From Guns to Mental Health and Accountability: Decoding Media Narratives and Audience Reactions in Public Mass Shootings

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you. I was suprised and impressed by the quality and lack of issue in the manuscript. The authors addressed there acknowledged the limitations of there analysis and did not attempt to over reach there findings.

Author Response

Thank you so much for taking the time to review our work and provide comments. We appreciate your kind words. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is an interesting essay on a timely, important issue. The authors analyze the impact of media framing on public online engagement and suggest that online comments and posts affect wider policy debates. But I wonder if the latter is true. What is the evidence that online fora exert significant influence on policy makers and policy debates? Perhaps online comments are ephemeral, with very brief half-lives. The online comments on sports rarely endure before the next game or match. I don't know the answer, but the authors should engage the issue.

I also wonder about causation in this article. Is there evidence that framing influences--as opposed to attracts--attitudes? The authors argue that media framing influences public sentiment and policy, but this is asserted and not demonstrated. Similarly, I worry about collinearity issues. Are there gender or racial or regional or age or religious differences in the audiences or the subset of viewers who post on particular networks? I'm not sure how this would be untangled, since the posts probably don't include the kind of demographic data for something akin to regression analysis. Nonetheless, the authors need to consider these issues.

In short, this is an intriguing analysis with enormous potential, though it would be a bit stronger if the authors could engage even partially the issues mentioned above.

Author Response

Comment 2: 

We appreciate the feedback very much and hope that these clarifications and revisions will alleviate concerns.  

The first concern is that whether we are correct that public online “comments and posts affect wider policy debates. But I wonder if the latter is true. What is the evidence that online fora exert significant influence on policy makers and policy debates?”

• We don’t claim that policymakers are reading these online comments. We argue that audiences are more diverse than typically credited. The assumption that, for example, FOX viewers are CNN viewers exist in silos appears inaccurate. Reactions tend to remain relevant to the frame, but do not parrot it, with considerable disagreement occurring on many issues.
• The realization that audiences are more complex than their viewing habits might suggest should be relevant to policymakers and to media platforms, as our analysis suggests. Whether any of them pay attention to those arguments is outside the scope of our analysis.

The second concern is “about causation in this article. Is there evidence that framing influences--as opposed to attracts--attitudes? The authors argue that media framing influences public sentiment and policy, but this is asserted and not demonstrated.”

• We don’t make this claim. Our argument is that people should recognize the diversity of opinion in a complex American public, rather than making traditional assumptions that Fox viewers are like X, while CNN viewers are like Y.
• Out data about the online conversations demonstrate that audiences are speaking to each other, often agreeing, disagreeing, or amplifying the concerns of other citizens.
• We modified the abstract to change “provokes” to “correlate with” to add clarity.
• Earlier mentions that might suggest causality in the research relate the literature and previous conclusions. We are referencing lines 174 to 176 and 237 to 240. We do not assert that our research demonstrates this causality.
• In other references, our research cautions against causal claims indicating that online responses are frequently inconsistent with the episodic framing of the platform claims. We identify lines 996 through 998, lines 1009 through 1014, lines 1080 through 1086 and lines 1179 to 1182 as evidence that we cannot make that causal claim. Audiences frequently respond in ways that are inconsistent with the frame being established.
• For addition clarity, we modified the first paragraph of the conclusion, line 1174, replacing “influence’ with “framing correlates with.”
• In short, our analysis cannot determine whether respondents are influenced by or attracted to the frames, but we do demonstrate that audiences react to episodic frames, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. We also identified nuances in how audiences respond to thematic frames. Media should be very aware of the diversity of reactions.

The final concern was about “collinearity issues. Are there gender or racial or regional or age or religious differences in the audiences or the subset of viewers who post on particular networks? I'm not sure how this would be untangled, since the posts probably don't include the kind of demographic data for something akin to regression analysis.”

• For reasons of privacy and methods of data collection, the demographic data is unavailable. This is why we don’t address those issues. However, for clarity’s sake, we’ve added a few items to the article to help.
• In lines 298-304, we identify the reasons for our inability to collect that data.
• In our conclusion, lines 1186-1188, we acknowledge this as part of the limitations of the research.

Once again, we appreciate the feedback very much and wish everyone a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The core strengths of the essay remain, though the revision largely deflect rather than engage the review suggestions.

Author Response

Comment 2: 

Dear Reviewer: Thank you for your thoughtful first and second reviews of our work. We greatly appreciate your feedback and want to assure you that any impression of deflecting your earlier concerns was entirely unintentional.

1. We acknowledge the need to clarify why demographic data is not included in our samples, and we have addressed this by adding a paragraph in lines 299–305 of the Method section.

2. Additionally, we agree that our discussions required further strengthening to engage with debates around other plausible explanations for our findings. To address this, we have expanded several sections of the Discussion to provide more robust arguments and rigorous engagement with the results. Please see lines 989–1008 and 1025–1029.

3. To avoid creating any impression of an argument for causality, we have made clarifications in lines 1100–1119 and 1156–1163.

4. Finally, we have also enhanced the general conclusion and limitations to reflect this deeper discussion. Please refer to lines 1253 and 1262–1276 for these revisions.

Once again, thank you for your constructive feedback. We hope these revisions address your concerns and bring greater clarity to our manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The revisions are largely cosmetic and intended to deflect rather than engage the suggestions in the review of the original version. Rather than hiding behind the complexity of unearthing clues about the influence of demographic forces, perhaps the authors might have investigated indirect ways to explore this theme or, at the very least, to shed some light on it. Even with this significant shortcoming, however, the essay is interesting and engaging.