The Killing Agent : A comparative transitivity analysis of US news headlines regarding killings of and by the civilian and the police officer

Abstract: Due to its status and reach, media discourse can shape its reader's perspective on social actors and events, for good and for worse. This thesis investigates 100 headlines retrieved via searches in the NOW corpus, of which 50 portray killings of police officers by civilians and 50 portray the opposite, killings of civilians by police officers. The US headlines were exposed to transitivity analysis with a focus on agency in order to discover potential differences in portrayal when comparing the two groups. The results show that the killing agents are placed similarly, that the civilian as the killing agent is named to a slightly higher extent and that the police officer as the killing agent is presented in plural or as a group to a much higher extent. All of these choices may have different motives. The descriptions of the participants and the circumstances seem to be the most significant in comparison, where the police officers and their actions are mainly neutrally described and the civilians and their actions are often negatively described, even when they are the victim. The study highlights and discusses the imbalanced relationship between journalists and police, which perhaps needs to be addressed more often publicly in order for news media's portrayals of mishaps by police officers to be understood critically.