Update 1: On May 16, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a proposed rule to the Federal Register to downgrade marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug. This is the first step in a lengthy approval process that starts with a 60-day comment period.

Update 2: Two recent research studies were added to the “Studies on marijuana and driving” section of this piece on July 18, 2024.

As marijuana use continues to rise and state-level marijuana legalization sweeps the U.S., researchers and policymakers are grappling with a growing public safety concern: marijuana-impaired driving.

As of April 2023, 38 U.S. states had legalized medical marijuana and 23 had legalized its recreational use, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Recreational or medical marijuana measures are on the ballot in seven states this year.

The issue of marijuana-impaired driving has not been an easy one to tackle because, unlike alcohol, which has well-established thresholds of impairment, the metrics for marijuana’s effects on driving remain rather elusive.

“We don’t have that kind of deep knowledge right now and it’s not because of lack of trying,” says Dr. Guohua Li, professor of epidemiology and the founding director of the Center for Injury Science and Prevention at Columbia University.

“Marijuana is very different from alcohol in important ways,” says Li, who has published several studies on marijuana and driving. “And one of them is that the effect of marijuana on cognitive functions and behaviors is much more unpredictable than alcohol. In general, alcohol is a depressant drug. But marijuana could act on the central nervous system as a depressant, a stimulant, and a hallucinogenic substance.”

Efforts to create a breathalyzer to measure the level of THC, the main psychoactive compound found in the marijuana plant, have largely failed, because “the THC molecule is much bigger than ethanol and its behavior after ingestion is very different from alcohol,” Li says.

Currently, the two most common methods used to measure THC concentration to identify impaired drivers are blood and saliva tests, although there’s ongoing debate about their reliability.

Marijuana, a term interchangeably used with cannabis, is the most commonly used federally illegal drug in the U.S.: 48.2 million people, or about 18% of Americans reported using it at least once in 2019, according to the latest available data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Worldwide, 2.5% of the population consumes marijuana, according to the World Health Organization.

Marijuana is legal in several countries, including Canada, where it was legalized in 2018. Despite state laws legalizing cannabis, it remains illegal at the federal level in the U.S.

As states grapple with the contentious issue of marijuana legalization, the debate is not just about public health, potential tax revenues and economic interests. At the heart of the discussion is also the U.S. criminal justice system.

Marijuana is shown to have medicinal qualities and, compared with substances like alcohol, tobacco, and opioids, it has relatively milder health risks. However, it’s not risk-free, a large body of research has shown.

Marijuana consumption can lead to immediate effects such as impaired muscle coordination and paranoia, as well as longer-term effects on mental health and cognitive functions — and addiction. As its use becomes more widespread, researchers are trying to better understand the potential hazards of marijuana, particularly for younger users whose brains are in critical stages of development.

Marijuana and driving

The use of marijuana among drivers, passengers and pedestrians has increased steadily over the past two decades, Li says.

Compared with the year 2000, the proportion of U.S. drivers on the road who are under the influence of marijuana has increased by several folds, between five to 10 times, based on toxicology testing of people who died in car crashes, Li says.

A 2022 report from the National Transportation Safety Board finds alcohol and cannabis are the two most commonly detected drugs among drivers arrested for impaired driving and fatally injured drivers. Most drivers who tested positive for cannabis also tested positive for another potentially impairing drug.

“Although cannabis and many other drugs have been shown to impair driving performance and are associated with increased crash risk, there is evidence that, relative to alcohol, awareness about the potential dangers of driving after using other drugs is lower,” according to the report.

Indeed, many U.S. adults perceive daily marijuana use or exposure to its smoke safer than tobacco, even though research finds otherwise.

Several studies have demonstrated marijuana’s impact on driving.

Marijuana use can reduce the drivers’ ability to pay attention, particularly when they are performing multiple tasks, research finds. It also slows reaction time and can impair coordination.

“The combination is that you potentially have people who are noticing hazards later, braking slower and potentially not even noticing hazards because of their inability to focus on competing things on the road,” says Dr. Daniel Myran, an assistant professor at the Department of Family Medicine and health services researcher at the University of Ottawa.

In a study published in September in JAMA Network Open, Myran and colleagues find that from 2010 to 2021 the rate of cannabis-involved traffic injuries that led to emergency department visits in Ontario, Canada, increased by 475%, from 0.18 per 1,000 traffic injury emergency department visits in 2010 to 1.01 visits in 2021.

To be sure, cannabis-involved traffic injuries made up a small fraction of all traffic injury-related visits to hospital emergency departments. Out of 947,604 traffic injury emergency department visits, 426 had documented cannabis involvement.

Myran cautions the increase shouldn’t be solely attributed to marijuana legalization. It captures changing societal attitudes toward marijuana and acceptance of cannabis use over time in the lead-up to legalization. In addition, it may reflect an increasing awareness among health care providers about cannabis-impaired driving, and they may be more likely to ask about cannabis use and document it in medical charts, he says.

“When you look at the 475% increase in cannabis involvement in traffic injuries, rather than saying legalizing cannabis has caused the roads to be unsafe and is a public health disaster, it’s that cannabis use appears to be growing as a risk for road traffic injuries and that there seem to be more cannabis impaired drivers on the road,” Myran says. “Legalization may have accelerated this trend. Faced with this increase, we need to think about what are public health measures and different policy interventions to reduce harms from cannabis-impaired driving.”

Setting a legal limit for marijuana-impaired driving

Setting a legal limit for marijuana-impaired driving has not been easy. Countries like Canada and some U.S. states have agreed upon a certain level of THC in blood, usually between 1 to 5 nanograms per milliliter. Still, some studies have found those limits to be weak indicators of cannabis-impaired driving.

When Canada legalized recreational marijuana in 2018, it also passed a law that made it illegal to drive with blood THC levels of more than 2 nanograms. The penalties are more severe for blood THC levels above 5 nanograms. The blood test is done at the police station for people who are pulled over and are deemed to be drug impaired.

In the U.S., five states — Ohio, Illinois, Montana, Washington and Nevada — have “per se laws,” which set a specific amount of THC in the driver’s blood as evidence of impaired driving, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That limit ranges between 2 and 5 nanograms of THC per milliliter of blood.

Colorado, meanwhile, has a “permissible inference law,” which states that it’s permissible to assume the driver was under the influence if their blood THC level is 5 nanograms per milliliter or higher, according to NCSL.

Twelve states, most which have legalized some form of marijuana of use, have zero tolerance laws for any amount of certain drugs, including THC, in the body.

The remaining states have “driving under the influence of drugs” laws. Among those states, Alabama and Michigan, have oral fluid roadside testing program to screen drivers for marijuana and other drugs, according to NCSL.

In May this year, the U.S. Department of Transportation published a final rule that allows employers to use saliva testing for commercially licensed drivers, including truck drivers. The rule, which went into effect in June, sets the THC limit in saliva at 4 nanograms.

Saliva tests can detect THC for 8 to 24 hours after use, but the tests are not perfect and can results in false positives, leading some scientists to argue against using them in randomly-selected drivers.

In a 2021 report, the U.S. National Institute of Justice, the research and development arm of the Department of Justice, concluded that THC levels in bodily fluids, including blood and saliva “were not reliable indicators of marijuana intoxication.”

Studies on marijuana and driving

Over the past two decades, many studies have shown marijuana use can impair driving. However, discussions about what’s the best way to measure the level of THC in blood or saliva are ongoing. Below, we highlight and summarize several recent studies that address the issue. The studies are listed in order of publication date. We also include a list of related studies and resources to inform your audiences.

State Driving Under the Influence of Drugs Laws
Alexandra N. Origenes, Sarah A. White, Emma E. McGinty and Jon S. Vernick. Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, July 2024.

Summary: As of January 2023, 33 states and D.C. had a driving under the influence of drugs law for at least one drug other than cannabis. Of those, 29 states and D.C. had a law specifically for driving under the influence of cannabis, in addition to a law for driving under the influence of other drugs. Four states had a driving under the influence of drug laws, excluding cannabis. Meanwhile, 17 states had no law for driving under the influence of drugs, including cannabis.  “The 17 states lacking a DUID law that names specific drugs should consider enacting such a law. These states already have expressed their concern — through legislation — with drug-impaired driving. However, failure to name specific drugs is likely to make the laws more difficult to enforce. These laws may force courts and/or law enforcement to rely on potentially subjective indicators of impairment,” the authors write.

Associations between Adolescent Marijuana Use, Driving After Marijuana Use and Recreational Retail Sale in Colorado, USA
Lucas M. Neuroth, et al. Substance Use & Misuse, October 2023.

Summary: Researchers use data from four waves (2013, 2015, 2017 and 2019) of the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey, including 47,518 students 15 and older who indicated that they drove. They find 20.3% of students said that they had used marijuana in the past month and 10.5% said they had driven under the influence of marijuana. They find that the availability of recreational marijuana in stores was associated with an increased prevalence of using marijuana one to two times in the past month and driving under the influence of marijuana at least once. “Over the study period, one in ten high school age drivers engaged in [driving after marijuana use], which is concerning given the high risk of motor vehicle-related injury and death arising from impaired driving among adolescents,” the authors write.

Are Blood and Oral Fluid Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and Metabolite Concentrations Related to Impairment? A Meta-Regression Analysis
Danielle McCartney, et al. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, March 2022.

Summary: Commonly used THC measurements may not be strong indicators of driving impairment. While there is a relationship between certain biomarkers like blood THC concentrations and impaired driving, this correlation is often weak. The study underscores the need for more nuanced and comprehensive research on this topic, especially as cannabis usage becomes more widespread and legally accepted.

The Effects of Cannabis and Alcohol on Driving Performance and Driver Behaviour: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Sarah M. Simmons, Jeff K. Caird, Frances Sterzer and Mark Asbridge. Addiction, January 2022.

Summary: This meta-analysis of experimental driving studies, including driving simulations, confirms that cannabis impairs driving performance, contrary to some beliefs that it might enhance driving abilities. Cannabis affects lateral control and speed — typically increasing lane excursions while reducing speed. The combination of alcohol and marijuana appears worse than either alone, challenging the idea that they cancel each other out.

Cannabis Legalization and Detection of Tetrahydrocannabinol in Injured Drivers
Jeffrey R. Brubacher, et al. The New England Journal of Medicine, January 2022.

Summary: Following the legalization of recreational marijuana in Canada, there was a notable increase in injured drivers testing positive for THC, especially among those 50 years of age or older. This rise in cannabis-related driving incidents occurred even with new traffic laws aiming to deter cannabis-impaired driving. This uptick began before legalization became official, possibly due to perceptions that cannabis use was soon-to-be legal or illegal but not enforced. The data suggests that while legalization has broad societal impacts, more comprehensive strategies are needed to deter driving under the influence of cannabis and raise public awareness about its risks.

Cannabis and Driving
Godfrey D. Pearlson, Michael C. Stevens and Deepak Cyril D’Souza. Frontiers in Psychiatry, September 2021.

Summary: Cannabis-impaired driving is a growing public health concern, and studies show that such drivers are more likely to be involved in car crashes, according to this review paper. Drivers are less affected by cannabis than they are by alcohol or cocaine, but the problem is expected to escalate with increasing cannabis legalization and use. Unlike alcohol, THC’s properties make it challenging to determine direct impairment levels from testing results. Current roadside tests lack precision in detecting genuine cannabis-impaired drivers, leading to potential wrongful convictions. Moreover, there is a pressing need for research on the combined effects of alcohol and cannabis on driving, as well as the impact of emerging popular forms of cannabis, like concentrates and edibles. The authors recommend public awareness campaigns about the dangers of driving under the influence of cannabis, similar to those against drunk driving, to address misconceptions. Policymakers should prioritize science-based decisions and encourage further research in this domain.

Demographic And Policy-Based Differences in Behaviors And Attitudes Towards Driving After Marijuana Use: An Analysis of the 2013–2017 Traffic Safety Culture Index
Marco H. Benedetti, et al. BMC Research Notes, June 2021.

Summary: The study, based on a U.S. survey, finds younger, low-income, low-education and male participants were more tolerant of driving after marijuana consumption. Notably, those in states that legalized medical marijuana reported driving after use more frequently, aligning with studies indicating a higher prevalence of THC detection in drivers from these states. Overall, while the majority perceive driving after marijuana use as dangerous, not all research agrees on its impairment effects. Existing studies highlight that marijuana impacts motor skills and executive functions, yet its direct correlation with crash risk remains debated, given the variations in individual tolerance and how long THC remains in the system.

Driving Under the Influence of Cannabis: A Framework for Future Policy
Robert M. Chow, et al.Anesthesia & Analgesia, June 2019.

Summary: The study presents a conceptual framework focusing on four main domains: legalization, driving under the influence of cannabis, driver impairment, and motor vehicle accidents. With the growing legalization of cannabis, there’s an anticipated rise in cannabis-impaired driving cases. The authors group marijuana users into infrequent users who show significant impairment with increased THC blood levels, chronic users with minimal impairment despite high THC levels, and those with consistent psychomotor deficits. Current challenges lie in the lack of standardized regulation for drivers influenced by cannabis, primarily because of state-to-state variability and the absence of a federal statutory limit for blood THC levels. European nations, however, have established thresholds for blood THC levels, ranging from 0.5 to 50.0 micrograms per liter depending on whether blood or blood serum are tested. The authors suggest the combined use of alcohol and THC blood tests with a psychomotor evaluation by a trained professional to determine impairment levels. The paper stresses the importance of creating a structured policy framework, given the rising acceptance and use of marijuana in society.

Additional research

Cannabis-Involved Traffic Injury Emergency Department Visits After Cannabis Legalization and Commercialization
Daniel T. Myran, et al. JAMA Network Open, September 2023.

Driving Performance and Cannabis Users’ Perception of Safety: A Randomized Clinical Trial
Thomas D. Marcotte, et al. JAMA Psychiatry, January 2022.

Medicinal Cannabis and Driving: The Intersection of Health and Road Safety Policy
Daniel Perkins, et al. International Journal of Drug Policy, November 2021.

Prevalence of Marijuana Use Among Trauma Patients Before and After Legalization of Medical Marijuana: The Arizona Experience
Michael Levine, et al. Substance Abuse, July 2021.

Self-Reported Driving After Marijuana Use in Association With Medical And Recreational Marijuana Policies
Marco H. Benedetti, et al. International Journal of Drug Policy, June 2021.

Cannabis and Driving Ability
Eric L. Sevigny. Current Opinion in Psychology, April 2021.

The Failings of per se Limits to Detect Cannabis-Induced Driving Impairment: Results from a Simulated Driving Study
Thomas R. Arkell, et al. Traffic Injury Prevention, February 2021.

Risky Driving Behaviors of Drivers Who Use Alcohol and Cannabis
Tara Kelley-Baker, et al. Transportation Research Record, January 2021.

Direct and Indirect Effects of Marijuana Use on the Risk of Fatal 2-Vehicle Crash Initiation
Stanford Chihuri and Guohua Li. Injury Epidemiology, September 2020

Cannabis-Impaired Driving: Evidence and the Role of Toxicology Testing
Edward C. Wood and Robert L. Dupont. Cannabis in Medicine, July 2020.

Association of Recreational Cannabis Laws in Colorado and Washington State With Changes in Traffic Fatalities, 2005-2017
Julian Santaella-Tenorio, et al. JAMA Internal Medicine, June 2020.

Marijuana Decriminalization, Medical Marijuana Laws, and Fatal Traffic Crashes in US Cities, 2010–2017
Amanda Cook, Gregory Leung and Rhet A. Smith. American Journal of Public Health, February 2020.

Cannabis Use in Older Drivers in Colorado: The LongROAD Study
Carolyn G. DiGuiseppi, et al. Accident Analysis & Prevention, November 2019.

Crash Fatality Rates After Recreational Marijuana Legalization in Washington and Colorado
Jayson D. Aydelotte, et al. American Journal of Public Health, August 2017.

Marijuana-Impaired Driving: A Report to Congress
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, July 2017

Interaction of Marijuana And Alcohol on Fatal Motor Vehicle Crash Risk: A Case–Control Study
Stanford Chihuri, Guohua Li and Qixuan Chen. Injury Epidemiology, March 2017.

US Traffic Fatalities, 1985–2014, and Their Relationship to Medical Marijuana Laws
Julian Santaella-Tenorio, et al. American Journal of Public Health, February 2017.

Delays in DUI Blood Testing: Impact on Cannabis DUI Assessments
Ed Wood, Ashley Brooks-Russell and Phillip Drum. Traffic Injury Prevention, June 2015.

Establishing Legal Limits for Driving Under the Influence of Marijuana
Kristin Wong, Joanne E. Brady and Guohua Li. Injury Epidemiology, October 2014.

Cannabis Effects on Driving Skills
Rebecca L. Hartman and Marilyn A. Huestis. Clinical Chemistry, March 2014.

Acute Cannabis Consumption And Motor Vehicle Collision Risk: Systematic Review of Observational Studies and Meta-Analysis
Mark Asbridge, Jill A. Hayden and Jennifer L. Cartwright. The BMJ, February 2012.

Resources for your audiences

The following resources include explainers from federal agencies and national organizations. You’re free to use images and graphics from federal agencies.

• CDC’s main marijuana page.
• CDC’s marijuana data and statistics.
• Marijuana Drug Facts from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
• Health Effects of Marijuana from the CDC.
• Learn About Marijuana Risks from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
• Marijuana and Lung Health from the American Lung Association.
• Substance Use Disorder 101 from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
• What You Need To Know About Marijuana Use and Driving from the CDC.
• Does marijuana use affect driving? from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
• Drug-Impaired Driving from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

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Journalists can’t report accurately on research involving human subjects without knowing certain details about the sample of people researchers studied. It’s important to know, for example, whether researchers used a nationally representative sample.

That’s important whether a journalist is covering an opinion poll that asks American voters which presidential candidate they prefer, an academic article that examines absenteeism among U.S. public school students or a clinical trial of a new drug designed to treat Alzheimer’s disease.

When researchers design a study, they start by defining their target population, or the group of people they want to know more about. They then create a sample meant to represent this larger group. If researchers want to study a group of people across an entire country, they aim for a nationally representative sample — one that resembles the target population in key characteristics such as gender, age, political party affiliation and household income.

Earlier this year, when the Pew Research Center wanted to know how Americans feel about a new class of weight-loss drugs, it asked a sample of 10,133 U.S. adults questions about obesity and the effects of Ozempic, Wegovy and similar drugs. Pew designed the survey so that the answers those 10,133 people gave likely reflected the attitudes of all U.S. adults across various demographics.

If Pew researchers had simply interviewed 10,133 people they encountered at shopping malls in the southeastern U.S., their responses would not have been nationally representative. Not only would their answers reflect attitudes in just one region of the country, the individuals interviewed would not represent adults nationwide.

A nationally representative sample is one of several types of samples used in research. It’s commonly used in research that examines numerical data in public policy fields such as public health, criminal justice, education, immigration, politics and economics.

To accurately report on research, journalists must pay close attention to who is and isn’t included in research samples. Here’s why that information is critical:

1. If researchers did not use a sample designed to represent people from across the nation, it would be inaccurate to report or imply that their results apply nationwide.

A mistake journalists make when covering research is overgeneralizing the results, or reporting that the results apply to a larger group of people than they actually do. Depending on who is included in the sample, a study’s findings might only apply to the people in the sample. Many times, findings apply only to a narrow group of people at the national level who share the same characteristics as the people in the sample — for example, individuals who retired from the U.S. military after 2015 or Hispanic teenagers with food allergies.

To determine who a study is designed to represent, look at how the researchers have defined this target population, including location, demographics and other characteristics.

“Consider who that research is meant to be applicable to,” says Ameeta Retzer, a research fellow at the University of Birmingham’s Department of Applied Health Sciences.

2. When researchers use a nationally representative sample, their analyses often focus on what’s happening at a national level, on average. Because of this, it’s never safe to assume that national-level findings also apply to people at the local level.

“As a word of caution, if you’re using a nationally representative sample, you can’t say, ‘Well, that means in California …,” warns Michael Gottfried, an applied economist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

When researchers create a nationally representative sample of U.S. grade school students, their aim is to gain a better understanding of some aspect of the nation’s student population, Gottfried says. What they learn will represent an average across all students nationwide.

“On average, this is what kids are doing, this is how kids are doing, this is the average experience of kids in the United States,” he explains. “The conclusion has to stay at the national level. It means you cannot go back and say kids in Philadelphia are doing that. You can’t take this information and say, ‘In my city, this is happening.’ It’s probably happening in your city, but cities are all different.”

3. There’s no universally accepted standard for representativeness.

If you read a lot of research, you’ve likely noticed that what constitutes a nationally representative sample varies. Researchers investigating the spending habits of Americans aged 20 to 30 years might create a sample that represents this age group in terms of gender and race. Meanwhile, a similar study might use a sample that represents this age group across multiple dimensions — gender, race and ethnicity along with education level, household size, household income and the language spoken at home.

“In research, there’s no consensus on which characteristics we include when we think about representativeness,” Retzer notes.

Researchers determine whether their sample adequately represents the population they want to study, she says. Sometimes, researchers call a sample “nationally representative” even though it’s not all that representative.

Courtney Kennedy, vice president of methods and innovation at Pew Research Center, has questioned the accuracy of election research conducted with samples that only represent U.S. voters by age, race and sex. It’s increasingly important for opinion poll samples to also align with voters’ education levels, Kennedy writes in an August 2020 report.

“The need for battleground state polls to adjust for education was among the most important takeaways from the polling misses in 2016,” Kennedy writes, referring to the U.S. presidential election that year.

4. When studying a nationwide group of people, the representativeness of a sample is more important than its size.

Journalists often assume larger samples provide more accurate results than smaller ones. But that’s not necessarily true. Actually, what matters more when studying a population is having a sample that closely resembles it, Michaela Mora explains on the website of her research firm, Relevant Insights.

“The sheer size of a sample is not a guarantee of its ability to accurately represent a target population,” writes Mora, a market researcher and former columnist for the Dallas Business Journal. “Large unrepresentative samples can perform as badly as small unrepresentative samples.”

If a sample is representative, larger samples are more helpful than smaller ones. Larger samples allow researchers to investigate differences among sub-groups of the target population. Having a larger sample also improves the reliability of the results.

5. When creating samples for health and medical research, prioritizing certain demographic groups or failing to represent others can have long-term impacts on public health and safety.

Retzer says that too often, the people most likely to benefit from a new drug, vaccine or health intervention are not well represented in research. She notes, for example, that even though people of South Asian descent are more likely to have diabetes than people from other ethnic backgrounds, they are vastly underrepresented in research about diabetes.

“You can have the most beautiful, really lovely diabetes drug,” she says. “But if it doesn’t work for the majority of the population that needs it, how useful is it?”

Women remain underrepresented in some areas of health and medical research. It wasn’t until 1993 that the National Institutes of Health began requiring that women and racial and ethnic minorities be included in research funded by the federal agency. Before that, “it was both normal and acceptable for drugs and vaccines to be tested only on men — or to exclude women who could become pregnant,” Nature magazine points out in a May 2023 editorial.

In 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued guidance on developing plans to enroll more racial and ethnic minorities in clinical trials for all medical products.

When journalists cover research, Retzer says it’s crucial they ask researchers to explain the choices they made while creating their samples. Journalists should also ask researchers how well their nationally representative samples represent historically marginalized groups, including racial minorities, sexual minorities, people from low-income households and people who don’t speak English.

“Journalists could say, ‘This seems like a really good finding, but who is it applicable to?’” she says.

The Journalist’s Resource thanks Chase Harrison, associate director of the Harvard University Program on Survey Research, for his help with this tip sheet.  

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For decades, researchers have urged journalists to avoid framing gun violence solely as a crime issue and provide a broader public health context. Yet, as evidenced by the findings of a recent study of local TV news in Philadelphia, the focus on the crime angle remains very much at the forefront of gun violence coverage.

The researchers’ call for change was further underscored on June 25, when the U.S. surgeon general declared firearm violence a public health crisis for the first time in a 40-page advisory, calling on the nation to take a public health approach to address gun violence, much like it has done before to address tobacco and car crashes.

In “Public health framing of firearm violence on local television news in Philadelphia, PA, USA: a quantitative content analysis,” published in BMC Public Health in May 2024, researchers analyzed 192 TV news clips aired on four local news stations between January and June 2021 and found that 84% contained at least one element that could be harmful to communities, audiences and gun violence survivors. Some of those elements are visuals of the crime scene, not following up on the story, naming the treating hospital and the relationship between the injured person and the shooter.

Meanwhile, public health elements such as root causes of gun violence, solutions and sources other than law enforcement officials were missing from most news clips.

“The main message is that the majority of reporting on firearm violence, at least in TV news, has many harmful content elements and we have to do better,” says the study’s lead author, Dr. Jessica Beard, director of research at The Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting, a trauma surgeon at Temple University Hospital and an associate professor at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University. “The public does not have an accurate understanding of what gun violence is and the policy implications are huge.”

Beard was part of a panel on covering gun violence as a public health emergency at the Association of Health Care Journalists’ annual conference in New York City earlier this month. She also spoke with The Journalist’s Resource after the panel.

Previous studies have shown that when the news media covers community gun violence as a single incident in isolation, audiences are more likely to blame victims. This approach also reinforces racist stereotypes and suggests that policing is the most effective way to prevent violence, undermining public health measures that could curb gun violence, Beard and her co-authors of the BMC Public Health study write.

This type of coverage also has a negative effect on people who are injured in shootings, they point out.

Injured people say that graphic content, inaccuracies and mention of treating hospitals resulted in distress, harm to their reputation and threats to their personal safety, according to a 2023 study by the same research team, which included interviews with 26 adults who had recently sustained a gunshot wound. They said that news reports that neglected their personal perspectives left them feeling dehumanized and compounded their trauma.

“Some people were afraid to get discharged from the hospital,” Beard says.

More about the study and its findings

The researchers chose to study TV news because more people in the U.S. get their news from TV than other legacy sources such as radio and print, according to a 2023 survey by Pew Research Center. (That same survey found that more Americans get their news from digital devices than from TV, and there’s a need for research on firearm violence content in digital news, the authors note.)

They focus on Philadelphia for several reasons. The city is the birthplace of Eyewitness News, which launched in 1965, and Action News, which launched in 1970. The two newscasts pioneered reporting approaches that have been criticized for the way they are produced and for casting a negative light on Black communities, the authors write. A 2022 story by The Philadelphia Inquirer delves deep into this history.

Moreover, the epidemic of gun violence in Philadelphia reflects a trend across the country where shooting rates have increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, disproportionately affecting young people and Black people. A June report from the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report finds that between January 2019 and September 2023, rates of emergency medical services encounters for gun-related injuries were highest among males, non-Hispanic Black people and people between 15 and 24 years old.

The study compares Philadelphia news clips based on two main characteristics: news clips that focused on a single incident in isolation, called episodic framing, and those with more of a public-health approach, exploring the broader social and structural context in which the violence occurs, called thematic framing.

Among the findings:

• Nearly 80% of the stories used episodic framing.
• In 21% of the clips, a law enforcement official was the main interview source.
• In 50.5% of the clips where the journalists were the only news narrators, police were the predominant source of information on firearm violence.
• More than 84% of the stories contained at least one harmful element, such as a visual of the crime scene, not following up on the story, the number of gunshot wounds, the name of the treating hospital and the relationship between the injured person and the shooter. About 7% of the clips included video or audio of the shooting.
• The 192 news clips mentioned a total of 433 injured people.
• More than 80% of the clips mentioned an injured person, although in 67%, the only information about injured people was age or gender.
• None of the 192 news segments included a health or public health professional or an injured person as the main interview source.
• Only 10% of the clips included discussions about public health solutions.
• And only five stories (2.6%) used the word “prevent.” Another four stories (2.1%) offered resources related to firearm prevention.

The authors point out that the study findings may not be generalizable to all U.S. cities, to national TV news, or to print, radio, or social media content.

Also, it’s still not clear whether harmful reporting on community firearm violence increases rates of gun violence. The connection between the two is complex, Beard says, adding that she’s hoping to explore and study the topic in the future.

In their 2023 study, Beard and colleagues asked injured participants if they would be willing to speak with a journalist about their shooting incident and what would they tell the journalist.

One participant said, “You report the gun violence, but why not do a follow-up report […] for the victims, the survivors, the families that had to bury these people, the whole process? Just don’t do a guy got shot over there, a guy got shot over here. You’re making people more fearful. You’re more fearful, you’re going to arm yourself more.”

The authors underscore the study participant’s point: Reporting on firearm violence with limited information and no follow-up stories may perpetuate fear, which may contribute to increasing firearm use and, in turn, the increasing incidence of firearm violence.

The BMC Public Health study was funded by the Stoneleigh Foundation, Lehigh University Research Investment Programs, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health, and the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Gun violence as a public health issue

Two days after the Pulse nightclub mass shooting, where 49 people were killed by a lone gunman in Orlando, The American Medical Association adopted a policy calling gun violence “a public health crisis,” which requires a comprehensive public health response.

In addition to death, gun violence can result in long-term physical, mental and financial burdens among injured individuals, studies show, including a 2023 study published in JAMA Network Open. It impacts communities, causing fear and economic decline. And compared with infectious diseases, it poses a larger burden on society in terms of potential years of life lost, according to a 2020 report by the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence (now the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions).

Gun violence affects the health of entire communities, said Dr. Ruth Abaya, an attending physician in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia emergency department, during the panel on covering gun violence as a public health emergency at the Association of Health Care Journalists.

“We’re seeing young people who have crippling anxiety that is limiting their abilities to participate in daily life, they’re being medicated and even being hospitalized, and that’s directly related to this other public health crisis of gun violence,” said Abaya, who’s also the senior director of health systems and CVI — community violence intervention — integration at The Health Alliance for Violence Intervention. “And I’m also seeing young people with other unrelated chronic diseases like asthma that’s out of control because their caregiver was killed in a violent incident.”

Recommendations for journalists

The study’s findings are not surprising to Rick Brunson, a senior instructor of journalism at the University of Central Florida’s Nicholson School of Communication and Media.

Brunson, who worked as a reporter and editor in Central Florida for 20 years, including at a local TV station, mentions several reasons why many TV stations’ coverage of gun violence lacks a broader public health context.

Commercial news stations’ economic lifeblood depends on ratings, and as much as audiences may say they are put off by coverage of crime and violence, stations’ internal research shows that people watch crime news, he says.

Also, with the plethora of streaming options and multiple screens, viewers are distracted and TV stations are often vying for their attention, which results in newscasts packed with videos and short stories without space for context and explanation.

And there’s the broader, growing trend of news avoidance among audiences.

“When they watch the news, it just makes them feel despair and exhaustion, especially the focus on crime coverage and because there’s no context,” Brunson says. “They’re just presented with problem after problem after problem. Violence after violence.”

“The question for news directors to ask in the face of this where people are just avoiding the news and you’re seeing your audience erode more and more, year after year, is can the news business also be in the hope business?” Brunson says. “It’s going to take some serious consideration and the reversal of the kind of coverage that you put on your air.”

Even though there are widely accepted journalistic guidelines to protect victims and audiences in cases of suicide, mass shootings, sexual assault, abuse, and crime involving minors, no such guidelines crafted by journalists and public health practitioners exist for reporting on community firearm violence, Beard and her colleagues note in their study.

They say their research aims to lay the foundation for understanding harmful content in TV news clips and share several recommendations, including the practice of trauma-informed reporting.

Trauma-informed journalism recognizes the need for journalists to better understand how trauma can affect survivors and how to avoid reporting that could cause additional harm to vulnerable people and those who have experienced trauma. The practice also helps journalists to protect their own mental health.

When covering firearm violence, trauma-informed reporting would involve engaging with survivors using trauma-informed principles, including giving them control over the narrative of their injuries. It also minimizes harmful elements such as graphic visuals.

“This type of reporting could humanize firearm-injured people and build empathy in audiences, deconstructing the existing racialized news narratives around firearm violence in cities,” the authors write.

They also recommend:

• Public health practitioners partner with firearm violence survivors to offer alternative perspectives to journalists reporting on firearm violence.
• Journalists seek training in trauma-informed practices and solutions journalism.
• Newsrooms adopt a public health approach to reporting on firearm violence, provide resources to audiences and use the public health framing.

To help journalists and newsrooms meet these recommendations, the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting and Frameworks Institute created a free gun violence reporting toolkit, which provides more information on trauma-informed reporting, the drivers of gun violence, and tips for more complete news coverage of gun violence.

Brunson advises reporters to seek out public health professionals as a source to help add context to their reporting and to read BMC Public Health study.

“People are always trying to tell us what to do,” Brunson says. “But we should take that as a compliment because the folks like the people who did this study acknowledge that they’re doing it because the media has influence, and journalists help shape and frame public debate and discussions and the problems that get looked at. Policymakers look at what journalists are doing.”

Additional research

Systematic disparities in reporting on community firearm violence on local television news in Philadelphia, PA, USA
Jessica H. Beard, et al. Preventive Medicine Reports, April 2024.

“Like I’m a nobody:” firearm-injured peoples’ perspectives on news media reporting about firearm violence
Jessica H. Beard, et al. Qualitative Research in Health, June 2023.

Firearm Injury — A Preventable Public Health Issue
Jay Patel, et al. Lancet Public Health, November 2022.

Making the News: Victim Characteristics Associated with Media Reporting on Firearm Injury
Elinore J Kaufman, et al. Preventive Medicine Reports, December 2020.

Resources

• To help journalists with better reporting of gun violence, PCGVR has created a free gun violence reporting toolkit.
• “Firearm Violence: A Public Health Crisis in America” is the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2024 advisory, a first of its kind for gun violence.
• The American Public Health Association’s Gun Violence page links to several useful resources.
• The Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC/Radio-Canada), and the Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma recently launched a news industry toolkit on trauma-aware journalism.
• This fact sheet by the American Public Health Association lists some of the recommended public health responses to gun violence.

The post Research highlights need for public health approach in news reporting of gun violence appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Threats against poll workers made national news following false claims from former President Donald Trump and supporters that Joe Biden had fraudulently won the 2020 presidential election.

For example, in Georgia “two local election workers, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss were pressured to make false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election,” write the authors of a 2022 essay on local political violence, published in the State and Local Government Review. “After refusing to lie, a far-right media outlet spread conspiracies about the two women that resulted in a mob surrounding their house.”

In April 2024, a federal judge upheld a $148 million judgment for Freeman and Moss from a civil case against former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who admitted to making false claims about the poll workers.

Poll workers perform fundamental tasks in democratic societies, ensuring citizens can safely and freely cast their ballots for measures and candidates, often working long hours on Election Day for low pay.

More than 900,000 poll workers staffed early voting sites and Election Day polling places during the 2016 national elections in the U.S., according to the federal Election Assistance Commission. That number dipped to about 775,000 for 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic curtailed in-person voting.    

Poll workers are often temporary government employees hired to help on Election Day, though they almost always undergo training beforehand. They greet voters, remind them of their voting district, verify their eligibility, help them use voting equipment, assist voters with disabilities and register voters in states that allow same-day registration, among other tasks.

While poll worker job titles vary by election district, districts may hire a clerk in charge of overall operations on Election Day along with assistant clerks, equipment operators, inspectors who verify that voters are registered, and deputies who greet voters.

Pay varies by election administration jurisdictions, which usually align with county boundaries. In Miami-Dade County, for example, poll workers are paid between $200 and $346 including training, pre-election setup and Election Day duties.

Most poll workers in New York City get $250 for Election Day and are expected to work from 5 a.m. to after 9 p.m., when polls close. In rural Coffee County, Alabama, Election Day pay maxes out at $185.

Election officials, by contrast, are government employees who work on Election Day but also during the rest of the year to prepare for and administer elections.

Journalists can reach out to election officials or visit election office websites to find poll worker duties and job titles. The nonpartisan U.S. Vote Foundation offers this election official directory by state.

Poll worker intimidation and threats

Poll workers are often motivated by civic duty, according to research and reporting featured in the tipsheet below. Despite their commitment to democracy, poll workers have recently been increasingly concerned about threats and violence while doing their jobs.

More than one-third of election officials — 38% — have experienced “threats, harassment, or abuse” specifically because of their job, finds a 2024 survey of 928 local election officials conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

That’s up from 30% who reported the same the year prior. More than half of the officials surveyed in 2024 by the Brennan Center said they are worried about the safety of their staff in future elections and 92% have enacted measures to protect voters and poll workers since 2020.

Some 28% indicated they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about harassment or threats aimed at their family or loved ones while 27% were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about being assaulted at home or work.

Looking to November

The 2024 presidential race is poised to be a rematch between Trump and Biden.

The ongoing potential for threats to poll workers and election officials is real enough that the U.S. Department of Justice has launched a task force to address those threats.

But some election officials don’t think the task force is doing enough. National Association of State Election Directors Executive Director Amy Cohen in June told reporter Zachary Roth with the nonprofit Oregon Capital Chronicle that it is “very clear that we are not seeing a deterrent effect.”

At the same time, threats do not always come to the attention of police — 45% of local election officials surveyed by the Brennan Center who reported being threatened did not file a report to law enforcement.

We put together this tipsheet, mostly based on recent academic research, to bolster your coverage of threats and violence against election workers in advance of Election Day 2024.

1. Understand the social forces that tend to lead to political violence.

Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow with the nonpartisan think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, identifies four risk factors for political violence in an October 2021 paper in the Journal of Democracy. Kleinfeld defines political violence broadly as “physical harm or intimidation that affects who benefits from or can participate fully in political, economic, or sociocultural life.”

To identify social and political situations that increase the risk for political violence, she draws from examples of political violence abroad, such as anti-Muslim attacks during the political rise of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the early 2000s.

The risk factors, according to Kleinfeld, are:

• A contested election with high stakes for the balance of power. “For much of U.S. history, one party held legislative power for decades,” Kleinfeld writes. “Yet since 1980, a shift in control of at least one house of Congress was possible — and since 2010, elections have seen a level of competition not seen since Reconstruction.”
• Partisanship based on broad groups. “Up to the 1990s, many Americans belonged to multiple identity groups –for example, a union member might have been a conservative, religious, Southern man who nevertheless voted Democratic,” Kleinfeld writes. “Today, Americans have sorted themselves into two broad identity groups: Democrats tend to live in cities, are more likely to be minorities, women, and religiously unaffiliated, and are trending liberal. Republicans generally live in rural areas or exurbs and are more likely to be white, male, Christian, and conservative.”
• Election rules, such as winner-take-all, that let candidates exploit partisanship. “Winner-take-all elections are particularly prone to violence, possibly because small numbers of voters can shift outcomes,” Kleinfeld writes. “Two-party systems are also more correlated with violence than are multiparty systems, perhaps because they create us-them dynamics that deepen polarization.”
• A lack of institutional checks on political violence. “The United States suffers from three particularly concerning institutional weaknesses today — the challenge of adjudicating disputes between the executive and legislative branches inherent in presidential majoritarian systems, recent legal decisions enhancing the electoral power of state legislatures, and the politicization of law enforcement and the courts,” Kleinfeld writes.

Kleinfeld concludes: “Although political violence in the United States is on the rise, it is still lower than in many other countries. Once violence begins, however, it fuels itself. Far from making people turn away in horror, political violence in the present is the greatest factor normalizing it for the future.”

2. Know that a small but notable segment of the U.S. population thinks political violence is sometimes justified.

To capture a snapshot of Americans’ views of political violence, nine scholars affiliated with the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, conducted a nationally representative survey with 8,620 participants during the summer of 2022. Results were published in September 2023 in the journal Injury Epidemiology.  

Nearly 20% of those surveyed strongly or very strongly agreed that having a “strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy.” About 14% strongly or very strongly agreed that “in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States.” And nearly 8% reported that in the future they would be very or extremely likely to be “armed with a gun” in a situation where political violence is justified.

The researchers define political violence as “the use of physical force or violence to advance political objectives.” When they asked participants to imagine a scenario in which they believed political violence was justified “to advance an important political objective,” nearly 22% responded that political violence is never justified.

But, given the same scenario, 4.5% responded that they would be sometimes, very or completely willing to use violence against a poll worker and 6.1% reported the same for using force or violence against an elected local official.

The authors estimate 8 million adults in the U.S. think violence in general can be justified to make political gains, though they emphasize caution since their survey is small compared with the overall population. 

“Our extrapolations also suggest that millions of Americans would be very or completely willing to engage in violence themselves to advance a political objective that they support; between 5 and 6 million people would threaten or intimidate someone, injure them, or kill them,” the authors write.

3. Remind audiences of the long history of electoral violence in the U.S.

While recent violence and threats toward poll workers may seem startling to audiences, they should be made aware of the long history of electoral violence in the U.S.

For example, Black politicians faced violent attacks from white individuals and mobs following the Civil War. This violence formed the foundation for Jim Crow laws that segregated public facilities for white and Black Americans and sharply curtailed Black voting rights for generations.

“The pursuit of legalized voter suppression by Southern Democrats only became possible once violence had been successful enough to put Democrats back in power, Southern state governments (re)developed electoral institutions, and national Republicans abandoned black voters,” write the authors of a March 2019 paper in Perspectives on Politics.

Before and after the civil rights legislation of the 1960s outlawed Jim Crow era segregation, Black voters attempting to register in the south faced physical threats and violence, including from white individuals, mobs and law enforcement.

“Sporadic violence to discourage black political participation persisted as late as the 1960s and lynching continued to be a tool to limit black civil rights, repress black labor, reinforce white racial solidarity, and punish blacks for alleged crimes for many years,” write the authors of the Perspectives on Politics paper.

4. Interview poll workers about what motivates them.

Despite sometimes facing threats to their safety, many poll workers remain resilient in their commitment to facilitating free and fair elections in the U.S. In reviewing recent research, the authors of a chapter in a 2024 book on lessons learned from the 2020 presidential race, published by academic press Springer Link, relay that civic duty and social engagement are top motivators for poll workers.

The authors also conduct their own survey on what motivates poll workers — specifically, 1,729 poll workers in Miami-Dade County during early 2021. Those surveyed were most motivated by being part of the democratic process, performing their civic duty or wanting “to make a difference.”

They were least motivated by financial considerations, such as making some extra money, a finding that tracks with a quarter of participants being retired and despite large job losses at the time stemming from COVID-19 business closures.

But, the authors note, returning poll workers were more interested in pay than first-time poll workers, suggesting that “financial motivations may be less important for recruitment of new poll workers but may become increasingly important for retaining poll workers from election to election.”

The poll workers in Miami motivated by a sense of civic duty are not alone. For example, a poll worker near Seattle received an envelope of white powder while counting mail-in ballots during November 2023. But the elected official in charge told Stateline reporter Matt Vasilogambros that after the fire department arrived, “everybody marched right into that building, and said, ‘Oh, heck no, you are not disrupting the democratic process.’”

5. Understand how election officials try to manage the emotional burden of intimidation, for themselves and their staff.

Poll workers are often steadfast in their commitment to the democratic process, but intimidation and violence can take an emotional toll on them.

Experts and journalists who have researched and worked with trauma survivors say trauma-informed journalism is a good way to tell better, more accurate stories and help protect survivors from further harm.

“Most election workers come to the job with a strong sense of patriotism and pride in their work,” write the authors of a November 2022 article in the journal Administration and Society. “The enthusiasm election workers have for their job is crucial to maintaining trust in the system and creating a connection with the citizen-customer.”

For many citizens, the voting experience and interactions with poll workers “can shape voter perceptions of the government in a broader sense,” the authors write. For poll workers, greeting citizens in a friendly way and doing their best to ensure a smooth voting experience is part of what the authors call “emotional labor,” borrowing a phrase from past research.

For example, the burden of emotional labor might be high for a poll worker who is tired at the end of a long Election Day but is still expected to be helpful and courteous to voters.

The authors of the Administration and Society article identify three ways election administrators have recently tried to relieve or limit the emotional labor of poll workers in the face of violence or violent threats. Some are leaning into more public outreach, while others are making their election offices and workers less accessible to the public.

• Administrative strategies “focus on changes to the way the job is done to avoid burnout from emotional labor,” the authors write. This may include administrators investing in public education campaigns and offering tours of poll sites to build trust with voters they serve. Strategies may also include establishing election associations for officials to share best practices for combating misinformation and ensuring poll worker safety.
• Security strategies “may encompass tactics to protect and manage any direct and indirect attack or threat,” the authors write. Some election officials have put bulletproof glass in their offices and have decreased public outreach. Training for some poll workers now includes “deeper security instructions and quick ways to contact the main election office in the case of incidents.”
• Personal protective strategies, such as those used by the city clerk of Detroit, who “took firearms training and now carries a concealed weapon after receiving threats, including one outside of her home,” the authors write. Other officials, such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, have requested more police presence at polling places and election offices following threats.

6. Note the difference between poll watchers and poll workers.

Poll workers and poll watchers sound similar but they’re very different. While poll workers are employed by election administration offices, poll watchers, sometimes called “election observers,” are members of the public or partisan groups interested in observing parts of the Election Day process.

States have different rules for people interested in observing voting. In certain jurisdictions they may be able to arrive early to polling sites and verify that voting machines are empty of ballots, watch election officials testing voting machines and other routine but important parts of setting up on Election Day.

Poll watchers are often members of partisan groups or political parties that may favor or oppose certain candidates or ballot measures. Election administration agencies may offer guides detailing poll watcher rights and rules.

They generally are allowed only to ensure that the voting process appears fair. No one watching an election may disrupt the process. States also restrict electioneering — trying to influence voters by handing out pamphlets or partisan apparel, for example — near polling sites.

But poll watchers too have a fraught history. During Reconstruction and again during the 1950s and 1960s, poll watchers intimated racial minorities attempting to exercise their right to register and vote. More recently, before the 2020 presidential election, Trump called on supporters to volunteer as poll watchers and “watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do,” none of which happened.

Other resources

Academic

Georgetown University Law Center | What to do if armed groups are near polling or registration places

MIT Election Data + Science Lab | Opting Out? Recent Challenges in Recruiting and Retaining Poll Workers

Election Law Journal | What Do We Actually Know About Poll Worker Recruitment in the United States?

Federal government

U.S. Department of Justice | Public Integrity Section annual reports

U.S. Election Assistance Commission | Election Administration and Voting Survey reports | Election Official Security

Nonprofit

Brookings Institution | The Americans on the front lines of elections

U.S. Vote Foundation | Election Official Directory

National Association of State Election Directors | State voter information

National Association of Election Officials | Board of Directors

News coverage

NBC News | Election worker turnover has reached historic highs ahead of the 2024 vote, new data shows

Oregon Capital Chronicle | Election workers worry that federal threats task force isn’t enough to keep them safe

Stateline | In face of threats, election workers vow: ‘You are not disrupting the democratic process’

The New York Times | Election Workers Face Flood of Threats, but Charges Are Few

The post Reporting on violence and threats against US election workers: 6 things to know appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

This piece was updated on June 13, 2024 to reflect the recent Supreme Court decision about access to mifepristone, and to highlight new research on medication abortion. It was originally published in November 2023, shortly after the interviews with Ruvani Jayaweera and Carrie Baker took place.

On June 13, the Supreme Court justices in a unanimous decision preserved access to mifepristone, a medication that’s used for the safe termination of early pregnancy, writing that “federal courts are the wrong forum for addressing the plaintiffs’ concerns about FDA’s actions.”

The legal future of mifepristone had hung in the balance for several months.

In August 2023, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that mifepristone should not be prescribed past the seventh week of pregnancy, prescribed via telemedicine, or shipped to patients through the mail. In September, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to consider a challenge to that ruling.

On Dec. 13, 2023, the Supreme Court justices announced that they would take up the case on the availability of mifepristone. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued a statement on the same day urging the court to rule in favor of keeping the pill on the market and available to patients. The justices heard oral arguments on March 26, 2024 before issuing the June 13 ruling.

Meanwhile, abortion is on the ballot in four states this year so far. Measures have also been proposed in several other states, with initiatives that aim to ban, restrict, or expand abortion rights. (State laws that ban abortion apply to both abortion medications and surgical procedures.)

It’s important for journalists covering abortion to have a good understanding of medication abortion so that they can better inform their audiences. Below, we explain what medication abortion is, how individuals access it, and what research shows about its safety and effectiveness.

Medication abortion

Medication abortion is also known as abortion with pills or medical abortion. The Food and Drug Administration has approved medication abortion for up to 10 weeks of pregnancy and the World Health Organization authorizes its use for up to 12 weeks. It is endorsed by several organizations, including the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists and the American Medical Association. Medication abortion can also be used beyond 12 weeks of pregnancy, according to several organizations including the World Health Organization and the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics.

Medication abortions accounted for 51% of all abortions in the U.S. in 2020, according to a 2022 CDC report. Use of medication abortion has been on the rise in recent years, increasing by 154% from 2011 to 2020, and by 22% from 2019 to 2020.

In many parts of the world, including the U.S., a two-medication protocol is used for medication abortion: mifepristone followed by misoprostol. Mifepristone blocks the hormone that is required for the continuation of pregnancy, and misoprostol causes the uterus to cramp and expel the pregnancy tissue.

The current approved regimen for medication abortion is 200 mg of mifepristone, followed by 800 mcg of misoprostol within 24 to 48 hours. Individuals are advised to follow up with a health care provider seven to 14 days after taking mifepristone, according to the FDA.

Studies have shown that both drugs are safe and effective. In consultation with medical experts, The New York Times has curated and reviewed a collection of 101 studies on medication abortion, all of which conclude that the pills are safe.

History of mifepristone

Mifepristone, or RU-486, is a drug that blocks progesterone, a hormone that’s needed for a pregnancy to continue.

Developed by the now-defunct French pharmaceutical firm Roussel-Uclaf, the pill was first approved in France and China in 1988. As of May this year, 96 countries have approved it for medication abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual and reproductive health research and policy organization that supports abortion rights.

The FDA approved mifepristone for medical termination of pregnancy in September 2000. Some 5.9 million women in the U.S. used mifepristone between September 2000 and December 2022, 32 of whom died, according to the FDA, which notes in its report that “the fatal cases are included regardless of causal attribution to mifepristone.” Causes of death included infection, homicide, ruptured ectopic pregnancy, drug overdose, and suicide.

Danco Laboratories manufactures Mifeprex, the brand name for mifepristone. In 2019, the FDA approved a generic version of the drug, which is manufactured by GenBioPro. The drug is also manufactured by other companies around the globe.

When the FDA first approved the pill in 2000, the recommended dosage of mifepristone was higher, 600 mg, compared with the current 200 mg. Studies over time showed the lower dose is effective.

Initially, the FDA also required three doctor office visits, on days one, three, and 14 after taking the pill. Prescribers had to be licensed physicians and the drug had to be dispensed in person at a medical facility. The pill was approved to be prescribed within 49 days of gestation, or seven weeks.

By 2016, after evaluating safety data, the FDA modified prescribing requirements, extending the prescription period to up to 70 days of pregnancy, or 10 weeks. It reduced the number of required office visits to one, between seven and 14 days of taking the pill, and the prescriber no longer had to be a physician. Still, mifepristone was not available at brick-and-mortar pharmacies for patients who had a prescription, nor was it available via telemedicine.

But the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which closed many practices and limited in-office doctor visits, changed that.

Mifepristone prescription after COVID-19 and overturn of Roe v. Wade

In December 2021, the FDA reviewed mifepristone’s long-standing safety data and decided to remove the in-person dispensing requirements, expanding access to telehealth visits in states where abortion isn’t banned. The pill can also be mailed to patients since providers no longer have to dispense the pills in person.

It also allowed brick-and-mortar pharmacies that obtain certification from manufacturers to dispense the drug to people in person or through mail with a prescription.

So far, 18 independent brick-and-mortar pharmacies are dispensing mifepristone, and larger drugstore chains may soon join their ranks.

It’s important to note that since approving mifepristone, the FDA has required prescribers to be certified — which means they have to register with the drugmaker. Pharmacies too need to be certified. Advocates say this requirement further limits who can distribute the drug.

In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, striking down the constitutional right to abortion and allowing individual states to decide on access to abortion. Since the decision, 14 states have banned abortion altogether. Those bans apply to both surgical and medication abortions.

Misoprostol and misoprostol-only abortions

The second pill used in the two-pill regimen for medication abortion is misoprostol. The pill is approved by the FDA to prevent stomach ulcers in people at high risk of developing them. It was first approved in 1988.

Even though the FDA hasn’t approved it for medication abortion, misoprostol is used off-label as part of the approved two-pill regimen for medication abortion.

Off-label use means health care providers prescribe a drug for diseases or conditions for which it’s not approved by regulatory bodies such as the FDA. They do so when they deem its use is medically appropriate for the patient.

It is also used worldwide for medication abortion, medical management of miscarriage, induction of labor, and treatment of postpartum bleeding. The drug causes the uterus to cramp and expel pregnancy tissue.

The pill can be used alone for medication abortion.

The World Health Organization has endorsed the use of misoprostol-only for ending a pregnancy in parts of the world where mifepristone is not available. Studies have shown the regimen is safe and effective, although it may have more side effects compared with the two-medication regimen.

A study published in JAMA Network Open in October 2023 finds that misoprostol alone is highly effective in self-managed medication abortions.

Abortion with misoprostol alone is rare in the U.S. but the a legal ban on mifepristone could have made it it the only option for some individuals, she says.

“What our study adds is that under the worst-case scenario in which mifepristone is removed, it doesn’t mean that there’s a ban on medication abortion,” says Ruvani Jayaweera, an epidemiologist and research scientist at Ibis Reproductive Health, a nonprofit organization that conducts social science research primarily on access to abortion and contraception around the world. “Our hope is that this study provides assurance to providers and people who are using misoprostol alone, whether it’s in a clinic-based setting or a telehealth setting or a self-managed setting, about the effectiveness of this method.”

Accessing abortion pills

Abortion pills are prescription medications in the U.S. Individuals in states where abortion is still legal can obtain them from licensed providers in person or via telehealth.

Abortion is currently banned in 14 states. Eleven states have laws limiting abortion between six and 22 weeks. Twelve of the 36 states where abortion is available have restrictions on prescribing medication abortion via telehealth, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

In response, activists have created networks of support to help individuals access abortion pills, explains Carrie N. Baker, a contributing editor to Ms. Magazine and professor at Smith College who studies and teaches courses on gender, law and public policy.

“The mainstream press is not adequately paying attention to what’s happening in the United States with regard to the underground network of abortion pill access,” says Baker, who has a forthcoming book on the history and politics of abortion pills in the United States.

These networks have also existed to help individuals around the world.

Europe-based Aid Access mails the medication abortion regimen — mifepristone and misoprostol — to all 50 states, regardless of abortion restrictions. There are other U.S.-based services, including Plan C, which provides people with available options to get abortion pills based on the state they live in.

In a November 2022 research letter published in JAMA, Aid Access reported that after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the average daily requests for telemedicine services for medication abortion increased from 82.6 to 231.7.

In the U.S., prescribing abortion medications via telehealth is nuanced based on state abortion laws.

For instance, U.S.-based virtual reproductive and sexual health clinic Hey Jane and online pharmacies like Honeybee can provide care and ship the pills to people in states where abortion is not banned. In all states, people may obtain medication abortion from alternative telemedicine services, online websites, or community networks, though the legal risk of each of these options may differ depending on the state. Services like ReproLegal Helpline help guide individuals on laws in their state, Jayaweera says.

Also, physicians in states that have passed shield laws can also prescribe medications via telemedicine to people in states where abortion is banned. So far, several states including Washington, Colorado, Massachusetts, Vermont, New York and California have passed telemedicine shield laws for health providers.

Abortion shield laws “seek to protect abortion providers, helpers, and seekers in states where abortion remains legal from legal attacks taken by antiabortion state actors,” according to a review article published in The New England Journal of Medicine in March 2023. Seven states so far have enacted a shield law since the overturn of Roe v. Wade.

But it’s important to know and note that those laws don’t protect individuals, Jayaweera says.

“One of the things to be especially sensitive to is with telemedicine or online models is that even if the risk is very much minimized for the provider, the legal risk falls on the individual in restricted states,” she says, underscoring the importance of educating individuals about those risks during counseling.

Self-managed abortion

Self-managed abortion is when individuals use medication abortion without medical supervision, ordering pills via telehealth, online pharmacies, mail or in-person.

Worldwide, most medication abortions are self-managed, Jayaweera says.

As a reminder, although the drugs are shown to be safe and effective, the individuals who use self-managed abortion may face legal risks, explain Drs. Daniel Grossman and Nisha Verma in a viewpoint published in JAMA in November 2022.

“Resources like the If/When/How legal helpline may be useful for patients and clinicians who are trying to understand their legal risks related to self-managed abortion. Patients requesting emotional support could be connected with resources that provide free confidential talk lines,” the authors write.

Worldwide, 22 countries ban abortion altogether, according to the Center for Reproductive Health, a global advocacy organization, and many others restrict it. This has given rise to safe abortion hotlines and “accompaniment groups” of people who have training in abortion counseling for individuals who are using medication abortion.

They also “provide a lot of empathetic counseling throughout the process and provide people with additional assurance and support and to help them understand if what they are experiencing is normal, or if they need to seek care,’” says Jayaweera.

She was part of a research team that found the outcomes of self-managed abortions were comparable to the ones performed under clinical supervision. The study, among others, contributed to the World Health Organization revising its guidelines last year to add self-managed abortion in early pregnancy to its abortion guidelines.

National organizations including the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists oppose the criminalization of self-managed abortion because it deters patients from seeking care when complications occur, write Dr. Lisa H. Harris and Daniel Grossman in a review article published in the New England Journal of Medicine in March 2020.

“Given the safety of the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol for self-managed abortion, the biggest danger to patients may be legal prosecution,” the study authors add. “Doctors and health care institutions must develop strategies that favor effective, compassionate clinical care over legal investigation of patients.”

A note on abortion ‘reversal’ pills

On Oct. 30, a judge in Kansas blocked a state law that requires health care providers to tell patients that medication abortion can be reversed, despite a lack of scientific evidence. A few days earlier, in Colorado, a federal judge ruled that a Catholic medical center can’t be stopped from offering medication abortion “reversal” treatment.

So-called abortion medication “reversal” treatment involves taking a dose of the hormone progesterone in an attempt to stop the effects of mifepristone, but it’s important for journalists to inform their audiences that “reversal” of medication abortion is not supported by science. (The Associated Press recommends using quotation marks in order to stress the lack of scientific evidence.) The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has publicly stated that it does not support the treatment.

“Despite this, in states across the country, politicians are advancing legislation to require physicians to recite a script that a medication abortion can be ‘reversed’ with doses of progesterone, to cause confusion and perpetuate stigma, and to steer women to this unproven medical approach,” reads a statement on ACOG’s website. “Unfounded legislative mandates like this one represent dangerous political interference and compromise patient care and safety.”

Between 2012 and 2021, 14 states had enacted abortion “reversal” laws, according to a February article in the American Journal of Public Health.

“States largely use explicit language to describe reversal, require patients receive information during preabortion counseling, require physicians or physicians’ agents to inform patients, instruct patients to contact a health care provider or visit abortion pill reversal resources for more information, and require reversal information be posted on state-managed Web sites,” the authors write. “Reversal laws continue a dangerous precedent of using unsound science to justify laws regulating abortion access, intrude upon the patient‒provider relationship, and may negatively affect the emotional and physical health of patients seeking [a medication abortion].”

A 2020 randomized controlled study of medication abortion reversal, involving 40 patients, ended early because of safety concerns for 12 participants. Some of the women in the study received 400 mg of progesterone after taking mifepristone to “reverse” the abortion. Others were given a placebo after taking mifepristone. Three patients – one had taken progesterone and two had received placebo – had severe hemorrhage and required ambulance transport to the hospital, the authors write.

“We could not estimate the efficacy of progesterone for mifepristone antagonization due to safety concerns when mifepristone is administered without subsequent prostaglandin analogue treatment. Patients in early pregnancy who use only mifepristone may be at high risk of significant hemorrhage,” they write in the study.

A March 2023 systematic review of four studies finds, “based mostly on poor-quality data, it appears the ongoing pregnancy rate in individuals treated with progesterone after mifepristone is not significantly higher compared to that of individuals receiving mifepristone alone.”

A 2015 systematic review of 11 studies on medication abortion reversal during the first trimester of pregnancy finds “evidence is insufficient to determine whether treatment with progesterone after mifepristone results in a higher proportion of continuing pregnancies compared to expectant management.”

Research roundup

The following roundup of systematic reviews examines the safety and effectiveness of medication abortion. They are listed by publication date. The list is followed by additional research and reporting resources.

Effectiveness and Safety of Misoprostol-Only for First-Trimester Medication Abortion: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Elizabeth G. Raymond, Mark A. Weaver, and Tara Shochet. Contraception, November 2023.

A review of 49 published studies, including a total of 16,354 patients, finds misoprostol-only is effective and safe for the termination of first-trimester pregnancy, especially when mifepristone is not available.

“Technically An Abortion”: Understanding Perceptions and Definitions of Abortion in the United States
Alicia J. VandeVusse, et al. Social Science & Medicine, October 2023.

The study is based on in-depth interviews of 64 cisgender women and 2009 participants in an online survey. Individuals were asked about their understanding of pregnancy outcomes including abortion and miscarriage. “The blurred boundaries between different types of pregnancies and their outcomes emphasize the differences in people’s notions of what constitutes an abortion,” the authors write. “It shapes how abortion stigma can arise across different pregnancy outcomes, as well as people’s own perceptions of the care they have sought, the legality of this care, and their experience in accessing it. Understanding how people construct boundaries around abortion allows for more effective healthcare messaging and advocacy, which is increasingly relevant as legal restrictions on abortion mount while telemedicine and medication abortion become more widely available to some.”

Requests for Self-managed Medication Abortion Provided Using Online Telemedicine in 30 US States Before and After the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization Decision
Abigail R. A. Aiken, et al. JAMA, November 2022.

The authors analyze anonymized requests for abortion pills to Aid Access, a Europe-based abortion pill provider. They analyzed the requests before Roe v. Wade was overturned, after the decision was leaked, and after the decision was announced. They find that each of the 30 states from which requests came, regardless of abortion policy, showed a higher request rate after the leak and announcement compared to before. The largest increases were in states that enacted total bans on abortion.

Systematic Review of the Effectiveness, Safety, and Acceptability of Mifepristone and Misoprostol for Medical Abortion in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Ian Ferguson and Heather Scott. Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada. April 2020.

A review of 36 studies, including a total of 25,385 medical abortions, finds the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol is “highly effective, safe, and acceptable to women in low- and middle-income countries, making it a feasible option for reducing maternal morbidity and mortality worldwide.” Among a group of 17,381 women, 0.8% required hospitalization.

Telemedicine for Medical Abortion: A Systematic Review
M. Endler, et al. British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, March 2019.

A review of 13 studies, mostly based on self-reported data, finds the rates of complete abortion, hospitalization, and blood transfusion after abortion through 10 weeks of pregnancy were at similar levels to those reported after in-person abortion care in the published studies.

First-Trimester Medical Abortion with Mifepristone 200 mg and Misoprostol: A Systematic Review
Elizabeth G. Raymond, Caitlin Shannon, Mark Weaver, and Beverly Winikoff. Contraception, January 2013.

A review of 87 studies, including a total of 47,283 women, finds medical abortion in early pregnancy with 200 mg mifepristone followed by misoprostol is highly effective and safe.

Additional research

Mail-Order Pharmacy Dispensing of Mifepristone for Medication Abortion After In-Person Screening
Daniel Grossman, et al. JAMA Internal Medicine, May 2024.

Pharmacists’ Experiences Dispensing Misoprostol and Readiness to Dispense Mifepristone
Meron Ferketa, et al. Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, October 2023.

Medication Abortion Safety and Effectiveness With Misoprostol Alone
Ruvani Jayaweera, et al. JAMA Network Open, October 2023.

Prior Cesarean Birth and Risk of Uterine Rupture in Second-Trimester Medication Abortions Using Mifepristone and Misoprostol: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
Andrea Henkel, et al. Obstetrics & Gynecology, October 2023.

Changes in Induced Medical and Procedural Abortion Rates in a Commercially Insured Population, 2018 to 2022
Catherine S. Hwang, et al. Annals of Internal Medicine, October 2023.

Explaining the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Ruling on Mifepristone Access
Molly A. Meegan, JAMA, October 2023.

Effectiveness of Self-Managed Medication Abortion Between 9 and 16 Weeks of Gestation
Heidi Moseson, et al. Obstetrics & Gynecology, August 2023.

Comparison of Mifepristone Plus Misoprostol with Misoprostol Alone for First Trimester Medical Abortion: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Tariku Shimels, Melsew Getnet, Mensur Shafie, and Lemi Belay. Frontiers in Global Women’s Health, March 2023.

Experiences Seeking, Sourcing, and Using Abortion Pills at Home in the United States Through an Online Telemedicine Service
Melissa Madera, et al. Social Science & Medicine: Qualitative Research in Health. December 2022.

Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2020
Katherine Kortsmith, et al. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, November 2022.

Mifepristone: A Safe Method of Medical Abortion and Self-Medical Abortion in the Post-Roe Era
Elizabeth O. Schmidt, Adi Katz, and Richard A. Stein. American Journal of Therapeutics, October 2022.

Effectiveness of Self-Managed Abortion During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results From a Pooled Analysis of Two Prospective, Observational Cohort Studies in Nigeria
Ijeoma Egwuatu, et al. PLOS Global Public Health, October 2022.

Increasing Access to Abortion
American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists, December 2020.

Abortion Pill “Reversal”: Where’s the Evidence
Advancing New Standards In Reproductive Health, July 2020.

A Qualitative Exploration of How the COVID-19 Pandemic Shaped Experiences of Self-Managed Medication Abortion with Accompaniment Group Support in Argentina, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Venezuela
Chiara Bercu, et al. Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, June 2022.

Medical Abortion in the Late First Trimester: A Systematic Review
Nathalie Kapp, Elisabeth Eckersberger, Antonella Lavelanet, Maria Isabel Rodriguez. Contraception, February 2019.

Continuing Pregnancy After Mifepristone and “Reversal” of First-Trimester Medical Abortion: A Systematic Review
Daniel Grossman, et al. Contraception, September 2015.

Medical Compared With Surgical Abortion for Effective Pregnancy Termination in the First Trimester
Luu Doan Ireland, Mary Gatter, Angela Y. Chen. Obstetrics & Gynecology, July 2015.

Resources

What to Know About Fetal Viability — And Why Some Advocates Want It Out of Abortion Law
Mary Chris Jaklevic. Association of Health Care Journalists’ Covering Health blog, October 2023.

#WeCount: A series of reports by the Society of Family Planning aiming to capture the shifts in abortion volume by state and month following the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe.

History and Politics of Medication Abortion in the United States and the Rise of Telemedicine and Self-Managed Abortion
Carrie N. Baker. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, August 2023.

Mifepristone U.S. Post-Marketing Adverse Events Summary through 12/31/2022
Food and Drug Administration

Questions and Answers on Mifepristone for Medical Termination of Pregnancy Through Ten Weeks Gestation
Food and Drug Administration

Key Facts on Abortion in the United States
Usha Ranji, Karen Diep and Alina Salganicoff. Kaiser Family Foundation, August 2023.

The Availability and Use of Medication Abortion
Kaiser Family Foundation, June 2023.

A Review of Exceptions in State Abortions Bans: Implications for the Provision of Abortion Services
Kaiser Family Foundation, May 2023.

State Requirements for the Provision of Medication Abortion
Kaiser Family Foundation, April 2023.

Are Abortion Pills Safe? Here’s the Evidence.
Amy Schoenfeld Walker, Jonathan Corum, Malika Khurana, and Ashley Wu. The New York Times, April 2023.

Abortion Care Guideline
World Health Organization, March 2022.

Center for Reproductive Rights provides a global view of abortion.

Abortion Facility Database by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, based at the University of California San Francisco, is a research program that informs the most pressing debates on abortion and reproductive health.

The post Abortion pill mifepristone: An explainer and research roundup about its history, safety and future appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

This journalism tip sheet on covering guns in the U.S., originally published in October 2018, was updated on May 3, 2024 with new data and links to more recent research and reports.

It’s crucial that journalists reporting on guns get the details right, down to the type and style of firearm involved. When news outlets make mistakes, audiences can view their work as sloppy or, worse, as an effort to mislead. Regardless, when the news media get facts wrong, audiences — especially gun owners — might not trust the information they provide.

Although gun ownership is common in the U.S., it remains one of the country’s most divisive issues. About 40% of U.S. adults say they live in a gun-owning household, according to a national survey the Pew Research Center conducted in June 2023. About 12% of women and 33% of men personally own firearms, researchers estimate in a paper published in the journal Injury Prevention in 2020.

To help reporters avoid errors when reporting on guns, The Journalist’s Resource teamed up with two journalists with lots of experience covering them. We thank Henry Pierson Curtis, who covered gun and drug trafficking and other crime at the Orlando Sentinel for 25 years before retiring in 2016, and Alex Yablon, who reported on the business side of guns and gun policy for about five years at The Trace, for helping create this tip sheet.

Here are seven things journalists should keep in mind when reporting on guns:

1. People who die in mass shootings represent a small fraction of the number who die from gun injuries in the U.S.

In 2022, 48,204 people died from injuries caused by firearms, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most gun deaths — 56% in 2022 — are suicides. Almost 41% of people killed by guns in 2022 were homicide victims.

2. Most guns made in the U.S. are handguns. 

While AR-15-style rifles get a lot of media attention, most firearms made in this country are handguns. In 2022, gun companies manufactured 6.2 million pistols and 830,786 revolvers, data from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives show. In comparison, nearly 3.6 million rifles and 662,350 shotguns were manufactured that year.

“There are just so many handguns out there,” Yablon says. “That has really been the story of America’s love of guns. There have been many, many AR-15s and AK-47s sold in the past 10 or 15 years, but there have been far more handguns sold.”

Of the nearly 2 million guns that U.S. law enforcement agencies recovered during crime investigations and performed traces on between 2017 and 2021, 79% were pistols or revolvers, according to the federal government’s most recent “National Firearms Commerce and Trafficking Assessment” report, released in February 2023.

A paper published in 2021 in the journal Injury Epidemiology identifies the specific brands and models of guns U.S. adults own.

3. Expect pushback from gun enthusiasts if you call an AR-15 an “assault rifle.”

An assault rifle, by some definitions, is a military firearm capable of fully automatic fire, meaning it can fire without pause until empty. AR-15-style guns are semi-automatic, meaning they fire a bullet for each pull of the trigger.

It’s worth pointing out that the “AR” in AR-15 doesn’t stand for assault rifle or automatic rifle. It comes from ArmaLite, the name of the company that developed that rifle style.

Organizations such as the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a firearms industry trade association, refer to AR-15-style guns as modern sporting rifles and warn against confusing them with military rifles such as the M-16. “These rifles are used by hunters, competitors, millions of Americans seeking home-defense guns and many others who simply enjoy going to the range,” the organization explains on its website.

The Associated Press updated its Stylebook in July 2022 with new guidance on weapon terms. It suggests newsrooms use the term “semi-automatic rifle” when referring to a rifle that fires once for each trigger pull and reloads automatically. “Avoid assault rifle and assault weapon, which are highly politicized terms that generally refer to AR- or AK-style rifles designed for the civilian market, but convey little meaning about the actual functions of the weapon,” AP recommends.

4. When writing about guns, it’s helpful to refer to the make and model to avoid confusion and errors.

“I would suggest that if you’re writing about a particular crime … ask whatever law enforcement agency is involved for the make and model for the gun used in the crime,” Yablon says. “That’s going to be the easiest way to avoid tripping up on any of these things.”

Curtis suggests that reporters covering crime and court beats take a gun safety course to learn some of the basic terminology. “I took the concealed carry [class] twice at the Sentinel,” he says. “That starts exposing reporters … to people who are very familiar with firearms. They [instructors] can be very arrogant, but they’re people who can help you out.”

5. All automatic weapons are not banned in the U.S.

Under the National Firearms Act, civilians cannot own fully automatic weapons made after May 19, 1986. But adults  who pass a federal background check and pay a $200 tax can legally purchase older automatic weapons, provided they also register them with the Secretary of the Treasury.

There are a limited number of those guns available, though, and they’re expensive, Curtis explains. “For a fully automatic M-16, you might pay $15,000,” he says. “Typically, it’s going to be stuff from World War II — German Schmeissers, stuff like that. Old Thompson submachine guns. That’s a good down payment on a nice house.”

As of May 2021, a total of 741,146 machine guns were registered with the federal government. The five states with the largest number of registered machine guns were Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Texas and Virginia.

6. There’s a difference between a bullet and a cartridge.

A bullet is the metal projectile that leaves the barrel of a gun when fired. The bullet, along with the case, primer and propellant, make up the cartridge that goes into the gun. It is incorrect to say “box of bullets” when you actually mean a “box of cartridges” or “box of ammunition.”

Keep in mind that shotguns use a different kind of ammunition. Shotgun shells contain either shot, which are metal pellets, or a slug, a projectile that can be made of various materials such as rubber or metal.

7. Silencers don’t make guns silent.

A suppressor — also known as a silencer — can be attached to the end of a gun barrel to reduce the dangerously loud sound of gunfire. But a suppressor doesn’t make gunfire silent.

You can find videos on YouTube of people using silencers and see for yourself.

For journalists wanting to learn more:

• We’ve gathered academic research examining how journalists portray gun owners in news stories.
• Poynter’s Al Tompkins created this guide in 2012: “What Journalists Need to Know about Guns and Gun Control.”
• This guide, created by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, includes a glossary of gun-related terms. It lists examples of what it considers inaccurate and misleading news coverage and offers suggestions for improvement. Even if journalists disagree with the opinions presented, there’s value in seeing how other organizations interpret their work.
• Patent and trademark attorney Bennet Langlotz, whose clients include firearms manufacturers, wrote “The Journalists’ Guide to Guns (How Not to Look Like an Idiot When Writing About Firearms).”

If you’re writing about guns, you should know about these groups and government agencies:

• The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is the primary regulator of firearms. It provides a variety of data, including firearms trace data and a listing of licensed firearms manufacturers, dealers, collectors and importers.
• The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks violent deaths, including gun-related deaths. Its National Center for Injury Prevention collects information on firearm injuries and death.
• The National Rifle Association is a pro-gun lobby organization and leading provider of civilian firearms education.
• The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and Coalition to Stop Gun Violence are advocacy organizations fighting to reduce gun-related deaths and injuries.

The post 7 things journalists need to know about guns appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

“For over 20 years, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been treated to luxury vacations by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.

He goes on cruises in far-flung locales on Crow’s yacht, flies on his private jet and keeps company with Crow’s powerful friends at the billionaire’s private resort.

The extent of Crow’s largesse has never been revealed. Until now.

-Lede to “Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire,” by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

In April 2023, ProPublica published the first story in its investigative series exposing a lack of ethics oversight for U.S. Supreme Court justices, some of whom received expensive gifts and worldwide vacations from well-heeled individuals — which meant private access to justices for those wealthy benefactors and their friends. The series provided rare, behind-the-scenes details of those interactions and prompted historic reforms on the nation’s high court.

The series begins covering the personal relationship between Justice Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, a real estate billionaire Thomas met three decades ago, according to ProPublica reporters Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski.

Those trips meant Thomas was in contact with powerful corporate executives, including from Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers, and political activists, such as “Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society leader regarded as an architect of the Supreme Court’s recent turn to the right,” the reporters write.

“By accepting the trips, Thomas has broken long-standing norms for judges’ conduct, ethics experts and four current or retired federal judges said,” the reporters write.

Crucially, those trips were not listed among Thomas’ annual financial disclosures, even though gifts worth over $415 usually must be reported, the reporters found. Despite such disclosure rules, before the ProPublica investigation the Supreme Court did not have a formal ethical code of conduct.

The private jet flights and yacht trips in particular should have been disclosed, the investigation finds. Thomas’ “failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts,” according to two ethics experts the reporters spoke with.

Crow “has denied trying to influence the justice but has said he extended hospitality to him just as he has to other dear friends,” the reporters write.

Among other findings from the investigation:

• Crow paid for boarding school tuition running more than $6,000 a month for a boy Thomas said he was raising “as a son.” According to a former school administrator, “Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student here, which was about a year,” the reporters write.
• A July 2008 “luxury fishing vacation” Justice Samuel Alito took with GOP billionaire Paul Singer, ProPublica reports, who paid for Alito’s private jet and whose firm later had cases before the Supreme Court. Alito did not report the jet flight in annual disclosures, according to the investigation.
• Alito’s lodging during that trip was covered by Robin Arkley II, owner of a mortgage company who had “recently acquired the fishing lodge,” the reporters write. Alito did not report the lodging in annual disclosures, they found.
• Thomas attended two donor summits hosted by the Koch network, the political organization founded by billionaires Charles and David Koch, which put Thomas in “the extraordinary position of having helped a political network that has brought multiple cases before the Supreme Court,” the reporters write.
• Crow and wife Kathy paid for a 7-foot-tall bronze statue of Thomas’ eighth-grade teacher, unveiled at an October 2021 ceremony in a New York City suburb at which Thomas spoke.

As a result of the yearlong investigation:

• The Senate Judiciary Committee last May held a full hearing on Supreme Court ethics reform and, in November, subpoenaed Leo and Crow to obtain information.
• The Supreme Court adopted its first-ever code of conduct in November 2023.
• Nonpartisan ethics watchdogs, including the Campaign Legal Center and the Project on Government Oversight, have called on the Department of Justice to investigate Thomas for failing to disclose the trips Crow provided.
• Another 40-plus watchdog groups have called for Thomas and Alito to recuse themselves from cases relating to big-time political donors. The justices have rejected such recusal.

For Kaplan, Elliott and Mierjeski, a big takeaway from the investigation is that courts at all levels need more scrutiny from journalists.

“One of the lessons of this has been that the courts are just totally under-covered as an institution, both at the federal level all the way down to local and state [levels],” Elliott says. “One piece of advice would just be to start adding judges and courts, at whatever the relevant level is, to the mental list of things that should be covered.”

Here are seven more tips for covering courts the ProPublica reporters shared with The Journalist’s Resource.

1. Think of a public figure’s entourage as a huge source pool.

It takes a village to move a public figure from point A to point B.

“It’s not like a normal person going on a trip to Europe or something,” Elliott says.

This is especially true if the public figure travels on private planes and boats, which require specialized crew to operate. For example, Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose, often operates with a staff of a couple dozen, the ProPublica reporters found.

“We decided to try to talk to some of those people,” Elliott says. “So we started just sort of cold calling.”

2. Being an outsider can be an advantage, but be ready to play a ‘numbers game’ with cold calls.  

Kaplan says there are “extremely talented court reporters” with well-connected sources who focus on explaining Supreme Court decisions — but the ProPublica reporting team “did not start with any sources at all,” he says.

That wasn’t necessarily a detriment. To a reporter who regularly covers Supreme Court decisions, the staff of a yacht a Supreme Court justice had boarded might not have much to offer. But it was those seemingly tertiary sources, not directly involved with the regular functioning of the court, who were critical to telling the story of who the justices were spending time with while off the bench.

“We had to kind of start from scratch and get creative with the sort of people we were talking to,” Kaplan says. “We were talking almost exclusively to people that were very far removed from Washington, very far removed from the halls of national politics. And that brought us, over the course of the year, to some kind of relatively novel places.”

Those service workers — on the yacht, at the Adirondacks resort, at the Alaskan fishing lodge and other places — were “the absolute backbone of this,” Kaplan says. “It wasn’t a situation where any one person had the keys to the castle and were able to tell us everything that had happened, but a lot of people had some really valuable piece of the puzzle.”

Kaplan estimates that over the course of reporting the series, the team placed over a thousand phone calls.

“It really is a numbers game,” adds Elliott. “Many, many, many, many people said no to us, or just didn’t return our calls.”

3. Build trust with sources by articulating the big vision of your investigation, and by making sure they understand the concepts of “on the record,” “off the record” and “on background.”

Building trust is key when interviewing sources who don’t have experience talking with reporters. The ProPublica team found the sources they spoke with were by and large persuaded by the bigger picture of the investigation.

“Regardless of where any particular source might fall in the political spectrum, there’s, I think, a very clear public interest case that we should know who is getting access to some of the most powerful government officials — Supreme Court justices —  in the country,” Elliott says.

He adds “it would have been the same case that we were making if we were writing about Elana Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor,” referring to two justices usually regarded as being more ideologically liberal than conservative.

Likewise, being patient and explaining journalistic concepts that define how the information they share will be used — on the record, on background, or off the record, for example — is a great way to get sources to open up.

“Most people, when they get a call, they’ve never spoken to a reporter before,” Kaplan says. “They don’t understand the seriousness with which one takes protecting anonymity. And so, just taking the time to get to know people and to earn that trust, I think it’s critical.”

4. Take advantage of teamwork by divvying the labor.

When embarking on an investigation that will involve hundreds of phone calls and reading reams of records, dividing the work among a small group can save time and allow for collaborative strategizing along the way.  

“The benefit of the dynamic was that while these guys were making calls, I had time to kind of noodle around,” Mierjeski says. “Some of the findings in those stories just came from the ability to spend time searching and fishing.”

With Elliott and Kaplan focusing on contacting sources, Mierjeski was able to track down, for example, coverage in Catholic Cemetery magazine of the statue of Thomas’ teacher, which Crow and his wife paid for, the reporters found. 

There can also be mental health benefits to teamwork, in terms of reporters encouraging each other to press ahead in the face of obstacles.

“For me it would be difficult, as a psychological proposition, to not be sort of paralyzed by the crushing disappointment of failure if you’re just sitting at home alone having seven people in a row ask you how you got their number and then hang up on you,” Elliott says. “It’s sort of like going to the gym — it works better if you have a partner.”

Elliott, Kaplan and Mierjeski were continually communicating, Kaplan says, which was hugely helpful for real-time brainstorming. One example: The realization that polo shirts with the logo for Crow’s yacht could lead to more information about when and where Thomas was on the yacht.

“I remember it was like Friday night at 10 p.m. that one of us realized the Michaela Rose, the yacht logo on the shirts, could be a way to find other potential trips,” Mierjeski says. “The Signal chat was just blown up.”

Elliott adds, “We started looking for every single picture we could find of Justice Thomas wearing a polo shirt to see if there was a logo on it.”

5. Seek visual evidence, especially if a key source won’t talk.

The photos the reporters obtained of Thomas on trips with Crow and Alito holding a fish in Alaska were “very helpful in establishing things, but also, I think, really resonated with people and helped these stories get a wider reach,” Kaplan says.

The photographs were “more powerful than probably any prose we could come up with,” Elliott adds. The reporters found some of them on social media sites, like Instagram and Facebook. The pictures were not just illustrative but were important evidence of places the justices had been.

Alito responded to questions from the ProPublica reporters indirectly — in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Thomas, however, was silent until the first story in the series published.

“It wasn’t like Justice Thomas was going through our very detailed questions that we sent and saying, ‘You have this right, you have this wrong,’” Elliott says. “It was just like, ‘No comment.’ Which can be a sensitive position to be in as a reporter because if you’re getting no engagement, you just have to be right.”

6. Tap into university archives.

The ProPublica team examined numerous archival documents while reporting the series, including from congressional and judiciary archives.

Also among them: university archives, which are often collections of documents and pictures by and about public figures produced throughout their careers. The team early in reporting the series visited the collection of former Justice Antonin Scalia, donated to the Harvard Law School Library after Scalia died in 2016. Many parts of the Scalia archive remain sealed — but photographs weren’t sealed, Kaplan says.

“From the chicken scratch scrawl on the back of some of these photos, we started learning about some of the people that had taken Scalia to an Alaska trip — reporting those out brought us to Alito,” he says.

Kaplan adds: “Figuring out what past or present officials have archives that are at least partially in a university, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be the first reporter to have ever looked at them. And they might have some gold in there.”

Start by looking for archives from universities a public figure has attended or has some other longstanding affiliation with, such as a professorship.

7. Search court documents, which are likely to be public record, for evidence.

When covering a story that deals with private interactions or a government entity not subject to public records laws, look for court cases. Unless a judge seals a case or portions of it, such records often are subject to public inspection.

That’s how the ProPublica team was able to show in their reporting that Crow had paid tuition on behalf of the boy Thomas was raising. The private school had been involved in a bankruptcy and later dissolved, but for a time was required to file financial statements to a federal court. The reporters found those statements through the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, or PACER, an online federal courts document repository.

“Whoever was filing those statements seems to get sloppier and sloppier about redacting them as the case was going on,” Elliot says. “We came across a financial statement from the school that actually showed a wire of money from one of Crow’s companies to the school.”

In July 2009, the company “wired $6,200 to the school that month, the exact cost of the month’s tuition,” the reporters write.

Read the stories

Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire

Clarence Thomas Had a Child in Private School. Harlan Crow Paid the Tuition.

Justice Samuel Alito Took Luxury Fishing Vacation With GOP Billionaire Who Later Had Cases Before the Court

Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated in Koch Network Donor Events

A ‘Delicate Matter’: Clarence Thomas’ Private Complaints About Money Sparked Fears He Would Resign

The Judiciary Has Policed Itself for Decades. It Doesn’t Work.

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It was no surprise to Jerry Mitchell to learn high-ranking law enforcement officials had been accused of behaving badly in parts of Mississippi where journalists had not kept a watchful eye.

But the details he and his colleagues at Mississippi Today and The New York Times uncovered during a yearlong investigation shocked even this veteran journalist, who has been exposing corruption in the state’s criminal justice system for more than 30 years.

The project uncovered decades of allegations of sex abuse, torture, bribery, retaliation and other abuses of power at sheriff’s offices across the state. When Mitchell and a fellow journalist at Mississippi Today, Ilyssa Daly, started looking into claims made about one sheriff in 2022, residents came forward with what seemed like unbelievable stories about other sheriffs as well as detectives and patrol deputies in different parts of the state.

The combined efforts of these journalists and journalism organizations produced the seven-story series, “Unfettered Power: Mississippi Sheriffs.” It revealed that:

• A sheriff in Noxubee County, located on the Mississippi-Alabama border, allegedly demanded that a woman being held in the county jail send him sexually explicit photos and videos and ignored her complaint that she had been coerced into having sex with two deputies.
• Multiple women accused a sheriff in Clay County, in northeastern Mississippi, of sexually harassing or coercing them. For example, an incarcerated woman accused the sheriff of arranging for her and another prisoner to be brought to his house, where they had to change into boxer shorts and pose for photos. A Clay County Sheriff’s Office employee told journalists she picked up two female prisoners from the sheriff’s house and returned them to the jail.
• A sheriff in Rankin County, in the middle of the state, allegedly lied to get grand jury subpoenas to spy on his married girlfriend.
• Rankin County narcotics detectives and patrol officers, some of whom referred to themselves as the “Goon Squad,” allegedly used Tasers and waterboarding to torture people into confessing to drug crimes or providing information. Of the drug raids the journalists examined, the biggest involved a $420 sale of heroin. The series identified 20 of the deputies present during those incidents.

“All of this reporting has just been beyond the pale,” Mitchell says. “A lot of this has been totally shocking to me.”

A lack of oversight in Mississippi

The series also documents how the three sheriffs operated largely without oversight and avoided being investigated for a range of serious allegations.

For example, a district attorney compiled a report of evidence collected against Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey in 2016 but stopped investigating, in part because he was friends with Bailey. Although he shared details with two local judges and forwarded the investigation to the state’s attorney general, the case ended there, Daly and Mitchell reported in September.

When a former deputy called Bailey to warn him about the Goon Squad, Bailey called him “a dirty cop and accused him of secretly recording the call,” Howey and Rosenfield write in a November article.

The impact

The series jarred public leaders. Earlier this year, state legislators introduced a bill that would allow the Mississippi Board on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Training to investigate law enforcement misconduct. The measured passed the Mississippi House unanimously last week and was sent to the senate.

The series also spurred federal action. Several weeks after journalists asked about the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s languishing investigation of former Noxubee County Sheriff Terry Grassaree, he was indicted on bribery charges. After the story about him ran in April, he was indicted on additional charges.

Immediately after the two news outlets published the piece on Rankin County’s Goon Squad, attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division flew to the state capital to meet with the president of the local chapter of the NAACP. Days later, the U.S. Attorney’s Office put out a press release urging victims to come forward.

Federal officials put up billboards, too, urging residents to report police brutality to the FBI.

Meanwhile, on March 19, two members of Rankin’s Goon Squad were sentenced to prison for torturing two Black men last year using Tasers, a sex toy and other objects. One of the victims was shot in the mouth. On March 20, two other former deputies were sentenced for their part in the torture, one of whom received a 40-year federal prison sentence.

We asked the reporting team for advice to help other journalists take on similar projects. Below, we highlight four of the tips they shared.  

1. If you report on law enforcement agencies, get their Taser log data.

Data collected from deputies’ Tasers played a key role in Howey and Rosenfield’s reporting on Rankin County deputies’ use of force. It allowed them to confirm victim statements and demonstrate when, where, how, and how long deputies fired their Tasers while on the job.

“One running theme we kept hearing again and again is people being tased and Tasers being used as torture weapons,” Rosenfield says.

Many Tasers keep detailed digital records of their use. The Rankin County Sheriff’s Office gathers that data to compile departmentwide logs. Mississippi Today and The New York Times examined 24 years of the agency’s Taser data.

The journalists determined, for example, that three deputies triggered their Tasers a combined 14 times during a 2018 home raid over an $80 sale of methamphetamine. The four men at the home that night said deputies beat them and used Tasers and a blowtorch while interrogating them.

Howey and Rosenfield reported the Taser logs also showed that “[a]t least 32 times over the past decade, Rankin deputies fired their Tasers more than five times in under an hour, activating them for at least 30 seconds in total — double the recommended limit. Experts in Taser use who reviewed the logs called these incidents highly suspicious.”

Rosenfield recommends asking industry experts and academic researchers for help understanding Taser log data and identifying potentially problematic patterns.

“We talked to lots of use of force experts to find out what we could actually glean from the logs and how to read them correctly to contextualize them,” he adds.

2. Be kind and transparent. Sources may be more willing to help if you’ve treated them well.

Daly, the lead reporter on the project, spent hours driving across the state with Mitchell, interviewing sources, tracking down court files and transcripts, and digging through stacks of paper records in various government offices and facilities.

When she’s  out reporting, she says she tries to treat everyone she encounters with kindness. She also aims for transparency, so sources know what she plans to do with the information they share with her.

She calls this approach “walking in the sunshine.”

“Always walk in the sunshine with whatever you’re doing and be friendly and polite and make source connections with everyone around you — because you don’t know who’s going to help you with the thing you need most,” she says.

It paid big dividends for her last year, when an assistant records clerk she saw often at a local courthouse went out of her way to find a case file. Details from the case, filed in 2012 by a former prisoner accusing Clay County Sheriff Eddie Scott of sex abuse, were crucial to the story about Scott.

Initially, no one could locate the file, which Daly later learned probably had been missing for years.

“The woman comes back and can’t find it and she’s freaking out and she’s saying, ‘This has never happened before,’” Daly says.

Daly helped search the office’s paper files but also came up emptyhanded.

A couple weeks later, she and Mitchell returned to the courthouse with a different strategy for gathering bits of information from court filings, to try to figure out what information the missing file contained. When the head clerk spotted the two journalists, she told them the assistant clerk found the file they wanted.

The assistant clerk had spent days looking for the file and found it misplaced in another part of the clerk’s office. What it contained: The only public record of a local woman’s allegations that Scott, when he was the county’s chief deputy, had coerced her into a sexual relationship after her arrest. He had promised to use his influence to help her, she writes in the court filing. She says they had sex in his patrol car, parked on a hog farm, on at least five occasions.

The file also contained hand-written, suggestive letters that Scott sent to her in prison in 2011, months before he became sheriff. Mississippi Today and The New York Times published one of those letters.

“You never know which source might go that extra mile,” Daly says.

3. Understand that the way you present yourself through your words, actions and appearance can create or break down barriers between you and members of the public.

For Howey, one of toughest parts of the series was getting people to open up, especially those living in communities that have been regularly targeted by law enforcement.

He discovered that being himself, which meant not hiding his tattoos and piercings, helped him connect with residents in the rural and lower-income communities he visited. Sometimes, he wore a T-shirt to interviews — for his own comfort and so people he approached might be less apprehensive or suspicious of him.

“Usually, the people with the big vocabularies and nice wardrobes are the people who put them in the positions they’re in,” Howey says.

He notes that most people can “sniff out insincerity.”

“I just approach people as myself instead of a stuffy, professional reporter,” he says. “It’s about finding that line that allows you to stay professional and allows you to be personable enough for people to see you’re a real human being.”

If someone starts confiding in you, they might tell others you’re trustworthy.

“I’ve had situations where I’m talking to people and they’ll make a phone call [to a potential source] and say, ‘He’s actually cool,’” Howey says. “That has gotten me interviews.”

4. Use digital tools such as Pinpoint and Descript to make your job easier.

Two of the investigative team’s favorite digital tools are Descript and Google’s Pinpoint.

Descript is a video editing app. You can use it to record, edit and transcribe videos as well as collaborate on videos and podcasts. Rosenfield and Howey use it for transcribing audio files.

There is a free version, but they recommend investing in the paid version, which starts at $12 a month. The free version comes with one hour of transcription per month while the entry-level paid plan provides 10 hours a month.

Pinpoint is a free research tool that lets you examine and search large collections of documents quickly. You can also use it to transcribe audio and video files and sort documents according to key words and phrases, including locations and people’s names.

“It’s a great resource when you’re grappling with reams of court and police records and it’s a mixture of digital and paper,” Howey explains. “This tool allows you to compile everything into one folder and makes it all text searchable so it’s easy to extract information. It’s extremely useful. We used it constantly to look for patterns in police reports, to pull certain records out without spending 20 minutes looking for them in folders.”

Read the stories

Sex Abuse, Beatings and an Untouchable Mississippi Sheriff

Where the sheriff is king, these women say he coerced them into sex

The Sheriff, His Girlfriend and His Illegal Subpoenas

How a ‘Goon Squad’ of Deputies Got Away With Years of Brutality

Who Investigates the Sheriff? In Mississippi, Often No One.

The post How they did it: Mississippi Today and The New York Times reveal sex abuse, torture allegations at sheriff’s offices appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

“In some respects, there was nothing unusual about the killing of Walter Gonzalez.

Eighty-six pedestrians had already died in car crashes in New York City last year by October 23, when a driver slammed a pick-up truck into Gonzalez in Brooklyn. It was not out of the ordinary that the driver was speeding, nor that his license had been revoked months prior.

But there was one thing that stood out about the crash: the paper license plate hanging from the back of the truck.”

-The lede to “Ghost Tags: Inside New York City’s Black Market for Temporary License Plates,” by Jesse Coburn

In April 2023, online news outlet Streetsblog NYC published the first story in a four-part investigation exposing a vast black market for temporary license plate tags, the massive scale of which was not publicly known.

Temporary tags are legal when someone buys a car. In New Jersey, for example, a dealer issues the buyer weatherized paper tags to display until metal plates come in the mail.

But it is illegal for dealers to issue temporary tags absent a car sale. It is also remarkably easy for dealers to sell those tags on the black market. And when dealers were caught, the penalties were small — before the series from Streetsblog investigative reporter Jesse Coburn.

Further, “Drivers were using them to mask their identities while evading tolls and traffic cameras, or while committing more serious crimes, authorities said,” Coburn writes.

At the time the Streetsblog investigation was published, auto dealers fraudulently selling authentic tags could fetch $100 to $200 apiece, while the maximum violation for a first-time offense in New Jersey was $500, Coburn found. One dealer in New Jersey issued tens of thousands of tags in 2021, and “could have made millions of dollars,” if all those were sold on the black market, Coburn writes.

Coburn’s seven-month investigation was built upon nearly 50 public records requests he filed, particularly from motor vehicle authorities in New Jersey and Georgia, for information on dealers illegally issuing temporary tags. Those tags, Coburn found, were being issued by dealers who appeared by and large not to be engaged in any legitimate business.

“The data really tells the story because it’s like, here’s this dealership that has no online presence, none whatever, no listing on Google Maps — none of the trappings of a successful car dealership — issuing tens of thousands of temp tags every year,” Coburn says.

Since the Streetsblog series, New Jersey has imposed tougher restrictions on temporary tags, including potential prison time and fines up to $10,000 for violators. A lawmaker in Georgia has also introduced legislation aimed at curtailing the market for fraudulent temporary tags there.

“New Jersey and Georgia have also shut down dozens of dealers for temp tag fraud since the series came out and proposed $150,000 in fines,” Coburn says. “Seven of the dealers that I sort of flagged to these states as possible temp tag violators are now under criminal investigation.”

Keep reading for four tips from Coburn based on his investigation, including how it came about, how he got people buying and selling temporary tags to talk to him, and the types of sources he thinks are most compelling.

1. Stay alert — is there something weird in your neighborhood?

Being an investigative reporter isn’t necessarily about having deep government sources or getting your hands on an incendiary tip, Coburn says. Sometimes, a strong investigation can come from staying alert to changes in the places you frequent.

“During the pandemic, in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, I started seeing tons of these paper license plates on cars from out of state — Texas, New Jersey, Georgia, Virginia, Maryland,” Coburn says. “And, you know, I’m sort of wondering what this is about.”

Coburn says he saw some local news coverage of illicit temporary tags in New York City, but those stories were driven mostly by police reports and press conferences.

“It just seemed inconceivable to me that so many people had just bought cars in Texas or Georgia,” he adds.

So, he began filing public records requests for data on temporary tags issued by auto dealers in New Jersey.

“What I saw was that there were these dealerships that were issuing massive numbers of tags — 10, 20,000 tags in a single year,” Coburn says. “Which should mean that that dealership is selling that many cars.”

He started digging into one dealer, F&J Auto Mall in Bridgeton, New Jersey, and learned it “issued 36,000 temporary license plates in 2021 — more than any other dealership in the state, including the used-car juggernauts Carvana and CarMax combined,” Coburn writes in Part 1 of the series.

Coburn recalls that when he looked up the publicly available address for F&J, Google Maps images showed a “warehouse in the middle of nowhere, with no big sign out front. A giant parking lot that was totally empty. That was the moment I was like, ‘There’s something really crazy going on here.’”

2. To ‘find your Virgil,’ try old-fashioned cold calling.

Cold calling may not feel like the most natural thing in the world, but if you don’t otherwise have good sources for your story, a few dozen unsolicited calls can work.

That’s what Coburn did when he realized he needed reputable auto dealers to walk him through what the data indicated about F&J. He searched for dealerships in northern New Jersey, close enough to his home base to potentially visit in person.

Initially, the response from auto dealers was “chilly” and “people were very skittish,” Coburn says. But before long, he struck journalistic gold.

“It took me about a dozen dealerships,” he says. “But, eventually, I got this guy on the phone named Abdul Cummings.”

As an émigré from Palestine running a legitimate used auto dealership, Cummings was troubled by the illegal activity happening in his industry, Coburn says. Cummings immediately began describing to Coburn how the paper tag fraud worked. Coburn recalls that Cummings was “very candid, and smart” with “a lot of integrity.”

“Find your Virgil,” Coburn advises, referring to the ancient Roman poet, a fictional version of whom shepherds Dante through hell in the Divine Comedy. “Someone who can kind of guide you through.”

Coburn found many other key sources through cold calls, such as Jose Cordero, who told Coburn he made $18,200 selling temporary tags before New Jersey authorities caught him.

3. Use court calendars to find sources involved in active cases.

Coburn identified temporary tag buyers through cold calls, but also by looking at WebCriminal, the online criminal court portal for New York.

“It’s extremely Web 1.0 — it’s very hard to use,” Coburn says. “But there is a wealth of information if you kind of know how to find it. And so eventually, I figured out how to search the court calendars for every day, and to search by violation.”

The violation for possessing illegal temporary tags is called “criminal possession of a forged instrument.” Coburn would search for people being arraigned on that charge and potentially related charges, such as driving with a suspended license.

“I would just sit in court and wait for their hearing to be called,” he says. “You know, I just had this list of names. And then after they were arraigned, I approached them and tried to talk to them — and was once again amazed at how candid people were.”

That’s how Coburn got the story of Adrian Mocha, who had his license suspended. In the span of one year, Mocha went through “eight or nine” temporary tags, according to Part 3 of the investigation. Coburn simply approached Mocha and interviewed him following one of Mocha’s court dates.

4. Seek sources outside the spotlight for interesting anecdotes.

Politicians and other high-profile officials are often used to interacting with members of the news media. They may be guarded and self-aware in what they publicly convey. But people who have less or no experience talking with reporters provided some of the more interesting details in Coburn’s story — such as Ali Ahmed, manager at Zack Auto Sales, which is registered in New Jersey, according to Coburn’s reporting.

Coburn visited Zack Auto Sales and asked Ahmed about the 999 temporary tags the dealership issued in 2022, despite having no presence online. Ahmed said, “If you’re going to go deep, and I find it, and you go to ask about my company in Trenton and New Jersey, you’re going to get trouble with it, believe me,” Coburn writes in Part 2 of the series. Ahmed said they “retail and wholesale [cars] online, like a broker,” according to Coburn’s reporting.

“Streetsblog did not find evidence that Zack Auto Sales illegally sells temporary license plates,” Coburn writes. “But one car wholesaler and one car broker based in New Jersey told Streetsblog that wholesalers and brokers have no reason to issue large numbers of temp tags.”

Coburn also recalls the compelling story of how Kareem Ulloa-Alvarado discovered he had been unknowingly delivering temporary tags for a dealership for a few weeks in December 2022 and January 2023, after finding the gig on Craigslist.

In Part 4 of the series, Coburn reports that Ulloa-Alvarado didn’t realize he was doing anything illegal until he was attacked at knifepoint during a delivery in the Bronx. When he went to police, a detective told Ulloa-Alvarado that he could be arrested for delivering fake tags if he filed a report about the assault. “Kareem was shocked,” Coburn writes.

“They were very interesting, original people,” he says. “I like stories where I’m not just speaking to media-trained government officials.”

Read the stories

Part 1: The Dealers

Part 2: The Landlords

Part 3: The Buyers

‘Duped’: A Harlem 20-Something Blows the Whistle on an Illegal Temporary License Plate Business

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U.S. citizens ages 18 and older who are registered to vote can cast ballots in local, state and federal elections. But states, which conduct and administer many elections, including federal elections, can also take away individuals’ right to vote for certain reasons.

A felony conviction, either in state or federal court, is one common way people lose the right to vote in the U.S. This process is commonly referred to as felony disenfranchisement. Because laws on felony disenfranchisement vary by state, there are a range of outcomes when it comes to the voting rights of those convicted of felonies. While nearly every state curtails voting for people convicted of felonies while they are incarcerated, not every felony conviction results in prison time.

Convictions can result from jury trials or plea deals, and the vast majority of criminal convictions in the U.S. are obtained by guilty plea, according to a 2023 report from the American Bar Association. Most people in jail for misdemeanor offenses or while awaiting court hearings can vote, but they face challenges, such as a lack of opportunities to register, according to reporting from Matt Vasilogambros of Stateline, a nonprofit news organization.

Felony disenfranchisement laws by state

“In 11 states, felons lose their voting rights indefinitely for some crimes, or require a governor’s pardon for voting rights to be restored, face an additional waiting period after completion of sentence (including parole and probation) or require additional action before voting rights can be restored,” according to research from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

• Those 11 strictest states are Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Tennessee, Virginia and Wyoming, according to the NCSL. Florida “disenfranchises more returning citizens than any other state,” write the authors of a January 2023 paper in the Vanderbilt Law Review.
• There are 14 states where people convicted of felonies lose the right to vote while incarcerated, as well as while completing probation or parole, according to the NCSL. These states are Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
• There are 23 states where people convicted of felonies lose the right to vote only while incarcerated, according to the NCSL, with the right automatically reinstated after time served. These states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington.       
• People convicted of felonies in the District of Columbia, Maine and Vermont do not lose their voting rights and can vote while incarcerated.
• In some states, people convicted of a felony can vote in the state where they live even if they wouldn’t be eligible in the state where they were convicted. Journalists covering this topic should consult legislation and reach out to legal experts to understand their state rules for restoring voting rights. For a quick look at restoring voting rights for people with criminal convictions, check this U.S. Department of Justice state-by-state guide.

Brief historical context of felony disenfranchisement

More than 4 million people in the U.S. are barred from voting because of a felony conviction, according to estimates from The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that advocates for “effective and humane responses to crime.” News outlets commonly cite reports and policy briefs from The Sentencing Project, and their data is used in academic research, including in one of the papers featured below.

Over the past quarter century, about half of state legislatures have moved to restore voting rights to those disenfranchised due to a felony conviction.

“Since 1997, 26 states and the District of Columbia have expanded voting rights to people living with felony convictions,” according to an October 2023 report from The Sentencing Project. “As a result, over 2 million Americans have regained the right to vote.”

State felony disenfranchisement laws arose during the post-Civil War era, when the Reconstruction Act of 1867 affirmed universal suffrage for all men.

“At that point, two interconnected trends combined to make disenfranchisement a major obstacle for newly enfranchised Black voters,” according to a 2017 report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “First, lawmakers — especially in the South — implemented a slew of criminal laws designed to target Black citizens. And nearly simultaneously, many states enacted broad disenfranchisement laws that revoked voting rights from anyone convicted of any felony.”

Mississippi is something of an outlier among the strictest states in that people convicted of felonies in federal court do not lose voting rights there, but people convicted of felonies in state courts for a range of crimes do lose the right to vote, according to the U.S. Department of Justice guide on voting rights for people with criminal convictions. The right to vote in Mississippi can only be restored by pardon or legislative action, according to the guide.

Rules for restoring voting rights in states that allow it can also vary. Even if the right is “automatically” reinstated, often individuals must still proactively re-register to vote, according to the NCSL.

Below, we have gathered and summarized six studies that explore demographic trends in felony disenfranchisement as well as how felony disenfranchisement affects political engagement and electoral democracy in U.S. states. The research roundup is followed by story ideas and interview questions for journalists.

The findings show …

• Public health outcomes tend to be worse in states where democratic processes are affected by policies such as felony disenfranchisement.
• People are more likely to support felony disenfranchisement when they express attitudes aligned with xenophobia and when they support policies that would restrict immigration and reduce government funding for public programs.
• Felony disenfranchisement is relatively higher where Black populations also exhibit higher rates of depressive symptoms.
• Restoring voting rights to people convicted of felonies is unlikely to meaningfully affect election results — but those who have their voting rights restored tend to feel they personally have more of a say in how their state governments operate.

Research roundup

Electoral Democracy and Working-Age Mortality
Jennifer Karas Montez, Kent Jason Cheng and Jacob Grumbach. The Milbank Quarterly, May 2023.

The study: The authors explore the relationship between the democratic health of a state and the physical health of people aged 25 to 64 in that state. They use the State Democracy Index, which measures the health of each state’s democratic processes based on 51 indicators, such as felony disenfranchisement, the availability of absentee voting and voter registration requirements. (The index was developed by Jacob Grumbach, an associate professor public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.) The authors of the paper also use mortality rates for working-age people from the National Center for Health Statistics.

The findings: Working-age mortality and electoral democratic health are strongly associated, the authors find. States that improve their electoral democracy rating from “moderate” to “high” could see their working-age mortality rates fall 3.2% for men and 2.7% for women, according to estimates from statistical models the authors developed. The authors further estimate that state improvements to electoral democracy are associated with lower drug poisoning deaths for men and women, along with deaths from infectious diseases and homicides.

In the authors’ words: “According to historians … real improvements in population health in the mid- to late 1800s in industrializing countries such as England came about largely because of increased voting power of the public and, partly as a consequence, the rise of government interventions such as sanitation and clean water systems to improve social conditions for everyone. The historical association between rising democratic functioning and declining mortality is the flip side of today’s association between declining democratic functioning and rising mortality.”

Exclusionary Citizenship: Public Punitiveness and Support for Voting Restrictions
Cecilia Chouhy, Peter Lehmann and Alexa Singer. Justice Quarterly, August 2022.

The study: The authors explore links between individual support for “anti-welfarism, anti-immigrant attitudes and symbolic racism,” and support for disenfranchisement of people convicted of felonies. Symbolic racism refers to “an apathy toward racial inequalities and a rejection of efforts to mitigate them,” the authors write. Specifically, the authors analyze results from 7,453 adults who took the 2020 American National Election Survey, a public opinion poll conducted during the weeks before and after presidential elections, operated by collaboration of several major universities.

The findings: People are more likely to support felony disenfranchisement when they express attitudes aligned with xenophobia or symbolic racism. They also tend to support policies that would restrict immigration and reduce government funding for public programs such as social security, education and aid to people with low incomes.

Support for the death penalty, likewise, is associated with support for felony disenfranchisement, the authors find. This association is strongest among Republicans, compared with Democrats. Among Democrats, attitudes aligned with symbolic racism are more likely to lead to support for felony disenfranchisement, compared with Republicans and independents.

In the authors’ words: “Our findings suggest that racial animosities, as well as xenophobia and support for immigration restrictions, not only are correlated with attitudes favoring punitive criminal justice policies but also explain differences in public support for punitive and non-punitive forms of voting restrictions.”

Sick And Tired of Being Excluded: Structural Racism in Disenfranchisement As A Threat To Population Health Equity
Patricia Homan and Tyson Brown. Health Affairs, February 2022.

The study: Does felony disenfranchisement affect health during middle and later life? The authors seek to shed light on this question. They use data from The Sentencing Project and the U.S. Census Bureau to assess whether Black people in each state are over- or under-represented among those disenfranchised due to felony convictions. Then, they compare that information with results from the Health and Retirement Study from the University of Michigan, a nationally representative survey of adults over age 51 that is “the most widely used dataset for studying health and well-being in later life,” the authors write. The datasets are from 2016, the most recent available.

“This study focused on Black and White people because they have the highest and lowest rates of disenfranchisement, respectively,” the authors explain in the paper. The final analysis excludes 15 states that have relatively small populations of Black people. The 35 states included account for 92% of the U.S. white population and 99% of the Black population, the authors write.

The findings: During the year studied, Black people were proportionally disenfranchised at a higher rate than white people in all 35 states, but particularly in states in the North, Mountain West and West. States in the South tended to have lower rates of proportional Black disenfranchisement. The authors find that felony disenfranchisement is relatively higher in states where older Black populations also exhibit higher rates of depressive symptoms and difficulty performing everyday tasks, such as using a telephone, shopping, bathing, dressing and getting in and out of bed. There was no association found between disenfranchisement among Black people and these health outcomes among white people.

In the authors’ words: “Consistent with the growing recognition that social policies are health policies, enacting laws to dismantle racialized felony disenfranchisement would likely improve the health of Black people and make progress toward achieving health equity.”

How Often do People Vote While Incarcerated? Evidence from Maine and Vermont
Ariel White and Avery Nguyen. The Journal of Politics, January 2022.

The study: The authors begin with data from the 2018 elections across 17 states that disenfranchise people while they are incarcerated for felony offenses and explore what the turnout rates would have to have been for those individuals to swing elections if they were granted the right to vote while incarcerated. The highest was Massachusetts, where the closest race in 2018 was decided by 654,161 votes — if the 8,870 people in that state who were disenfranchised due to felony incarcerations had been able to vote, they would have had to vote at a rate of 8,090%, an impossibility, and all would have had to have voted against the winning candidate. The lowest was Nevada, where those incarcerated for felonies would have had to vote at a rate of 36%, and all against the winning candidate, to swing the closest election held there that year.

The authors note that “studies of people who have regained their right to vote after incarceration find that they participate at much lower rates than other votes,” and then turn to whether the question of whether people incarcerated for felonies vote in the two states, Maine and Vermont, where they are never disenfranchised. They use prison records and state voter files to explore this question.

The findings: About one-in-three people serving time in Vermont for felony crimes were registered to vote during the 2018 election, while 8% of all people incarcerated for felonies voted. Similarly, in Maine, about one-third of those incarcerated for felony crimes were registered in 2018, while around 6% of people incarcerated for felonies cast ballots.

In the authors’ words: “This conclusion — that from-prison voter turnout is low even in Vermont and Maine and would be unlikely to affect state elections elsewhere — does not imply that we think states should avoid such policies. Rather, we suggest that policy makers should consider moral arguments rather than casual predictions about how these laws might change elections. People have made moral claims both for and against re-enfranchising people with felony convictions, highlighting ideas about paying one’s debt to society, the racist history of disfranchisement laws, and the meaning of citizenship. Our findings suggest that such normative debates are at least as relevant as the possibility of imprisoned voters changing election outcomes.”

Neighborhoods and Felony Disenfranchisement: The Case of New York City
Kevin Morris. Urban Affairs Review, September 2021.

The study: Morris explores whether voter turnout rates by neighborhood during the 2017 New York City mayoral election are linked to the proportion of people disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, by neighborhood. In particular, Morris identifies “lost voters,” which he defines as people with a history of voting before their disenfranchisement due to felony conviction. The data Morris analyzes includes felony incarceration and parole records since 1990, which he obtained via public records request from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. Morris also uses a snapshot of publicly available, statewide voter data from April 2018, which includes whether individuals voted in the past as well as those who lost eligibility and were removed from the active voter file. He identifies 2,518 “lost voters” during the 2017 election.

The findings: Neighborhoods with lost voters also had lower average turnout rates in the 2017 election than the overall average neighborhood. In addition, neighborhoods without a lost voter during the 2016 general election that then lost at least one voter by 2017 also had lower turnout rates.

Morris identifies clear demographic differences between neighborhoods with lost voters and those without. The median income for a neighborhood with lost voters was $47,806, on average, compared with $65,495 in the overall average neighborhood. The percentage of Black people in neighborhoods with lost voters was 41%, on average, compared with the overall average of 22%. The percentage of Latino people in neighborhoods with lost voters was also higher than the overall average — 36% to 29%. Registered Democrats made up 77% of the electorate in neighborhoods with lost voters, on average, compared with an overall average of 68%.

In the author’s words: “Individuals who live in neighborhoods where police activity is relatively limited may interpret the incarceration of a neighbor as a largely individual phenomenon … In the neighborhoods where policing is most prevalent — often, lower-income Black communities — the incarceration of a neighbor might not be interpreted so individualistically. It may, rather, be interpreted as another reminder of the government’s unfairness. If a would-be voter finds herself soured on political participation because of her neighbor’s incarceration, she may be less likely to cast a ballot.”

Restoring Voting Rights: Evidence that Reversing Felony Disenfranchisement Increases Political Efficacy
Victoria Shineman. Policy Studies, December 2019.

The study: Shineman explores what happens to the political efficacy of people who have been convicted of felonies and disenfranchised after their right to vote is then restored or made eligible to be restored. Political efficacy refers to “the feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact upon the political process,” according to foundational political science research from the mid-1950s.

Shineman conducted a survey of people with felony convictions eligible to have their voting rights restored, before and after the 2017 statewide elections in Virginia. In 2016, an executive gubernatorial order and subsequent court ruling allowed people convicted of felonies in Virginia to have their voting rights restored, one at a time, by executive order. By the 2017 election, more than 150,000 people had their right to vote restored, according to the paper.

Those who had their voting rights restored were notified by mail at their last known residence. But people convicted of felonies are “a particularly transient population,” Shineman writes, meaning many of those now able to vote did not know it.

Shineman convened a panel of 98 people convicted of felonies, divided into three groups, to assess their political efficacy before and after the 2017 election cycle. The first group was told the state sought to restore voting rights to those convicted of felonies, and Shineman offered to look up their registration status. The second group received the same treatment, plus they were told about the upcoming election, how to register and where to vote. The third was a placebo group that was encouraged to engage in civic activity by volunteering in their neighborhoods, but not told that they could potentially register to vote, or about the election. Participants were surveyed about their feelings of political efficacy before and after the 2017 election cycle.

The findings: Among participants in the first two groups, about 21% learned from Shineman that their right to vote had been restored. Shineman notes that the sample size is small, which somewhat limits the strength of the results. With that caveat in mind, the treatment groups exhibited higher rates of political efficacy than the placebo group. For example, about 90% of people in those groups agreed with the statement “my vote makes a difference,” compared with 73% in the placebo group. Some 81% of participants in the treatment groups said they felt qualified to serve in a jury, compared with 76% of those in the placebo group. And 68% of the treatment participants said they “feel politically empowered,” compared with 57% of the placebo group.

In the author’s words: “Regardless as to whether citizens choose to exercise their voting rights, the act of restoring rights alone causes citizens to feel more empowered, more capable, and to be more likely to seek out opportunities for participatory engagement in the future.”

Suggested story ideas and interview questions

• When telling the stories of people affected by felony disenfranchisement, including family members and community members, delve into the consequences of losing the right to vote. Try to move from abstract (“losing the right to vote”) to concrete effects, such as financial, physical health and mental health outcomes.
• If there are local conflicts between people advocating for and against felony disenfranchisement, use research to inform or question each side’s arguments.
• Use census data and information from organizations like The Sentencing Project to report local or statewide demographic differences in felony disenfranchisement. Who is the practice disproportionately affecting?

The post Felony disenfranchisement in the US: An explainer and research roundup appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

More cities and states are introducing bills to decriminalize and regulate access to psychedelic drugs, which could potentially become another option to treat mental health conditions and substance use disorders. But the substances remain illegal under U.S. federal law and scientific evidence about their effectiveness is still far from conclusive.

This month alone, California lawmakers introduced a bill to allow people 21 and older to consume psychedelic mushrooms under medical supervision. In Massachusetts, lawmakers are working on a bill that would legalize psilocybin, the active ingredient of psychedelic mushrooms. And Arizona legislators have also introduced a bill that would make psychedelic mushrooms available as a mental health treatment option.

Last December, Congress passed legislation that included funding for psychedelic clinical trials for active-duty service members. And in January this year, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it will begin funding research on MDMA, also known as ecstasy, and psilocybin, to treat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. This is the first time since the 1960s that the VA is funding research on such compounds, according to the department.

The rise of proposed and passed legislation in recent years necessitates more journalistic coverage. But it’s important for journalists to go beyond what the bills and lawmakers say and include research studies about psychedelics and note the limitations of those studies.

Major medical organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association, have not yet endorsed psychedelics to treat psychiatric disorders, except in clinical trials, due to inadequate scientific evidence.

The authors of a 2023 study published in the journal Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology, also advise “strong caution” regarding the hype around the potential medical use of psychedelics. “There is not enough robust evidence to draw any firm conclusions about the safety and efficacy of psychedelic therapy,” they write.

Scientists are still trying to better understand how psychedelics work, what’s the best dose for treating different mental health conditions and how to reduce the risk of potential side effects such as intense emotional experiences or increased heart rate and blood pressure, the authors of a February 2024 study published in the journal Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry write.

In a 2022 study published in JAMA Psychiatry, Dr. Joshua Siegel and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis write that while legislative reform for psychedelic drugs is moving forward rapidly, several issues have not been addressed, including:

• A mechanism for verifying the chemical content of drugs that are obtained from outside the medical establishment.
• Licensure and training criteria for practitioners who wish to provide psychedelic treatment.
• Clinical and billing infrastructure.
• Assessing potential interactions with other drugs.
• How the drugs should be used in populations such as youths, older adults and pregnant people.

“Despite the relative rapidity with which some have embraced psychedelics as legitimate medical treatments, critical questions about the mechanism of action, dose and dose frequency, durability of response to repeated treatments, drug-drug interactions, and the role that psychotherapy plays in therapeutic efficacy remain unanswered,” Siegel and colleagues write.

What are psychedelics?

Psychedelics are among the oldest class of mind-altering substances, used by humans for thousands of years in traditional or religious rituals.

In 2021, 74 million people 12 years and older reported using hallucinogens, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

The terms “psychedelics” and “hallucinogens” are used interchangeably in public discourse, but scientifically, hallucinogens fall into three groups based on chemical structure and mechanism of action, according to NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse:

• Psychedelic drugs, also called “classic psychedelics” or simply “psychedelics,” mainly affect the way the brain processes serotonin, a chemical that carries messages between nerve cells in the brain and the body. These drugs can bring on vivid visions and affect a person’s sense of self, according to NIDA. Drugs in this category include:
  • Psilocybin is the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, also known as “magic” mushrooms or shrooms. It’s a Schedule 1 drug in the U.S. under the Controlled Substances Act, which means it has a high potential for abuse and has no accepted medical use. However, some states have decriminalized it, according to NIDA. The drug has also been given the Breakthrough Therapy designation from the FDA, a process to speed up the development and review of drugs, for the treatment of major depressive disorder.
  • LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide, is a synthetic chemical made from a fungus that infects rye. It’s a Schedule 1 drug.
  • DMT, or dimethyltryptamine, found in certain plants native to the Amazon rainforest, has been used in religious practices and rituals. The plants are sometimes used to make a tea called ayahuasca. DMT can also be made in the lab as a white powder. DMT is generally smoked or consumed in brews like ayahuasca. It’s a Schedule 1 drug.
  • Mescaline, a chemical compound found in a small cactus called peyote, has been used by Indigenous people in northern Mexico and the southwestern U.S. in religious rituals. Mescaline can also be produced in the lab. Mescaline and peyote are Schedule 1 drugs.
• Dissociative drugs affect how the brain processes glutamate, an abundant chemical released by nerve cells in the brain that plays an important role in learning and memory. These drugs can make people feel disconnected from their bodies and surroundings. Drugs in this category include:
  • PCP, or phencyclidine, was developed in the 1950s as an injectable anesthetic but was discontinued because patients became agitated and delusional. Today it is an illegal street drug. It’s a Schedule 2 drug, which means it has a high potential for abuse, but lower compared to Schedule 1 drugs.
  • Ketamine, a drug developed in the 1960s and used as an anesthetic in the Vietnam War, is approved by the FDA as an anesthetic. It has been shown to play a role in pain management and treatment of depression. It is also illegally used for its hallucinogenic effects. It is a Schedule 3 drug, which means it has a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence. A chemically-similar drug called esketamine is approved by the FDA for the treatment of depression that doesn’t respond to standard treatment.
• Other hallucinogens, which affect different brain functions and can cause psychedelic and potentially dissociative effects, include:
  • MDMA, or ecstasy, is a synthetic drug that’s a stimulant and hallucinogen. It is a Schedule 1 drug. It has been given the Breakthrough Therapy designation from the FDA for the treatment of PTSD.
  • Salvia is an herb in the mint family that has hallucinogenic effects. It is not a federally controlled drug, but it is controlled in some states, according to the DEA.
  • Ibogaine is derived from the root bark of a West African shrub and is a stimulant and hallucinogen. It is a Schedule 1 drug.

Research on psychedelics

There was a wave of studies on psychedelics, particularly LSD, in the 1950s and 1960s, but they came to a halt when the U.S. declared a “War on Drugs” in 1971 and tightened pharmaceutical regulations. There was little research activity until the early 1990s when studies on drugs such as MDMA and DMT began to emerge.

In 2006, researchers at Johns Hopkins University published a seminal double-blind study in which two-thirds of participants — who had never taken psychedelics previously — said their psychedelic sessions were among the most meaningful experiences of their lives.

“These studies, among others, renewed scientific interest in psychedelics and, accordingly, research into their effects has continued to grow since,” Jacob S. Aday and colleagues write in a 2019 study published in Drug Science, Policy and Law.

In their paper, Aday and colleagues argue that 2018 may be remembered as the true turning point in psychedelic research due to “advances within science, increased public interest, and regulatory changes,” such as psilocybin receiving the “breakthrough therapy” status from the FDA.

Today, there are numerous ongoing clinical trials on the therapeutic potential of psychedelics for different conditions, including substance use disorders and mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Given the growing number of studies on psychedelics, the Food and Drug Administration issued a draft guidance in June 2023 for clinical trials with psychedelic drugs, aiming to help researchers design studies that will yield more reliable results for drug development.

The systematic reviews highlighted below show that there’s a lack of robust study designs in many psychedelic clinical trials. Some have small sample sizes. Some include participants who have used psychedelics before, so when they participate in a randomized controlled clinical trial, they know whether they are receiving psychedelic treatment or a placebo. Or, some include participants who may have certain expectations due to positive coverage in the lay media, hence creating bias in the results.

If you’re covering a study about psychedelics…

It’s important for journalists to pay close attention to study design and speak with an expert who is not involved in the study.

In a February 2024 blog post from Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center, Leiden University professors Eiko I. Fried and Michiel van Elk share several challenges in psychedelic research:

• “Conclusions are dramatically overstated in many studies. This ranges from conclusions in the results sections, abstracts, and even titles of papers not consistent with the reported results.”
• “There is emerging evidence that adverse events resulting from psychedelic substances are both common and underreported.”
• Some studies don’t have control groups, which can create problems for interpreting results, “because treatments like psychedelics need to be compared against a placebo or other treatment to conclude that they work beyond the placebo effect or already existing, readily available treatments.”
• “Participants in psychedelic studies usually know if they are in the treatment or control group, which artificially increases the apparent efficacies of psychedelics in clinical studies.”
• Small sample sizes can affect the statistical power and generalizability of the findings. “Small samples also mean that results are not representative. For example, participants with severe or comorbid mental health problems are commonly excluded from psychedelic studies, and therefore results may look better in these studies than in real-world psychiatric settings.”
• Many studies do not include long-term follow-ups of participants. “Studying how these people are feeling a few days or weeks after they receive treatment is not sufficient to establish that they are indeed cured from depression.”

Fried and van Elk also have a useful checklist for assessing the quality and scientific rigor of psychedelic research in their 2023 study “History Repeating: Guidelines to Address Common Problems in Psychedelic Science,” published in the journal Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology.

Journalists should also remind their audiences that the drugs are still illegal under federal law and can pose a danger to health.

In California, the number of emergency room visits involving the use of hallucinogens increased by 54% between 2016 and 2022, according to a January 2024 study published in Addiction. Meanwhile, the law enforcement seizure of psychedelic mushrooms has risen dramatically, increasing nearly four-fold between 2017 and 2022, according to a February 2024 study published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

Below, we have curated and summarized five recent studies, mostly systematic reviews and meta-analyses, which examine various aspects of psychedelic drugs, including legislative reform; long-term effects; efficacy and safety for the treatment of anxiety, depression and PTSD; and participation of older adults in clinical trials. The research summaries are followed by recommended reading.

Research roundup

Psychedelic Drug Legislative Reform and Legalization in the US
Joshua S. Siegel, James E. Daily, Demetrius A. Perry and Ginger E. Nicol. JAMA Psychiatry, December 2022.

The study: Most psychedelics are Schedule I drugs federally, but state legislative reforms are changing the prospects of the drugs’ availability for treatment and their illegal status. For a better understanding of the legislative reform landscape around Schedule I psychedelic drugs, researchers collected all bills and ballot initiatives related to psychedelic drugs that were introduced into state legislatures between 2019 and September 2022. They used publicly available sources, including BillTrack50, Ballotpedia and LexisNexis.

The findings: In total, 25 states considered 74 bills, although the bills varied widely in their framework. A majority proposed decriminalization but only a few would require medical oversight and some would not even require training or licensure, the authors write. Ten of those bills became law in seven states — Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, New Jersey, Oregon, Texas and Washington. As of August 1, 2022, 32 bills were dead and 32 remained active.

The majority of the bills — 67 of them — referred to psilocybin; 27 included both psilocybin and MDMA; 43 proposed decriminalization of psychedelic drugs.

To predict the future legalization of psychedelics, the authors also created two models based on existing medical and recreational marijuana reform. Using 2020 as the year of the first psychedelic decriminalization in Oregon, their models predict that 26 states will legalize psychedelics between 2033 and 2037.

In the authors’ words: “Despite the relative rapidity with which some have embraced psychedelics as legitimate medical treatments, critical questions about the mechanism of action, dosing and dose frequency, durability of response to repeated treatments, drug-drug interactions, and the role psychotherapy plays in therapeutic efficacy remain unanswered. This last point is critical, as a significant safety concern associated with drugs like psilocybin, MDMA, or LSD is the suggestibility and vulnerability of the patient while under the influence of the drug. Thus, training and clinical oversight is necessary to ensure safety and also therapeutic efficacy for this divergent class of treatments.”

Who Are You After Psychedelics? A Systematic Review and a Meta-Analysis of the Magnitude of Long-Term Effects of Serotonergic Psychedelics on Cognition/Creativity, Emotional Processing and Personality
Ivana Solaja, et al. Neuroscience & Behavioral Reviews, March 2024.

The study: Many anecdotal reports and observational studies have reported that psychedelics, even at microdoses, which are roughly one-tenth of a typical recreational dose, may enhance certain aspects of cognition and/or creativity, including coming up with new, useful ideas. Cognition is a “range of intellectual functions and processes involved in our ability to perceive, process, comprehend, store and react to information,” the authors explain. There are established relationships between impaired cognitive functioning and mental health disorders.

Due to limitations such as a lack of rigorous study designs, various populations in the studies and lack of documented dosage, it’s difficult to draw any conclusions about changes that last at least one week as a result of consuming psychedelics.

The authors screened 821 studies and based on the criteria they had set, found 10 to be eligible for the review and meta-analysis. The drugs in the studies include psilocybin, ayahuasca and LSD.

The findings: Overall, there was little evidence that these psychedelics have lasting effects on creativity. Also, there was not sufficient evidence to determine if this group of psychedelics enhances cognition and creativity in healthy populations or improves cognitive deficits in the study populations.

Pooled data from three studies showed lasting improvement in emotional processing — perceiving, expressing and managing emotions.

The studies offered little evidence suggesting lasting effects of psychedelics on personality traits.

In the authors’ words: “Results from this study showed very limited evidence for any lasting beneficial effects across these three psychological constructs. However, preliminary meta-analytic evidence suggested that these drugs may have the potential to cause lasting improvement in emotional recognition time. Future studies investigating these constructs should employ larger sample sizes, better control conditions, standardized and validated measures and longer-term follow-ups.”

The Impact of Psychedelics on Patients with Alcohol Use Disorder: A Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis
Dakota Sicignano, et al. Current Medical Research and Opinion, December 2023.

The study: Researchers are exploring the psychedelics’ potential for the treatment of alcohol use disorder, which affected nearly 30 million Americans in 2022. The authors of this study searched PubMed from 1960 to September 2023 for studies on the use of psychedelics to treat alcohol use disorder. Out of 174 English-language studies, they selected six studies that met the criteria for their analysis.

The findings: LSD and psilocybin are promising therapies for alcohol use disorder, the authors report. However, five of the six trials were conducted in the 1960s and 1970s and may not reflect the current treatment views. Also, four of the six studies included patients who had used psychedelics before participating in the study, increasing the risk of bias.

In the authors’ words: “Despite the existence of several clinical trials showing relatively consistent benefits of psychedelic therapy in treating alcohol use disorder, there are important limitations in the dataset that must be appreciated and that preclude a conclusive determination of its value for patient care at this time.”

Older Adults in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Trials: A Systematic Review
Lisa Bouchet, et al. Journal of Psychopharmacology, January 2024.

The study: People 65 years and older have been underrepresented in clinical trials involving psychedelics, including the use of psilocybin for the treatment of depression and anxiety. About 15% of adults older than 60 suffer from mental health issues, the authors note. They wanted to quantify the prevalence of older adults enrolled in psychedelic clinical trials and explore safety data in this population. They searched for English-language studies in peer-reviewed journals from January 1950 to September 2023. Of 4,376 studies, the authors selected 36. The studies involved psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, ayahuasca, and DPT (dipropyltryptamine), which is a less-studied synthetic hallucinogen.

The findings: Of the 1,400 patients participating in the selected studies, only 19 were 65 and older. Eighteen received psychedelics for distress related to cancer or other life-threatening illnesses. In a trial of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, only one older adult was included. Adverse reactions to the drugs among older patients, including heart and gastrointestinal issues were resolved within two days and didn’t have a long-lasting impact.

In the authors’ words: “Although existing data in older adults is limited, it does provide preliminary evidence for the safety and tolerability of [psychedelic-assisted therapy] in older patients, and as such, should be more rigorously studied in future clinical trials.”

Efficacy and Safety of Four Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies for Adults with Symptoms of Depression, Anxiety, and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Anees Bahji, Isis Lunsky, Gilmar Gutierrez and Gustavo Vazquez. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, November 2023.

The study: LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca and MDMA have been approved for clinical trials on psychedelic-assisted therapy of mental health conditions in Canada and the U.S. However, major medical associations, including the American Psychiatric Association, have argued that there is insufficient scientific evidence to endorse these drugs for treating mental health disorders. To better understand the current evidence, researchers reviewed 18 blinded, randomized controlled trials, spanning 2008 through 2023. Most studies were conducted in the U.S. or Switzerland.

The findings: The studies overall suggest preliminary evidence that psychedelic drugs are mostly well-tolerated. Psilocybin and MDMA therapies may offer relief from depression and PTSD symptoms for at least a year. Most studies also used therapy and psychological support along with psychedelics.

In the authors’ words: “Despite the promising evidence presented by our study and previous reviews in the field, the evidence base remains limited and underpowered. Long-term efficacy and safety data are lacking,” the authors write. “Future steps should encourage and highlight the need for more robust larger scale randomized controlled trials with longer follow-up periods, and efforts to address regulatory and legal barriers through the collaborations between researchers, healthcare professionals, regulatory bodies, and policymakers.”

Additional reading

Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelics: History, Advancements, and Unexplored Frontiers
Juliana Marino Maia, Bruna Stefane Alves de Oliveira, Luiz G.S. Branco and Renato Nery Soriano. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, April 2024.

Aggressive Behaviours Associated with MDMA and Psychedelics: A Narrative Review
Negar Sayrafizadeh, Nicole Ledwos, M. Ishrat Husain and David J. Castle. Acta Neuropsychiatrica, February 2024.

MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy for PTSD: Growing Evidence for Memory Effects Mediating Treatment Efficacy
Mesud Sarmanlu, Kim P.C. Kuypers, Patrick Vizeli, Timo L. Kvamme. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, January 2024

Psychedelic Therapies Reconsidered: Compounds, Clinical Indications, and Cautious Optimism
Jennifer M. Mitchell and Brian T. Anderson. Neuropsychopharmacology, July 2023.

Psychedelics as Therapeutics: Gaps, Challenges and Opportunities
An NIH workshop with video recordings. January 2022.

Trends in MDMA-Related Mortality Across Four Countries
Amanda Roxburgh, et al. Addiction, March 2021.

The Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Drugs: Past, Present, and Future
Robin L. Carhart-Harris and Guy M. Goodwin. Neuropsychopharmacology, October 2017.

The post Reporting on psychedelics research or legislation? Proceed with caution appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

In 2022, 30 public radio stations across 25 states asked listeners for their biggest questions in advance of that year’s election. What they learned: People really want to know how to judge the judges on their ballot.

The effort was part of the Midterm Election Project from America Amplified, a nationwide community journalism engagement initiative for public media, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Voters are often confronted at the polling booth with a list of judicial candidates. For civil court judge. Appellate court judge. Surrogate’s court judge. These positions are important because local and state judges, by the nature of the job, hold massive sway over people’s lives every day. Yet many voters have no idea who the candidates vying for these positions are or what kinds of work the various judges do. 

“When it comes to the public’s interaction with the government, with public spaces, lower courts are really where the rubber meets the road,” says Douglas Keith, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and a founding editor of State Court Report. “If someone has to go to court for some reason, whether it’s as a party in a case or because of jury duty, these are the courts they are most likely going to interact with as citizens.”

Voters are often interested in the judicial philosophy of candidates running, particularly those running for state high courts, which “are increasingly being asked to decide the highest profile legal fights of today,” Keith adds. For example, on June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion afforded by its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Since then, abortion legality has returned to the states, where lawsuits over legislation or constitutional language allowing or prohibiting abortions could end with decisions by state high courts.

The U.S. Supreme Court only accepts around 2% of the roughly 7,000 cases brought for its consideration yearly, meaning on many legal matters state courts have the final say. One philosophical area where judges often differ is whether foundational legal documents, such as constitutions, are or are not open to interpretation given current cultural contexts and case precedents.

News audiences are also interested in what candidates are or would be like on the bench — courteous or belligerent? — often referred to as their judicial temperament.

Finally, news audiences also need a basic understanding of the hierarchy of their local and state legal systems and how cases move through the courts.

In advance of the 2024 U.S. general elections, we’re offering eight tips to empower newsrooms to create judicial election guides, which, as of now, are few and far between.

To help develop this guide to creating your judicial election guide, we reached out to journalists at three news outlets that have done it before: Spotlight PA, LAist and The Nevada Independent.

• For last year’s election cycle, Spotlight PA created more than a dozen voting guides on a variety of topics, from how to vote by mail to state Supreme Court races to how voters can check their registration or change parties.
  
  “There’s no one way to run a court system in this country, and I think voters get confused about how these elections work, through no fault of their own, because they’re often the elections that get the absolute least attention,” says Katie Meyer, government editor at Spotlight PA, an independent nonprofit newsroom focusing on state government and policy, founded in 2019 by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.
  
  
• Brianna Lee is an engagement producer with LAist, part of Southern California Public Radio. Lee, with reporter Caitlin Hernández, put together that outlet’s 2022 guide to judicial candidates running for Los Angeles Superior Court. She notes that the more public information that is available on judicial candidates, the better equipped voters are to “put responsible people in positions of power.”
  
  “And the less informed you are, and the less information is out there, the more that the people in power get to be put into those seats of power by a shrinking number of people,” Lee adds.
  
  
• For its 2022 guide, The Nevada Independent, a nonprofit news outlet founded by veteran political journalist Jon Ralston, convened and sought insight from a panel of twelve experts from various legal disciplines, including attorneys who had appeared before many of the candidates running for judgeships in that state.
  
  “Our mission should be, as journalists, to keep the populace as fully informed as possible,” Ralston says. “This is one area where people are woefully uninformed, and it’s not their fault. But if you haven’t had experience in front of a judge, you won’t know much about judging.”

With insights from Meyer, Keith, Lee and Ralston, here’s how to get started creating your own judicial election guide in 2024 and beyond.

1. Get to know how your state and local court systems operate.

Before creating a voter guide, it’s important to thoroughly understand the hierarchy of the court system in the state or region you cover, as well as how judges end up on the ballot.

In many states, there are trial courts that hear cases about alleged crimes, specialized courts, such as family courts, which hear civil cases, appellate courts that hear appeals to criminal or civil verdicts, and a high court, often but not always called the supreme court, that has the final say on cases at the state level.

Court systems differ state to state. For example, in New York, judges of the Supreme Court are not the last but the first to hear certain felony cases, followed by intermediate appellate courts. The hierarchy of criminal and civil cases in New York ends at the Court of Appeals.

These resources from the Brennan Center are a great place to start understanding judicial systems:

Significant Figures in Judicial Selection | Judicial Selection: An Interactive Map

The Brennan Center has distilled high level trends of how judges gain office, across the country and at various court levels. In 39 states, voters choose judges in public elections or choose whether to retain previously appointed judges. These latter elections happen in 16 states and are called retention elections. A governor makes an initial judicial appointment, then, after a term, these judges run unopposed in a simple yes-or-no vote to keep their jobs.

In yet another example of why it is important to understand how judges gain office, consider the system in New Mexico, where “judges are initially appointed by the governor, must then compete in a partisan election during the next general election, and then are reselected in unopposed retention elections,” according to the Brennan Center.

State rules often, but not always, require that candidates at least be licensed to practice law in the state to become a judge.

Ballotpedia offers a rundown of qualification requirements by state here.

Finally, it is a good idea to interrogate how much of a choice voters really have in competitive elections. Do judges in your area often run unopposed? If so, how did that name end up on the ballot and why are there no other options?

“New York is a good example of this, the process to get on the ballot is more opaque,” says Keith of the Brennan Center. “Many voters will show up to vote for judgeships in New York and what they will see when they look at the ballot is that the decision has actually already been made for them. There is no alternative choice.”

2. Make a plan you can realistically execute, and remember that something is better than nothing.

The guides from Spotlight PA, LAist and The Nevada Independent are different and were produced in different ways, reflecting the editorial judgment, staffing abilities and audience needs of each organization.

One big thing they have in common: they got done.

“Honestly, if you have anything, that’s better than nothing,” Lee says.

Consider the scope of your project and the effort required. There’s more than one way to create a good guide, even with a small team.

Spotlight PA dedicated several reporters and editors to creating their multi-topic guides and interactive tool.

“You’ve got to put the manpower behind it,” Meyer says. “But if this is the kind of thing you care about, I can’t recommend it enough, because our readers really found it useful.”

For its 2022 guide to the Los Angeles Superior Court Judge race, LAist repurposed a 2018 on-air interview with Stuart Rice, a former president of the California Judges Association, who provided useful context on what the court does and how best to evaluate judicial candidates. Lee and Hernandez then compiled and listed information on each candidate, including their websites and candidate ratings from a local bar association.

The Nevada Independent sent a detailed questionnaire to each candidate, asking for their specific areas of legal expertise, whether there were legal areas they were less confident in presiding over, how the context surrounding a case could affect sentencing decisions, and other information that could affect how candidates would perform.

The panel of legal experts also provided editors with snippets of their personal perspectives on the judges. For example, one panelist described Judge Deborah Westbrook, who won a six-year term on the Nevada Court of Appeals, as “probably one of the smartest human beings I’ve ever interacted with.”

3. Enlist outside support if staffing is a challenge. Local law schools and bar associations can help.

Spotlight PA is specifically focused on government and policy, so it makes sense they would devote significant staff time to their guide.

“But I’ve also done it as a single reporter who doesn’t have that kind of support,” Meyer says. “There are resources. I really recommend your state bar association.”

The General Bar has links to state bar associations here.

This is essentially what LAist did for their 2022 guide, compiling the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s publicly available ratings — “well qualified,” “qualified” or “not qualified” — of attorneys running for judgeships. Those ratings are “based on a lot of interviews and personal recommendations and references that a whole panel of the bar association does every single election,” Lee says.

But reporters should be aware there may be elements of the ratings process that are not transparent. If possible, ask bar association officials for clarity on the step-by-step process behind their ratings. Still, Lee notes that such ratings are often one of the best gauges available for assessing candidates.

In addition to legal associations that can give a sense of a candidate’s qualifications and potential temperament on the bench, lean on local law schools for research help. This is what The Nevada Independent did for its 2022 guide, turning to students at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Setting up the arrangement was straightforward.

“We went to them and said, ‘We want to partner with you on this,’” Ralston says.

The law students researched the cases the candidates had handled either as judges or attorneys, producing a report on each candidate for the Nevada Independent editors. If, on the questionnaire, a candidate pointed to a case they were proud of having argued or presided over, the law students would research that case to assess whether the candidate was accurately describing it.

For The Nevada Independent, the biggest resource lift was not editorial but technical, in creating web templates and pages. The students benefit too, Ralston says.

“There’s been a couple of deans now that we’ve gone through, but both have been enthusiastic in saying, ‘This is a great exercise for the law students,’” he says.

4. Ground your reporting in real cases having to do with well-known people.

As you explore the ins and outs of how the judicial system works in your coverage area, take note of highly publicized cases involving well-known people. Grounding the legal process with names audiences are familiar with is a useful way to present the information. “It kind of tethers it to reality,” says Meyer.

Spotlight PA, in its interactive tool, used the example of a drug and weapons case against rapper Meek Mill, who was born and raised in Philadelphia. Mill was arrested in 2007 then sentenced to jail in the Philadelphia Court of Commons Pleas, according to Spotlight PA. Over the intervening decade, judges on the state Supreme Court, the highest court, and the Superior Court, one of the state’s appellate courts, granted Mill bail and eventually vacated the conviction.

“Mill’s high-profile case illustrates the circuitous path cases can take through the commonwealth’s justice system — and also, the ease with which convicted offenders can find themselves back in prison thanks to long parole terms,” writes Spotlight PA democracy editor Elizabeth Estrada.

5. Dig into the case history of judges running for office.

Another daunting part of creating a judicial voting guide: wading through and understanding years, potentially, of decisions across multiple candidates.

These decisions are likely to be most informative among higher court judges. Keith notes that lower courts often do not write lengthy opinions. Judges on higher courts may or may not offer such writings, which often comes down to the “legal culture” of the state, he says.

Look online for high court opinions, and even lower court decisions. Many states, including California, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York, Texas and Florida make appellate and high court opinions, and sometimes lower court decisions, available online.

Still, when these opinions do exist, they can provide valuable insight into a judge’s jurisprudence, or legal philosophy, which is something voters choosing high court judges especially want to know about.

Reading through past decisions is “a little easier than a lot of people think it’s going to be, even if you’re not a lawyer,” says Meyer, who adds that, in her experience, judges often write using plain language. “And if you do get lost, which I have so many times, call a lawyer. Have a lawyer kind of walk you through.”

Wondering if a candidate has faced judicial misconduct allegations in the past? States typically have independent commissions that investigate allegations of judicial misconduct. Decisions are often readily available online.

6. Talk to recently retired judges for insights on how the judicial system works, as well as the ideal temperament of potential judges.

Judges are unlikely to comment on pending cases, but sitting judges and recently retired judges can help journalists and audiences understand how courts function day-to-day while providing insight into the judicial temperaments that tend to do well within a system.

Ask questions like, “What personality characteristics are necessary for someone to do a good job at the job you yourself did for years?” But also know that some retired judges may be guarded against inviting public scrutiny to the courts where they spent their professional careers.

“You will find former judges who chafe at the [public] attention a bit,” Keith says. “We will hear judges who say, ‘You can’t assess the quality of a judge based on a few data points.’ There might be some truth to that. But it also might just be that judges are comfortable in the system that they came up in, and increased attention and accountability can make some of them nervous.”

The Nevada Independent’s panel of legal experts, which included several attorneys who had appeared before the candidates running for judgeships in 2022, brought insight into the judicial temperament of those candidates. Published comments from panelists about the candidates included things like, “very prepared, very smart,” “fair minded” and “the type of person that is going to pick things up quickly.”

7. Follow the money. There is more of it than ever in judicial races.

The groups and individuals funding candidates’ races can say a lot about the candidates themselves and can even influence decisions, Keith says. To learn more, Keith recommends the research of Michael Kang at Northwestern University and Joanna Shepherd at Emory University, collected in their 2023 book Free to Judge: The Power of Campaign Money in Judicial Elections.

Elections where the ideological balance of the court is at stake tend to attract the most money, according to the latest Brennan Center report on money in judicial elections, covering the 2021 to 2022 cycle. Total spending on judicial races topped $100 million, twice any other midterm cycle. In 2023, donors spent more than $50 million on the Wisconsin Supreme Court race alone, the report notes.

“The decision eliminating the federal right to an abortion crystalized the reality that as federal courts limit the protections provided by the U.S. Constitution, state courts will increasingly decide today’s highest-stakes legal fights,” Keith writes.

Use campaign finance watchdog FollowTheMoney to start understanding and reporting on the flow of money into individual campaigns. Janet Protasiewicz, for example, raised $16.7 million during her winning race for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2023, according to FollowTheMoney.

8. Remember: Your audience wants and needs information on judicial candidates.

Lee, Meyer and Ralston all say that the guides their outlets produced have been well received by their audiences. Voters want information about judicial candidates, they say, and audiences are grateful for any amount of information news organizations are able to publish.

Audience feedback can also inform future judicial election guides. Spotlight PA, for example, began creating guides on retention elections because they heard from readers asking for more about those elections.

“People generally will only tell you when they don’t like something when you’re in the business we’re in,” says Ralston, the Nevada Independent founder. “‘You made this mistake. You’re biased,’ all the rest of that. But I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of positive feedback we got from people saying, ‘I’m taking this guide into the voting booth with me. Thank you for doing this.’”

Additional resources

The Politics of Judicial Elections, 2021–2022
Douglas Keith. The Brennan Center for Justice, New York University, January 2024.

Why Judges Matter
Elizabeth Estrada. Spotlight PA, October 2023.

Free to Judge: The Power of Campaign Money in Judicial Elections
Michael Kang and Joanna Shepherd. Stanford University Press, August 2023.

Significant Figures in Judicial Selection
The Brennan Center for Justice. New York University, April 2023.

Judicial Selection: An Interactive Map
The Brennan Center for Justice. New York University, October 2022.

LA Superior Court Judges
Brianna Lee and Caitlin Hernández. LAist, October 2022.

The Indy 2022 Judicial Race Project
The Nevada Independent, 2022.

Judicial Temperament, Explained
Terry Maroney. Judicature, Summer 2021.

Originalism Versus Living Constitutionalism: The Conceptual Structure of the Great Debate
Lawrence Solum. Northwestern University Law Review, April 2019.

The People’s Courts: Pursuing Judicial Independence in America
Jed Shugerman. Harvard University Press, February 2012.

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In 1998, the FBI launched the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a namecheck database of people prohibited from buying or owning firearms.

Federally licensed gun dealers are required to run background checks through NICS on potential customers.

But the results of a review of state laws, published today in JAMA Health Forum, reveals a patchwork of requirements for court and other officials to follow, sometimes involving multiple state officials and agencies, when they report people at risk of harming themselves or others to NICS.

“This raises questions about the ability of NICS to be used to block firearm purchases or possession by individuals with court-identified high risk of perpetrating violence,” the authors conclude.

The state-by-state analysis of reporting laws first appeared as an October 2023 Research Letter by the same authors, published in JAMA Internal Medicine. In that paper the authors note that federal law does not compel states to report to NICS.

In 2021, 48,830 people died from gun injuries in the U.S., finds an April 2023 analysis by the Pew Research Center. About 43% were killed by someone else while 54% of those deaths were the result of suicide. The remaining 3% involved accidents, law enforcement or “had undermined circumstances,” according to the Pew report. Suicide has long been the leading cause of gun-related death in the U.S. 

So far in 2023, there have been 604 mass shootings, defined as a shooting event with at least four victims injured or killed, according to the Gun Violence Archive. There were 647 mass shootings in 2022 and 690 in 2021, according to the archive’s tally.

Firearm-related injuries are the leading cause of death for children under age 17, with the U.S. having the highest such rate by far of any large, wealthy nation, finds a July 2023 analysis from KFF, formerly The Kaiser Family Foundation.

The authors of the new papers, who specialize in medicine, law or both, find 40 states require reporting to NICS when a court orders an individual committed as an inpatient to a psychiatric care facility. Five states allow but do not require such reporting, while the final 5 states do not have reporting laws covering involuntary inpatient commitments.

It is not necessarily clear in those states that are silent on reporting whether a mental health professional, law enforcement officer or court official could still report an individual to NICS, explains Seattle University School of Law professor Deirdre Bowen, who led the state-by-state analysis.

The reason, Bowen says, is that state privacy laws may protect any kind of medical treatment from being revealed to a third party without the patient’s consent.

When a court determines someone cannot manage their basic needs, 13 states require reporting to NICS whether or not a guardian is appointed, while five allow the option.

Two states, California and Washington, require that individuals put on a short-term psychiatric hold, meaning less than 72 hours, also be reported if they are held for posing a physical risk to themselves or others.

“Given how layered and complicated it is, because there is no federal law that mandates, ‘You must report it,’ it really results in a lot of confusion among people on the ground who are supposed to be responsible for reporting,” says Bowen.

For example, research examining what California law says on the rights of psychiatric patients to own firearms has described that legislation as “complex,” and “conflicting.”

The authors of the new papers used the Westlaw database to compile their catalog of state mental health reporting laws. After a report is made to NICS, the FBI determines whether the individual ends up in the do-not-sell database, based on whether they are among the federal categories of people prohibited from receiving firearms. The authors did not seek to analyze real world reporting practices.

“Our team of researchers approached this from a non-partisan, non-advocacy perspective,” says author Emmy Betz, M.D., M.P.H., an emergency physician and director of the Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “We wanted to describe the current policy spectrum, and we encourage ongoing public discussion.”

State variance in NICS reporting

Rules for how NICS reporting should happen can vary widely by state, the authors find.

For instance:

• Some states require court officials to report directly to NICS, while others require intermediaries. A few have significant bureaucratic layers before a report reaches NICS.
• For involuntary, longer-term psychiatric commitments, several states, including Massachusetts, Mississippi, North Carolina and North Dakota, require that court officials report the commitment to NICS.
• In Idaho, a court reports to state police, who are then required to report to NICS.
• In New York, a mental health professional reports a long-term involuntary commitment to county mental health officials, who then report to the state Commissioner of Mental Health, who then reports to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Service, and an official from there reports the commitment to NICS, according to the analysis.

Many states require immediate reporting, or “without undue delay,” as Missouri statute puts it. Others, such as Florida, where reporting is allowed but voluntary, give up to 30 days to report. All laws examined for the paper were in effect as of the 2021 legislative session.

Three case studies to test the laws

For the Health Forum paper the authors created three hypothetical cases, each involving an individual with short-term or ongoing mental health issues, to test how reporting requirements would be handled under state laws:

• In the first case, a man, 35, with a history of psychosis and post-traumatic stress disorder, is brought to a local emergency department while suffering from paranoia and auditory hallucinations. He says he stopped taking his medications and that he is going to buy a firearm — and the hallucinations are telling him to kill government officials. A court involuntarily commits him for psychiatric treatment.

In this scenario, most states would require reporting to NICS. Arkansas, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Wyoming and Washington, D.C., do not have laws that require or allow reporting.

• In the second case, a woman, 75, has Alzheimer’s dementia. She is not taking good care of herself. She does not often bathe or get fresh groceries and has threatened neighbors with a shotgun. Her son, by court order, obtains guardianship over her.

In this scenario, 32 states and Washington, D.C., would not explicitly require or allow the woman to be reported to NICS. Thirteen states would require reporting. Five states — Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Nebraska, West Virginia — would allow but do not require reporting.

• In the third case, a man, 55, has told his wife that he will shoot himself. She calls the police, but he does not want to go to the hospital. The police take him to the local emergency department anyway, placing him under an involuntary short-term hold. He has struggled with depression and, recently, he and his wife had an argument. After a medical evaluation, doctors determine his risk of self-harm has lowered, and he agrees to an appointment with his therapist for the next day. He goes home with his wife, and the involuntary hold is lifted.

Two states, California and Washington, would require reporting to NICS. Along with Washington, D.C., no other state has laws that would explicitly allow or require reporting for this scenario.

While the cases are composites drawn from real-life experiences of the paper’s medical doctors, the third situation is particularly reflective of the everyday realities emergency department physicians often face, Betz says.

She notes that where she works, in Colorado, mental health holds are often used to bring someone to a hospital for a professional psychiatric assessment. The existence of a hold does not necessarily mean an assessment has been done yet, she says.

Advice for journalists covering gun violence and gun access

While gun violence has often been covered in the news media by reporters on the crime, legal or education beats, thinking of gun violence as a public health issue is appropriate, Betz says, because gun violence can mean physical and mental harm for individuals and families. 

As a physician, she says her role is to treat and meet people where they are at — whether they are gun owners or not.

She suggests journalists apply a similar framework to their reporting.

“We have to understand and talk about laws as part of these solutions,” Betz says. “My recommendation to journalists would be to do what they can to try to mend divisiveness and recognize that nobody wants these deaths happening. Nobody wants suicide. Nobody wants mass shootings. Nobody wants community violence. We may all disagree on how we get there, but I hope that this paper, that what’s coming out of it, can be sort of food for discussion. We are not trying to say what’s right or wrong — we want it to spark some of those conversations.”

Bowen recommends journalists remember that “NICS is only as good as what states wish to report and when they report it. Ultimately,” she says, “ this is an issue that is getting addressed at the state level. And that means there’s chaos that’s going to ensue because there are a myriad of procedures used in each state.”

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a hotline for individuals in crisis or for those looking to help someone else. To speak with a certified listener, dial 988.

For journalists covering topics related to suicide, see ReportingOnSuicide.org. Use this app to check if your story meets reporting guidelines that experts recommend.

This piece was updated on Nov. 21, 2023, to clarify that the analysis first appeared in JAMA Internal Medicine and to add quotes from Bowen.

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U.S. news organizations and the public often clash over the role the media should play in society, but many reporters, editors and news consumers view journalists as watchdogs — especially when it comes to holding elected officials accountable.

A recent paper published in The International Journal of Press/Politics is among the first to explore associations between local news coverage and criminal corruption charges brought against public officials.

The authors find prosecutions for public corruption are more likely in U.S. communities served by a nonprofit news outlet, a relatively new business model that often aims to fill the void left by shuttered traditional local newspapers.

Defining watchdog journalism

News outlets don’t have to do deep investigative reporting to be watchdogs, says Nikki Usher, lead author of the paper and an associate communications professor at the University of San Diego.

Watchdog journalism is “the kind of public interest journalism that keeps regular watch on public institutions, lawmakers and businesses,” Usher explains. “That kind of removes the narrow focus on investigative journalism, because you can have watchdog journalism that never really breaks into an investigative mode.”

University of Cardiff professor Bob Franklin, founding editor of several academic journals that analyze the news media, wrote in a 2005 journalism textbook that “the watchdog metaphor imbues the press with the role of being a forum for discussion, investigators of impropriety, an adversary to monopoly over power and knowledge and the defenders of truth, freedom and democracy.”

Journalism, as an institution, does not always act as a watchdog, and particular news outlets or reporters may not be interested in striving for such status.

Yet the watchdog role remains an ideal for many news organizations in the U.S., where voters cast ballots based on their understanding of candidate policies, proclivities and scandals.

Nonprofit news organizations are increasingly offering an alternative model that often allows for editorial autonomy while employing reporters driven by a watchdog mission who do award-winning work along the way. For example, nonprofit news site Mississippi Today last year uncovered a $77 million welfare scandal involving former Gov. Phil Bryant and Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre. Reporter Anna Wolfe won the Pulitzer Prize and the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Legacy newspaper staffing in the U.S. fell from 71,000 employees in 2008 to 31,000 in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. The internet disintegrated classified ad revenue over the past two decades, making the for-profit news model less viable for local and regional news outlets.

Nonprofit news sites, many of them digital-only, have stepped in to partially fill the void. National, regional or local nonprofit news outlets in the U.S. have grown in recent years, from fewer than 25 in 2009 to nearly 400 as of May 2023, according to an industry report by the Institute for Nonprofit News, a consortium of nonprofit news outlets. Digital-first INN member organizations employ 4,000 people nationally, with an average of five staffers — editorial and non-editorial — per outlet, according to the report.

Watchdog: Analysis of nonprofit news and corruption prosecutions

Usher and coauthor Sanghoon Kim-Leffingwell, a senior lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, started their analysis by looking at corruption-related prosecutions, such as bribery or obstruction of justice, against federal, local or state officials or other government workers across all 94 federal court districts in the U.S. from 2003 to 2019.

They also look at newspaper employment numbers and circulation by county, along with the presence of nonprofit news outlets that are INN members, plus figures on philanthropic donations to those nonprofit outlets, drawn from data compiled by Media Impact Funders, a membership organization for foundations and individuals that fund news organizations.

“What’s kind of the unique contribution of this paper, that I think really we have not seen before, is it asks, ‘How are these nonprofit news outlets supplementing public life’?” explains Usher. “And we find a really strong connection that they’re able to maintain accountability in these communities. And, actually, the better funded you are the more of a difference you’re able to make.”

The authors use newspaper employment data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics as a measure of the supply of news in a given county, while the circulation data is meant to get at demand for news.

The presence of an INN member organization “is a broader proxy for the commitment to alternative, philanthropic funding for journalism in an area,” Usher and Kim-Leffingwell write in their paper, “How Loud Does the Watchdog Bark? A Reconsideration of Losing Local Journalism, News Nonprofits, and Political Corruption.”

Key findings

The authors did not find a statistically significant relationship between overall newspaper employment in a judicial district and public corruption prosecutions. But they did learn prosecutions were more likely in judicial districts where there was relatively high demand for news, as measured by newspaper circulation.

Prosecutions for corruption also rise after a nonprofit news outlet is established within a judicial district, and prosecutions are more likely in districts where those outlets enjoy greater philanthropic funding.

“It seems reliable, like a really high-quality finding, that you see more prosecution of public officials — that’s really interesting to me,” says Meghan Rubado, an associate professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University who researches how news coverage affects civic institutions but was not involved with the recent paper.

“I would love to come up with a way to explore this in future research, whether public officials view these independent, nonprofit-funded newsrooms as anything to take seriously,” adds Rubado, who worked as a reporter at the Syracuse Post-Standard in New York from 2004 to 2010. “Maybe local officials or public officials more generally are less likely to change their behavior when the newsroom watching them is an independent nonprofit than when it’s a traditional newspaper.”

Usher and Kim-Leffingwell write that their findings offer partial evidence that local news outlets succeed in their role as public watchdogs. But watchdog journalists, they write, can only illuminate corruption. What happens next is outside the scope of the watchdog journalist’s role.

“Journalism cannot act on behalf of the public to sanction bad actors; journalists can only expose wrongdoing and hope that the public, in turn, acts accordingly — either voting someone out of office or hoping that other public stakeholders exact criminal or civil sanctions,” they write.  

Prior research on journalism and civic engagement

The recent paper builds on past research exploring the relationship between news and civics, a field of study that has grown since the widespread decline of for-profit local news.

In “Paper Cuts: How Reporting Resources Affect Political News Coverage,” published in October 2020 in the American Journal of Political Science, Rice University assistant professor of political science Erik Peterson looks at the relationship between newsroom staff cuts and local political coverage.

Across Peterson’s sample of 70 U.S. newspapers covering national, state and local politics from 1994 to 2014, every loss of 12 reporters was associated with 500 fewer political news stories each year.

“Although prior research focuses on how media outlets alter their coverage in anticipation of economic challenges, this account more fully details the consequences when these efforts fall short,” Peterson writes.

Another paper exploring the journalism-civics nexus is “Political Consequences of the Endangered Local Watchdog: Newspaper Decline and Mayoral Elections in the United States,” published in April 2019 in Urban Affairs Review. In it, Rubado and Jay Jennings, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, examine whether the presence of well-staffed local news organizations affects mayoral races.

For many cities and towns, the outcomes of mayoral elections can shape local government policies and programs for years. The dataset Rubado and Jennings developed includes 11 newspapers serving 46 cities in California, from Oroville in the north down to Solvang, roughly two and a half hours west of Los Angeles. They focus on 246 mayoral elections held from 1994 to 2016 — a period when local newsrooms nationally suffered major staffing cuts.

They find less political competition in cities with newspapers that severely cut staff — when newsrooms shrink, fewer candidates run for mayor. They also find smaller margins of victory for mayoral winners in areas with relatively more reporters.

“One way that quality candidates emerge is through vigorous and rigorous coverage of local government,” says Rubado. “So, when local government is perceived to not be doing a good job, you get quality challengers trying to unseat an ineffective public official.”

Usher, lead author of the recent paper on nonprofit journalism, maintains that even if a nonprofit news outlet has a fraction of the reach that a traditional newspaper used to have, it still provides a crucial civic function and helps drive the local news agenda.

“An open question that’s going to depend on each nonprofit is how well integrated they are into a local community’s existing media infrastructure,” Usher says. “Is one of these nonprofits regularly pumping coverage into local televisions, local newspapers? That’s what gives reach to the ordinary public.”

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A few years ago, the American Economic Review published research showing when Fox News and other cable networks have a low channel number — say, channel 25 instead of channel 65 — people watch more.

New research builds on those findings, revealing important consequences for criminal defendants in counties where Fox News is easy to find in the cable guide.

Specifically, counties with high exposure to Fox News tend to elect judges who impose harsh criminal sentences, finds the research, which analyzes 7 million prison sentencing decisions from 2005 to 2017.

The paper, “Conservative News Media and Criminal Justice: Evidence from Exposure to Fox News Channel,” is the latest in a small but growing literature on the relationship between media viewership and criminal court outcomes.

“This Fox News effect, it’s not just changing discourse, it’s not just changing voting, it actually has some local policy impacts,” says Elliot Ash, one of the paper’s authors and an assistant professor of law, economics and data science ETH Zurich, a public research university in Switzerland. “Of course, it’s a very high stakes and expensive outcome. Criminal sentencing is a really costly decision and outcome so it’s important to see if media can influence that.”

Ash and co-author Michael Poyker, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Nottingham, link more Fox News viewership with longer sentences in particular for defendants convicted of crimes involving illegal drugs.

Ash and Poyker also identify harsher sentences for Black defendants, compared with white or Hispanic defendants, in counties where Fox News is especially popular.

With Black people “disproportionately arrested for non-violent drug-related offenses, the effect could be driven by racial bias in media messaging,” Ash and Poyker write. “Alternatively, it could be that ‘tough-on-drugs’ rather than ‘tough-on-crime’ rhetoric matters in this setting.”

Harsher sentences stemming from Fox News viewership holds only for elected judges, not appointed ones, find Ash and Poyker.

This effect plays out in two ways.

First, “tough-on-crime” judges running for the first time may have the upper hand over opponents who favor more moderate sentencing.

Second, judges already in office may, over time, begin to hand down harsher sentences in response to local voters who favor “tough-on-crime” judges because Fox News programs concentrating on that message are easy to find in their cable guides.

This finding mirrors other recent research that has found judges change their sentencing behavior based on political and other outside influences.

Appointed judges, by contrast, are tenured and less susceptible to public perceptions driven by Fox News viewership, Ash and Poyker write.

“Rather than shifting the policy preferences of judges directly, Fox News affects judge decisions by shifting voter attitudes, which then influence judges through the electoral process,” they write.

The paper is conditionally accepted for publication in a forthcoming issue of The Economic Journal. The content of the paper is unlikely to change before it is published in the coming months and the journal will first have to replicate the findings, Ash says.

Fox News viewership and policy preferences

Ash and Poyker also analyze Gallup survey data from 2010 to 2016 and find respondents think drug crime is an important policy issue in counties where Fox News is popular because it has a low channel number and is easy to find in the cable guide.

With more Fox News viewership linked to harsher sentences for people convicted of drug crimes, “we can draw a causal chain from Fox News exposure to voter attitudes to the behaviors of elected judges,” they write.

Ash and Poyker rule out several other potential explanations for harsher crime sentencing. For example, they do not find that prosecutors bring more serious charges because of local Fox News viewership and neither does viewership affect local crime rates.

“Future work could build on this evidence to explore further how media influences inter-group attitudes,” the authors conclude. “Using more localized and fine-grained data on racial attitudes over time would be a promising first step.”

Fox News channel position: A natural experiment

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