The Chapel Hill Shooting

Case Study: The Chapel Hill Shooting
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Case study: The Chapel Hill Shooting
Introduction
Media plays a significant role in shaping the societal perception of events. It determines how society perceives issues surrounding it. Racism is an excellent example of how the media influences how people perceive others. When we think of racism, we think of bigots who make discriminatory statements about people of color, vulgar displays of racial epithets and insults, and outright acts of racism. This article explores how the press hides and denies prejudice and how people are blamed in crime tales. The media plays a critical role in shaping public perceptions of American Muslims, who are frequently portrayed as inflexible and indifferent to social progress (Al-Ahmad et al., 2020). In the Western world, notably in the United States, the media, contributing to their uneven depiction in the minds of Westerners, constructs anti-Muslim discourses. Discursive tactics like self-presentation, denial, retaliation, moral blackmail, nuanced denials, reduction, and defense and offense are widely relied upon to show how racism is concealed and denied in the press.
The media' influence can be discussed in light of the framing model, which is a theory of mass communication that focuses on how the media packages and represents information to the public. According to the model, the media captures specific events and presents them in a particular context to either encourage or discourage some interpretations. The framework implies that how one presents information to a targeted audience, termed the frame, invokes the choices of the individuals in processing the news or information. Arowolo (2017) adds that the foundation of the theory is that the media's focus is primarily on particular events and then coins the information in a chosen area of meaning and understanding. Therefore, this case study focuses on utilizing the framing theory to show how the media distorts the societal interpretation of racism. The case study under discussion will be on the Chapel Hill shooting and its subsequent presentation in the media. 
The Chapel Hill shooting became of public interest because of the circumstances surrounding three people' death in what was initially reported as an argument over a parking space. However, controversy arose after it emerged that Craig Hicks had shot dead three of his neighbors, who were all Muslims. Notably, the media portrayal of Muslims has not been very positive since the 9/11 attack. As the Framing theory suggests, even in cases where a Muslim is wronged, the media will piece together information to create a narrative that makes the public stand against the Muslims. The case study proves that indeed, media has been instrumental in the misconceptions surrounding various events in the world, including racism. This study assesses how different media houses report the same event using different choices of words to drive their agenda. We look at how NPR, BBC, and CNN report the Chapel shooting because the three media centers are a source of information to millions of readers around the world. The study will assess how these media houses utilize the three forms of appeal associated with the framing theory: cognitive, rhetorical and ideological appeals to communicate the same information. Despite the fact that they report one incident, the choice of words they use, the references they make, and the subsequent assumptions they base their assessment shows how media uses the framing theory to elicit different feelings and subsequent interpretation by the people.
Literature Review
Utilization of the framing theory to provide a critical lens of issues presented in literature entails understanding how messages get developed and how the audiences make sense of the news. The model uses frames to deliberately reconstitute selected aspects of reality surrounding the deliberation of a public issue. It knits together carefully chosen ideas, information, judgments, arguments, claims, and value statements into a narrative that guides the interpretation of the frame holder (Waller & Conaway, 2011). The frames operate on three different levels: the cognitive, rhetorical, and ideological levels. On the cognitive level, these frames operate by conveying new thematic concepts to the receiver. They may also trigger the preexisting thematic elements and knit them together, directing the viewer on what to focus on and ignore (Kendall, 2005). On the rhetorical level, the frames depend on metaphors and similes, appeals to pathos and ethos, figurative phrasing, and reliance on causal arguments to present points (Johnson-Cartee, 2005). On the ideological level, the frames possess information on how society works or ought to work. It also has comprehensive information on the relationship among the society's members and operates on assumptions concerning social priorities and challenges (Kendall, 2005). These different levels of operation allow the reporter to have an immense influence on society.
Several scholars have attempted to research the framing theory in the context of media and the portrayal of certain stereotypes and anecdotes that may lead to contextualized interpretations, which the audience relies on in responding to specific events. The article "The role of media framing in crime reports: How different types of news frames and racial identity affect viewers' perceptions of race" by Foreman depicts how racial recognition and various types of media frames influence viewer's beliefs about suspects of illicit actions and the whole racial sets to which the criminal belongs (Foreman et al., 2016). Similarly, Valkenburg, Semetko, and Claes (1999) carried out a study on the effects of news frames on the readers. They were using a sample of 187 participants. The researchers presented the participants with news articles on social and political issues in Europe. Some elements of the stories were manipulated to fit certain frames for the experiment. The findings indicated frames played a significant role in the readers' thought-listing responses.
Kim, Carvalho, and Davis (2010) also conducted a study exploring how the American news media frame the poverty issue regarding its causes and solutions. The authors examined the concept of frame building, in which they assessed the factors that may influence the media's selective utilization of specific frames. According to their findings, media largely attributed the cause to societal factors rather than personal level factors. Liberal newspapers attributed the causes more to societal factors than the conservative papers. An article by Provalis Research also confirms this approach to information representation, where the media frames issues through selection and salience. According to the report, framing entails selecting certain aspects of a perceived reality and making them more salient in communicating a text in such a manner that it promotes the intended problem definition, causal interpretation, moral assessment, and treatment recommendation of the items described. 
Kim (2017) studies how the US newspapers frame marijuana legalization. Traditionally, marijuana was an illegal drug, and anyone who would be found in its possession or usage would be prosecuted. During such times, the media sold a different narrative about the drug, rebuking it as being a dangerous drug that people should not use. However, following the decision to legalize it, it is interesting to assess how the media have changed the narrative. Kim (2017) utilized content analysis and experiment, and using the framing theory as a theoretical framework, the study established that the media largely described the legalization of marijuana as a legislation issue or a law enforcement issue. The newspapers frequently mentioned specific attributes, including the medical benefits and the medical risks to either support or oppose its legalization. Yang, Wendorf Muhamad, and Yang (2019) also confirmed the same findings in their study. These results confirmed that the way the media frames the issue under discussion influences the public's perception towards it. If the media chooses to focus only on the positive aspect of the drug, the society will accept such a drug as being important in their lives. On the contrary, if the media decides to market as specific drug as a bad one, people will also develop a negative attitude towards it. 
As Gallup (2021) posits, the framing effect or framing bias is based on the fact that people perceive information differently when it is presented in different frames. In this instance, context plays an essential role towards interpreting a message. For example, when one shouts, “Run” in a crowded area, people will interpret it differently compared to when one shouts the same term during a training session. This statement shows the significance of a frame towards interpretation of a message. Similarly, since the 9/11, despite it being a small fraction of the criminal events that occur in the United States annually, the excessive attention that the government and the media gave the incident created a wedge between Muslims and other religions not only in the United States but also in many other countries around the world (Thudium, 2022). Therefore, the way that the media frames an incident, through their choice of words and the sections that they choose to focus on, determines the interpretation of the public.
Assessment of the Chapel Hill incident in terms of how the media approached the issue reveals these framing instances. In using this technique, the media obtains information, sieves it and then creates a narrative from which they will sell to the people to make the idea to be more acceptable. This paper will analyze this case by considering the three different levels outlined in the framing theory that media uses to influence the people. It will consider how the media utilized the cognitive level frame, the rhetorical level frame, and the ideological level frame to influence people's perception towards the shooting incident. The study will show the power of the media in changing a narrative from facts to what they want the society to perceive as the truth. 
Methodology
The relevant media will be collected through a simple Google-search process using the key words “The Chapel Hill Shooting.” This search yielded 16,700,000 results on various shooting incidents. I focused on the reliable news outlets and their accompanying headings for analysis purposes. I narrowed on three major media sources based on their popularity and hence likely impact on the readers. The news sources identified included NPR (Chappell, 2019), CNN (Ahmed & Shoichet, 2015), and BBC (BBC, 2019). I applied the three appeals...