Desmond, Papachristos, and Kirk (2016) state that “the media plays a crucial role in this process, not only by raising awareness of episodes of police violence, but also . . . allowing certain acts of police force to be seen as unreasonable and disturbing. This can produce widespread effects on citizen crime reporting when large numbers of people learn of an episode around the same time” (p. 872). Here, the authors argue that in the relationship between police violence and crime reporting, the media acts as a ______.
a. mediator
b. moderator
c. statistical control
d. contextual factor
e. none of these
