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By Matthias Petry
Newspaper reporters tend to distort the issue of domestic violence. At least, that's the conclusion reached so far by a USU professor studying press coverage of domestic violence in two states. "The whole idea was this: If you take a social issue like domestic violence, unless you're going through it yourself or have a family member going through it, a lot of things you learn about it comes from the media. And research shows that media can make a difference in our pictures of the world," says Cathy Bullock, assistant professor in the Utah State University journalism and communication department. Bullock is working on research projects on the newspaper coverage of domestic violence fatalities in the states of Washington and Utah. Domestic violence is a social issue with many definitions and even more misconceptions tied to it. It is usually defined as any kind of abuse, be it verbal, psychological, physical or emotional, between partners in any kind of relationship, sometimes also involving the abuse of children. In 1998, when Bullock started her research, 1,830 people in the United States were murdered by their current or former partners, and 72 percent of the victims were women. Bullock started this project together with fellow research assistant Jason Cubert, for the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at the University of Washington. Their research examined the 1998 coverage of domestic violence homicides by all newspapers in Washington state. "We wanted to see how domestic violence was portrayed in those newspapers by looking at questions like: Are the articles labeled as domestic violence? Does the coverage show the common misconceptions about domestic violence? What sources do the journalists use?" Bullock says misconceptions include that the victim is to blame or that this can only happen to families with drug or alcohol problems. The results of the research indicated that in general, the coverage gave a distorted view of domestic violence and the victims' experiences. "What we came away with was that most of these articles did not give a very realistic picture of what we think domestic violence really is," Bullock said of the study's results so far. "This concerned us because a lot of us get our information from newspapers and TV. We literally found just a handful of articles among the 230 articles we examined that showed that you could follow today's journalistic norms and still do a better job portraying domestic violence realistically." Now she is repeating the same research project with newspapers in Utah, where the rate of domestic violence fatalities is above the national average. Bullock believes this is especially interesting, as "Utah is a place were the dominant culture really values family, so how does domestic violence have any place here?" The vast data, about 600 articles, has not yet been completely analyzed, so it is too early to draw any concrete conclusions. However, Bullock assumes that "they [the Utah newspapers] are more likely to label something domestic violence. I think probably we are going to find the misconceptions supported again, though I still have to crunch the numbers and we will see how true that is."
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