Officer-Involved: The Media Language of Police Killings*.

This article investigates the use of obfuscatory language—specifically syntactic structures like passive voice, nominalizations, omission of agents, and intransitive verbs—in U.S. television news coverage of police killings compared to civilian homicides. Analyzing over 190,000 news stories from 2013 to 2019, the study finds that media coverage of police killings employs these language forms significantly more, especially in the first sentence of reports, which tends to obscure police responsibility. A nationally representative survey and a controlled online experiment demonstrate that such obfuscation reduces viewers' attribution of moral responsibility to officers, decreases demands for accountability, and lowers support for police reform, particularly when victims are unarmed. The article further shows that obfuscatory language is more prevalent in cases likely to provoke public scrutiny (e.g., unarmed victims or available body-camera footage) and provides evidence that this language use is largely influenced by police department narratives rather than media ownership, political leaning, or audience demand.