Identity in Journalism: Evidence from News Reporting of Violence Against Women

Abstract

How does the identity of journalists shape news content, and to what extent does it affect readers' behavior? I investigate this question in the context of gender identity and media representation of violence against women (VAW) in Italy, focusing on murders where the victim is a woman. I construct a novel dataset of newspaper articles about murders of women from 2006 to 2022, and I isolate different reporting practices outlined in international guidelines using a dictionary approach. Exploiting the exogenous assignment of journalists to crimes based on work schedules, I find that female authors are more likely to comply with international journalistic guidelines on reporting about VAW. For instance, they are twice as likely as male reporters to mention the Italian helpline number for VAW and around ten percentage points less likely to mention a "fit of rage" which, according to the guidelines, tends to minimize the perpetrator’s responsibility in the murder. To identify the effect of being exposed to female journalists on readers' behavior, I leverage the exogenous assignment of journalists and the random timing of these murders. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design with continuous treatment, I show that increasing exposure to female authors leads to a 17% increase in calls to the helpline number for VAW in the weeks following the murder of a woman in the province where the murder happened, corresponding to one additional call for each province and week. Finally, preliminary evidence from an online experiment suggests that these changes are likely to be driven by the different narratives used by reporters, as exposure to perpetrator-centered and victim-centered narratives leads to changes in respondents' attitudes, preferences for government intervention, and perceived help-seeking behavior.