Publications by authors named "J MacMillan"

Community firearm violence (CFV), including fatal and non-fatal shootings that result from interpersonal violence, disproportionately harms people from marginalized racial groups. News reporting on CFV can further exacerbate these harms. However, examining the effects of harmful news reporting on CFV on individuals, communities, and society is hindered by the lack of a consensus definition of harmful reporting on CFV.

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Although efforts to estimate effective population size, census size and their ratio in wild populations are expanding, few empirical studies investigate interannual changes in these parameters. Hence, we do not know how repeatable or representative many estimates may be. Answering this question requires studies of long-term population dynamics.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to understand how community firearm violence (CFV) is portrayed in local TV news by examining differences in the characteristics of shooting victims and events in Philadelphia.
  • Researchers analyzed 154 local news clips from January to June 2021, comparing coded information about shooting victims in the news with data from the Philadelphia police database covering 1,082 total shootings.
  • Findings indicated that local TV news over-represented shootings involving children and mass shootings, while the locations featured had higher median household incomes and less socioeconomic inequality compared to other shooting events in the city.
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Background: Firearm violence is an intensifying public health problem in the United States. News reports shape the way the public and policy makers understand and respond to health threats, including firearm violence. To better understand how firearm violence is communicated to the public, we aimed to determine the extent to which firearm violence is framed as a public health problem on television news and to measure harmful news content as identified by firearm-injured people.

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