How Violent Crime Is Reported in Small Town Newspapers

This is a study of how the news media covers the issue of intimate partner violence. The study focuses on three counties in Mississippi and how the newspapers serving those counties reported on the issue of intimate partner violence. The three counties, Grenada, Coahoma and Lafayette were selected for this study because their law enforcement agencies complied with a 2005 revision to state law requiring law enforcement agencies to separate intimate partner assaults from other types of violent assaults in their reports to the FBI. All articles from 2006 with violent themes were gathered from three newspapers: The Oxford Eagle (Lafayette County), the Grenada Daily Star (Grenada County) and the Clarksdale Press Register (Coahoma County). The articles were analyzed using four criteria: whether intimate partner violence was reported commensurate with its frequency as an arrest, whether intimate partner violence was treated as an issue in the articles, whether the articles shifted blame from the perpetrator to the victim and whether intimate partner violence was portrayed as being more murder-centric than it actually and how that compares to reporting on other types of violent crimes.