Covering Domestic Violence: How the O.J. Simpson Case Shaped Reporting of Domestic Violence in the News Media

Abstract

This article examines how the Simpson case affected newspaper coverage of domestic violence. We analyzed the frequency with which domestic violence was covered and the content of that coverage in the New York Times, the Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. As expected, the number of non-Simpson domestic violence stories increased immediately after the event but declined in the majority of newspapers afterwards. The hypothesis that domestic violence story coverage would shift from incident focused to socially focused reporting was not generally supported. Social coverage was present across all domestic violence stories before the Simpson event, and with only minor variations, the overall coverage content did not change.