This paper examines language patterns in US television news coverage of police killings. We first document that the media employ semantic structures that obfuscate responsibility—such as passive voice, nominalizations, and intransitive verbs—more frequently for police killings than for civilian killings. Using field variation and an online experiment, we demonstrate that these language differences matter. In the field, we find that people who happened to have taken a survey just after more obfuscatory coverage of a police killing are more likely to support police funding. In our online experiment, participants are less likely to hold police officers morally responsible and demand penalties when exposed to obfuscatory language, especially when the victim is unarmed. Returning to the news data, we find higher use of obfuscatory language when victims are unarmed, when video footage is available, or when the suspect is not fleeing—in other words, situations when obfuscation matters most. Turning to the causes of this differential obfuscation, our evidence is not consistent with either demand-side drivers or supply-side factors associated with TV station ownership and political leaning. Instead, our results point to original narratives crafted by police departments as a more likely driver of obfuscation. Our study emphasizes the importance of considering semantic language structures in understanding how media shapes perceptions, extending beyond coverage quantity and slant.

The global increase in refugee flows and anti-migrant politics has made it increasingly urgent to understand how migration translates into anti-migrant sentiment. We study the mass exodus of Venezuelans across Latin America, which coincided with an unprecedented decrease in migrant sentiment in the countries which received the most Venezuelans. However, we find no evidence that this decrease occurred in the regions within-country that received the most migrants. We do this using multiple migrant sentiment outcomes including survey measures and social media posts, multiple levels of geographic variation across seven Latin American countries, and an instrumental variable strategy. We find little evidence for heterogeneity along a range of characteristics related to labor market competition, public good scarcity, or crime. If anything, local migration increases migrant sentiment among those most directly exposed to these pressures. We also find that local migration induces meaningful, repeated contact between migrants and natives. The results are consistent with anti-migrant sentiment being driven by national-level narratives divorced from local experiences with migrants.

This paper provides evidence of the causal effect of church attendance on petty crime by using quasi-random variation in the number of Sundays when it precipitated at the specific time of most religious services. Using a novel strategy, I find a narrow time window when most individuals attend church. Based on a panel between 1980 and 2016, I find that one more Sunday with precipitation at the time of church increases yearly drug-related, alcohol-related, and white-collar crimes. I do not find an effect for violent or property crimes. These effects are driven by more religious counties. Previous evidence showing negative effects of church attendance on the demand for alcohol and drugs is consistent with a demand-driven interpretation of the results presented.

I estimate how routine crime coverage capitalizes into housing prices by separating the realized amenity from the information conveyed about it. I assemble a novel dataset linking nearly all U.S. gun homicides (2014-2018) to 1.5 million station-days of local news and to housing transactions, which allows me to benchmark crimes the media could cover against those it does. Identification leverages predictable crowd-out in airtime from local sports schedules. Coverage of a nearby homicide lowers sale prices by 8.1-8.5 percent. Additional evidence points to demand-side responses: buyers react to news reports while short-run housing supply remains unchanged. Having established this information channel, I document systematic coverage disparities across race: incidents with non-white victims or suspects are more likely to be covered than white-white cases, even conditional on extensive incident and neighborhood characteristics. Using the price estimates, I quantify the implied valuation effects of these coverage gaps.