The shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018, sparked a nationwide student-led social movement that demanded more gun control¹ measures from political leaders. The March For Our Lives (MFOL) demonstration in Washington, D.C. grew into one of the largest protests in the United States, with over 800 sibling events nationwide. Elected officials, the media, and the public praised the young Parkland students for their activism. The activists also had a significant impact in building both public and elite consensus on the issue of gun control. The Republican-led Florida Legislature passed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act less than a month after the shooting, which tightened gun control measures in Florida. In addition, while the student-led nonprofit organization March For Our Lives was unable to convince the Trump administration to support legislative changes on a federal level, their policy suggestions were embraced by the presidential campaign of Joe Biden in 2020. This study explores the impact of the Parkland students’ activism by examining the narratives that were told about them in national news media together with narratives about guns and gun control. In particular, this study seeks to understand how narratives about guns are constructed in mass shooting reporting by an increasingly partisan news media and the opportunities activists might have in communicating their message within that landscape.

The data for this study was collected from four national news media sources, The New York Times, CNN, Fox News, and Breitbart to answer two research questions: 1) How did major news outlets frame the survivors-turned-advocates for gun control and 2) how did major news outlets frame the topic of mass shootings in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting? The analysis relied both on deductive and inductive content analysis (Bryant & Charmaz, 2019; Kuckartz, 2014; Morse et al., 2021; Schreier, 2012), while drawing on studies on media framing of youth political participation (Gordon, 2009; Thurlow, 2007; Wyn, 2005), mass shootings in general (Lawrence & Birkland, 2004; McCluskey, 2017; Muschert & Carr, 2006), and the Parkland shooting in particular (Holody & Shaughnessy, 2020; LaRose et al., 2021; Rohlinger et al., 2022). The findings were considered within the framework of partisan media bias (Levendusky, 2013a; Mutz, 2006; Shultziner & Stukalin, 2020, 2021) to untangle the choice of frames each news outlet was contending with from the very beginning of the shooting.

The way partisanship affects mass shooting reporting by the media has been researched to some degree (McCluskey, 2017; Muschert, 2007). However, besides the study by Holody and Shaughnessy (2020), the role of partisan media bias has been absent from the studies examining the reporting on the Parkland shooting. Arguably, the Parkland shooting presents a unique case to study due to the emergence of a strong national student movement that made explicit political claims about the shooting, inclining the news media towards a particularly partisan framing in its reporting. Researching the effects of partisan media bias on mass shooting coverage is crucial, especially as highly publicized, high-fatality shootings are becoming more frequent (Valeeva et al., 2022). At the same time, the media landscape is increasingly fragmented and partisan (Hollander, 2008; Mutz, 2006; Stroud, 2010). In addition, this study contributes to the scholarship on media representations of social movements and protests by considering the interaction between the protest paradigm and partisan media bias. The traditional protest paradigm dictates that media representations of social movements are mainly negative and sensational (McCurdy, 2012; McLeod, 2000). However, recent studies have found that if the ideological leanings of the newspaper align with the movement, the protest paradigm is less consequential (Chuang & Tyler, 2023; Kananovich, 2022). The case of the MFOL movement offers a new perspective on a student-led protest, which was highly critical of both parties in the divided government but took a partisan stance on a contentious political issue.

The Parkland students’ social media activism has gained considerable research attention (Austin et al., 2020; Cheas et al., 2020; Jenkins & Lopez, 2018; Zoller & Casteel, 2021), but little consideration has been given to how the national news media participated in either promoting their message or discrediting it. By examining how prominent news outlets represented the activists themselves and their diagnosis of the issue and its solutions, inferences can be drawn about the frames different media outlets are willing to adopt and how advocates can strategically exploit partisan media bias. In addition to studying how partisan media bias influences the framing of mass shootings, the study’s findings clarify the opportunities and challenges that partisan media poses to advocacy groups.

Literature Review

Gun Control as an Issue

Gun violence is a unique epidemic in the United States (American Public Health Association, 2022). On one hand, studies consistently show that there is a correlation between gun ownership and gun-related deaths (Leach-Kemon & Sirull, 2023; Miller et al., 2022; Studdert et al., 2022; Wallace et al., 2021). On the other hand, gun culture is steeped with historical ideas about what it means to be “American,” notions that are intertwined with individualism and the fundamental rights of citizens to be free from overreaches by the government inscribed into the Constitution. In the U.S. context, gun control is difficult as a social regulatory issue that is passively supported by the majority of the public (Gallup, 2022) but singularly opposed by an active minority (the gun control paradox, see Cook & Goss, 2014; Goss, 2006). Furthermore, the 400 million guns in circulation (Small Arms Survey, 2017) can make the problem seem insurmountable. These factors have contributed to the fact that it was only after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that a nationwide grassroots movement mobilized around the issue of gun control in a comprehensive way (Cook & Goss, 2014). Sustained advocacy work has only recently led to significant action by state and federal legislatures to address the problem, even though mass shootings are a constant reason for public outrage, and communities, often poor and of color, are being ravaged by everyday gun violence (Kravitz-Wirtz et al., 2022).

Partisan Media Bias and Covering Protest

Gun control messaging in the United States happens in a media landscape that is especially fragmented and politically polarized (Starr, 2012; Steppat et al., 2022; Stroud, 2011). Partisan media has been widely studied and debated. There is significant disagreement whether news media is traditionally more liberal (Groseclose, 2011) or conservative (McChesney, 2003), how much partisan preferences influence the public’s choice of news outlets (Dvir-Gvirsman, 2017; Nelson & Webster, 2017; Weeks et al., 2016), or how much media exacerbate partisan polarization of the public (Levendusky, 2013a, 2013b; Stroud 2010; Suhay et al., 2018). However, it seems clear that news media is increasingly being influenced by partisan considerations from the top of the organizational structure to the individual choices journalists make (Mutz, 2006; Shultziner & Stukalin, 2020, 2021). Partisanship does not affect every news outlet the same way, but it can influence what news gets reported, what becomes salient, and what frames are used (Shultziner & Stukalin, 2021).

When reporting on social movements and protests, the protest paradigm can complicate the logic of partisan bias. Gitlin (1980) argued that the media has a vested interest in upholding the status quo to protect its place in the power structure, and as such will not contradict the fundamental organizing principles of society. For example, when news media reports the actions of a movement protesting against its government, they reproduce social conflict “in terms derived from the dominant ideology” (Gitlin, 1980, p. 270). Indeed, scholars have found that news media’s reports of social movements often marginalize protestors, especially those of color (Harlow et al., 2017; Ismail et al., 2019; Mills, 2017), delegitimize movement claims (Ashley & Olson, 1998; Xu, 2013), emphasize individuals over the collective (Gitlin, 1980), and sensationalize violence (Brown, 2021). When the protestors are young, as was in the case of Parkland, negative tropes about youth political participation can also be employed. Young people can be seen as still “citizens in the making” who need to be taught how to “correctly” engage in politics by the adults in their lives such as their parents and teachers (Collin, 2015; Earl et al., 2017). These understandings of youth political participation can lead to media coverage that frames student activists in an infantilized manner, depoliticizing their message, or suggests that the students are being manipulated by radicalized adults (Gordon, 2009; Thurlow, 2007). Moreover, not only is youth activism sometimes seen as lacking in adult guidance, but it can also be likened to youth delinquency that is troubling and destabilizing for society (Wyn, 2005).

However, most recent studies have found that the protest paradigm misses some nuances in analyses of media coverage. Media can also portray protestors sympathetically by amplifying diverse social media voices (Elmasry & el-Nawawy, 2016) and legitimizing the claims of protestors (Li et al., 2023; Trivundža & Brlek, 2017). This is especially true if the protestors challenging the state are ideologically aligned with the partisan leanings of the news outlets (Chuang & Tyler, 2023; Kananovich, 2022; Kim & Shahin, 2019). In cases of student movements, sympathetically predisposed media coverage can also rely on positive conceptualizations of youth activism, where their participation is seen as different rather than lacking in adult guidance (Collin, 2015). These types of understandings can be tied to a notion that young people are capable of bringing about change in the world and as such become the sites where adults may project all their hopes and dreams of socioeconomic transformation (Wyn, 2005).

Framing of Mass Shootings

Gun control often gets attention in news media after a mass shooting. Scholars have extensively studied media framing of mass shootings since the Columbine shooting of 1999. Studies of mass shooting reporting have employed framing analysis from diverse perspectives. For example, Lawrence and Birkland (2004) analyzed issue-defining frames, while Holody and Daniel (2016) and Muschert and Carr (2006) considered frame salience by studying which frame was given the most attention, based on factors such as repetition or headlines. Holody and Shaughnessy (2020) examined frame valence by analyzing whether frames emphasized positive or negative qualities of the subject matter. In Columbine, the most prevalent media frames were gun control, mental illness, and violent popular culture (Lawrence & Birkland, 2004; Muschert, 2007). Mass shootings were framed through moral panics, which were particularly popular in news media discourse at the turn of the 20^thcentury. The perceived rise in crime was seen as connected to young people confusing fantasy with reality and being corrupted and desensitized to violence due to TV shows and video games (Glassner, 1999). Such narratives permeated the Columbine reporting too, which played its part in popularizing the “tough on crime” policy positions that followed (Altheide, 2009; Madfis, 2016; Morrow et al., 2016).

The frames in later shootings have remained largely the same with the three key narrators offered as the most prevalent explanation to the question of why such massacres happen (Schildkraut & Muschert, 2013). Especially in the beginning of the news cycle, focus is given to the particulars of the perpetrator, their mental health, and race if it is something other than white (Holody et al., 2012). Attention is given to how culpable other actors are in the shooting, including law enforcement, the school, and the family of the perpetrator (McCluskey, 2017; Muschert, 2007). After the Aurora, Colorado theater and Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in 2012, there was a widespread media shift to focus on the victims rather than the perpetrator (Holody & Daniel, 2016; Schildkraut & Muschert, 2014). Studies have also found evidence that the violent popular culture frame is becoming less relevant, while ideologically motivated, terrorism-related shootings are increasingly receiving intense attention in media coverage (Silva, 2020; Silva & Capellan, 2018, 2019).

The Parkland shooting has been the subject of multiple studies. Rohlinger et al. (2022) examined claims made for gun control and gun rights after the Parkland shooting in both national and local news and found that political actors in Florida were able to amplify a unified gun control message, while gun rights groups promoted multiple competing frames to their detriment. LaRose et al. (2021) studied how media framing of the Parkland shooting changed across time and place and discovered that while the framing remained largely the same as in previous shootings, there was a particular emphasis on school security. Holody and Shaughnessy (2020) identified in their study of media frames used in national and local coverage of the Parkland shooting that gun control was the most salient frame. They concluded that the MFOL activists recognized how previously established mass shooting frames, such as mental illness and popular culture, were distractions that disrupted the gun control conversation they wished to promote (Holody & Shaughnessy, 2020). Studies on media framing of school shootings have shown that news outlets rely on well-established scripts when reporting on such tragedies. Furthermore, the studies on Parkland in particular have shown largely the same trends, with the exception of the student activists who managed to draw more focused attention to gun control. This study continues and expands this literature by considering how partisan media bias affected these narrative choices and the opportunities and challenges the activists had in this landscape. 

The Current Study

To examine partisan bias in the reporting of the Parkland school shooting and to understand how the activists and their advocacy work were represented by news media, this study posits two main research questions:

RQ₁: How did major news outlets frame the survivors-turned-advocates for gun control?

RQ₂: How did major news outlets frame the topic of mass shootings in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting?

Within the framework of partisan media bias and the protest paradigm, this study predicts that left-leaning news outlets (The New York Times and CNN) will frame the gun control advocates positively, while right-leaning news outlets (Fox News and Breitbart) will frame the movement negatively. Furthermore, the study predicts that partisan dynamics will also influence coverage about the shooting itself. Gun control as a solution to gun violence has been a dividing issue between the parties ever since the 1960s (Cook & Goss, 2014). Most recently, Democrats in Congress have almost unanimously supported gun control, while Republicans have remained unified in their support for gun rights (Kurtzleben, 2018). The study expects that established frames found in previous studies will be used to frame the shooting. In addition, the frames discovered in the three Parkland studies provide insights into how gun control was countered (Holody & Shaughnessy, 2020; LaRose et al., 2021; Rohlinger et al., 2022). The analysis is therefore conducted by testing two overarching hypotheses with two sub-hypotheses.

H₁: The framing of the media coverage about the Parkland survivors and gun control advocates will align with the partisan leanings of the news outlet.

H_1a: Fox News and Breitbart will convey a message that the survivors are uninformed and victims of liberal indoctrinations.

H_1b: CNN and The New York Times will convey a message that the survivors have the power to effect change.

H₂: The media framing of mass shootings will align with the partisan leanings of the news outlets.

H_2a: Fox News and Breitbart will frame mass shootings as an issue of lack of school security, mental illness, and violent popular culture.

H_2b: CNN and The New York Times will frame mass shootings as an issue of lack of gun control.

Method

Data Collection

The articles were collected from the websites of four national news media outlets, which were chosen because of their significant readership and to represent the partisan bias evident in U.S. media. Metrics from Comscore were used to assess the most-read national news outlets.² In January 2020, CNN was reported to be the most popular online news media platform with the most unique visitors (148 million), while The New York Times had 109 million visitors (CNN Pressroom, 2020). Fox News had 114 million unique visitors on its website in January 2020 (CNN Pressroom, 2020). Breitbart is a less consumed news source among the wider population with 5.2 million unique visitors in February 2019 (The Righting, 2019).

How to consider partisan bias in the selection of the news sources was more complex. For comparison’s sake, the ideal scenario would include a right-wing news source that is three standard deviations to the right of center on the ideological spectrum and a left-wing news source that is three standard deviations to the left of center. Unfortunately, such precise quantitative measures of news source ideology do not exist, and more crude measures have been heavily criticized (Benjes-Small & Elwood, 2021; Mahadevan, 2023). In fact, studies of right-wing media in the U.S. find that there is no comparable media ecosystem on the left (Benkler et al., 2018).

Another option was to consider the partisan identification of the audiences reading the news outlets. Pew Research Center finds that 93% of those adults who named Fox News as their main source of political news identified as Republicans, while 91% of those respondents who named The New York Times and 79% of those who named CNN identified as Democrats (Grieco, 2020). Less than 2% of the respondents mentioned other right-leaning news sources. Notably, audiences identifying as Republicans tend to cluster around Fox News, while Democratic audiences are split among a wider array of media sources (Grieco, 2020). For this case study, Breitbart was chosen due to its unique position as a popular platform among the voices in the constellation of right-wing actors who promote so-called anti-woke, anti-liberal, anti-elite positions that are often rooted in ideas of white supremacy and misogyny (Benkler et al., 2018; Hawley, 2017). Overall, the aim was not to make definite statements about the level of partisan biases present but to account for some of the different narratives that exist both in left-wing and right-wing media. Importantly, including additional sources would not change the current interpretation of the news media analyzed here.  

The data sample was collected by searching for the phrases “Parkland school shooting” and “March For Our Lives” beginning from the shooting on February 14, 2018, and ending on February 28, 2019, with the last year mark story. This search produced 236 articles. When attempting to collect new data at a later period, two issues arose. First, some news stories were never long-term archived. Second, some news stories were actively removed from the websites. Therefore, comparability issues would exist if new data were collected at a different period, even if looking in archives. The data was further narrowed to articles with mentions of the Parkland students as well as to articles that comment on the issue of mass shootings. This search produced a final dataset of 200 articles, excluding episodic articles. The articles were divided fairly evenly, with 42 articles collected from CNN, 48 from The New York Times, 59 from Fox News, and 51 from Breitbart.  

Coding Process and Data Analysis

Emergent themes from the data were coded using the NVivo qualitative analysis tool, which allows systematic coding according to themes, sentiments, relationships, and the exploration of linkages between the three. Drawing on previous studies on media framing of both youth activism and mass shootings and in particular the Parkland shooting, both deductive and inductive content analysis (Bryant & Charmaz, 2019; Kuckartz, 2014; Morse et al., 2021; Schreier, 2012) were used to generate categories of frames found in the data. News articles describing either the Parkland advocates or the issue of mass shootings were considered to contain a frame if it promoted “a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation” (Entman, 1993, p. 52). The sections within an article coded for particular frames ranged from a phrase to multiple paragraphs in length. This analysis meant coded sections could contain multiple, co-occurring, and overlapping frames.

In the first phase, the data was carefully read and coded according to all the themes found in the text. From the initial codes, main framing categories were developed by combining inductive and deductive content analysis that relied on theoretical frameworks. To answer the first research question, how the news outlets framed the activists, four main categories were identified drawing on the emergent themes arising from the text and theories of media representation of youth political participation and the protest paradigm:

1. Victims: framing the activists through their experiences of victimization
2. Youth power: framing the activists as smart/capable/strong and/or their activism as something useful/impactful/desirable
3. Youth deficit: framing the activists as naïve/stupid/uneducated/gullible and/or their activism as something unhelpful/bad/harmful
4. Co-opted movement: framing the activism as deceitful/taken over by adults

To answer the second research question, how the news outlets framed the topic of mass shootings, seven main categories were identified drawing on the inductive content analysis and theories of mass shooting framing:

1. Gun control: access to guns as the cause/gun control as the solution
2. Special interest groups: gun lobby/political groups as the cause/obstructing the solution
3. Government failures: lack of action/action by government agencies the cause/solution
4. School security: lack/more school security the cause/solution (security officers, security tools, arming teachers)
5. Mental health: mental illness the cause/improving mental health the solution
6. Local officials: actions of local officials the cause/solution (police department, school board, teachers, superintended)
7. Violent popular culture: violence in video games/TV shows/movies the cause/restricting consumption the solution

In addition, following the definition by Holody and Shaughnessy (2020), frame valence was considered to provide more information about how the news outlets represented gun control activism and the topic of guns. If the framing of an article was positive towards the MFOL activists or presented gun control as the solution to stopping mass shootings, it was considered positive. If the framing of the article was negative towards the advocates or delegitimized gun control as a solution, it was coded negative. In the presence of both perspectives, the salience of the frames was considered by analyzing whether one frame was used multiple times or presented in the headline, abstract, or beginning of the article. Cases where activism and/or gun control were present without any commentary, quotes, or details into the content of the suggestions were considered neutral.

The codebook drafted for the second phase included criteria for coding the articles into the four categories identified for the framing of the MFOL activists and the seven categories identified for the framing of the shooting. In addition, the instructions included guidelines for coding the valence of the articles, when activist frames and gun control frames were present. To check the quality of the coding process, intercoder reliability was tested on a 10% random sub-sample of the articles. The author and a researcher outside of the study coded the articles with the codebook using the NVivo software. The guidelines in the codebook were discussed and clarified before coding. Agreement between the coders in the test sample was 95%.Disagreements were resolved in a feedback session and the guidelines were revised accordingly. The rest of the articles were coded again by the author.

After the coding process, descriptive tables were created to offer an overall summary of the data analysis. The tables describe the number of articles coded for specific frames as well as the valence of the articles in each news source with MFOL activist frames and gun control frames. Comparisons between the number of frames and the valence of the frames were made to test the hypotheses that the framing of activism and the shooting aligned with the partisan leanings of the news sources. In addition, qualitative content analysis (Bryant & Charmaz, 2019; Kuckartz, 2014; Morse et al., 2021; Schreier, 2012) was used to consider how each news source employed and combined particular frames to present an overarching narrative about the Parkland school shooting and the activism that followed it.

Results

Framing of the Activists

The activist frame was the only frame that was consistently and prominently featured in all four news outlets from the very beginning of the shooting in February to the end of the year mark. The New York Times and CNN’s portrayal of the MFOL activists were overwhelmingly positive. In The New York Times, 77% of the articles that used activism frames used them positively while in CNN, 79% of the articles with activism frames were positive. CNN focused heavily on the activists immediately after the shooting, while The New York Times shifted their attention to the activism primarily in March, when the March For Our Lives protest was organized. In contrast to the more left-leaning news outlets, Fox News and Breitbart in particular overwhelmingly framed the activists negatively. In Fox News, 47% of the articles with activism frames were negative toward the activists (35% of them were neutral). In Breitbart, 69% of the articles with activism frames were negative. Breitbart,out of all the outlets, right from the beginning, was much more focused on the activism than the shooting itself—it was the only outlet that had more articles about the shooting in March than in February when it occurred. Where the other outlets for example featured the gun control frame from the beginning until the end, the focus of Breitbart remained on the activists and the political figures Breitbart drew into its narrative. None of the articles on CNN and The New York Times that had activist frames were negative. Overall, the findings confirm that the framing of the coverage that the news outlets provided about the Parkland survivors-turned-gun control advocates aligned with their partisan orientations (Table 1).