Policing and Racial (In)Justice in the Media: Newspaper Portrayals of the “Black Lives Matter” Movement

Abstract

The “Black Lives Matter” movement, centered on fighting racial injustice and inequality (particularly in the criminal justice system), has garnered a great deal of media attention in recent years. Given the relatively recent emergence of the movement, there exists very little scholarly research on media portrayals of the movement. In this article, I report findings from a qualitative examination of major newspaper portrayals of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement between April and August 2016, before the particularly divisive 2016 presidential election. Inductive textual analyses of 131 newspaper articles indicate that, although the movement’s goals were represented positively and from the perspective of members of the movement, the newspapers politicized and sensationalized the movement, and they focused far more on supposed negative consequences of the movement. I discuss these findings by drawing on the “protest paradigm” and the “public nuisance paradigm” in media coverage of social protest movements, arguing that the latter is particularly useful for interpreting portrayals of Black Lives Matter in the prevailing US political climate.

Black Protests in the US, 1994-2010

“…Media coverage varies not only between sources with different political orientations, but also over time and between movements. For example, several studies found differences between the coverage of BLM protests in 2014-2016 and protests in earlier eras (Hopkins 2018, Steijns 2017, Umamaheswar 2020. We attend to the mutual relations between media and movements that lead to media attention cycles (Seguin 2016): activists intentionally seek to draw news coverage and success in gaining news coverage can lead to more protest.…”

Peace Teams in the Protest-Repression Nexus: A Sociomaterial Perspective of De-escalatory Tactics

“…Participant ages ranged from the "25 to 34 year-old" bracket all the way to "above 65 years old". We asked questions pertaining to personal and organizational experiences managing and mitigating violent repression during demonstrations, as well as the use of various technologies and tools in supporting tactics 1 .…”

“…Although largely nonviolent, violent challengers like right-wing counter protesters and police reprisals invited violence by demonstrators that was latched onto by the media. This provided a springboard for opponents of the movement to cast the demonstrators as rioters and looters in an attempt to sway public opinion against them [1].…”

Constructing Theory-Informed Relational and Verifiable Protest Event Data

“…The content of the texts themselves is also of interest. There is a great deal of research on how news articles describe protests (e.g., Campbell et al 2004, Evans 2011, Martin, Rafail and McCarthy 2017, Umamaheswar 2020, Weiner 2011. Text authors do not just list random bits of information about events but rather construct narratives.…”