Using artificial intelligence and archival news articles, this teen found that Black homicide victims were less humanized in news coverage

Using artificial intelligence and archival news articles, a teenager in Northern Virginia created a program to measure media biases – and in researching older news articles, she found that Black homicide victims were less likely to be humanized in news coverage. Emily Ocasio, an 18-year-old from Falls Church, Virginia, created an AI program that analyzed FBI homicide records between 1976 and 1984 and their corresponding coverage published in The Boston Globe to determine whether victims were presented in a humanizing or impersonal way. After analyzing 5,042 entries, the results showed that Black men under the age of 18 were 30% less likely to receive humanizing coverage than their White counterparts, Ocasio told CNN. Black women were 23% less likely to be humanized in news stories, Ocasio added. A news article was considered humanizing when it mentioned additional information about the victim and presented them "as a person, not just a statistic," Ocasio said in her project presentation.