Date of Graduation

2002

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MA

Committee Chair

James Nolan

Abstract

In 1990, the United States Congress passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act (HCSA) which set into motion the development of a law-enforcement based data collection system aimed at learning more about “hate crimes.” By 1999 the term “hate crime” had become so widely used and recognizable that when news broke of the murders of Matthew Shephard, a University of Wyoming student who was brutally murdered because he was gay, and James L. Byrd, a disabled black man who was savagely murdered because of his race, the media understandably labeled these acts as “hate crimes.” In this paper the authors will examine the news coverage of hate crimes prior to and after passage of the Hate Crime Statistics Act. In studying these news reports, the authors will attempt to gain an understanding of the nature of the hate crime coverage. I will examine the consistency in the way hate crimes are defined and reported in the media, the extent to which hate crimes are covered in specific geographic areas of the country, the types of bias most likely to be reported by the press (i.e., race, sexual- orientation, religion, or some other bias), and recent trends in the frequency in which hate crimes are reported. I will try to correlate the news coverage of hate crimes with the hate crimes being reported by law enforcement officials.

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