19 Restrictions on Domestic Violence in the Netherlands
- Chapter 5: Crime in the Coronavirus Pandemic: The Case of Israel
- Chapter 6: Crime During COVID-19: The Impact on Retail
- Part II: Media and Law
- Chapter 7: Flooding the Zone, Challenging State Secrecy: Newsmaking Criminology in Pandemic Times
- Chapter 8: Tweeting about Crime in Pandemic Times: US Legacy News Media and Crime Reporting During the COVID-19 Pandemic
- Chapter 9: The Hungarian Legislative Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic and its Challenges to the Rule of Law
- Chapter 10: Facing the Pandemic: Emergency Legislation in the COVID-19 Era and the Hypothetical Erosion of Democracy
- Part III: Policing
- Chapter 11: A Model of Police–Public Online Communication: Learning from Policing Under COVID-19 Pandemic Conditions
- Chapter 12: Policing Emergencies and Police–Community Relations: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic in Israel
- Chapter 13: Police Proactivity in an Era of Pandemic and Protest
- Part IV: Corrections
- Chapter 14: Institutional Corrections and COVID-19
- Chapter 15: No Escape: “Doing COVID-19 Time”
- Chapter 16: Participatory Action Research in a Pandemic: Prison Climates During COVID-19
- Index