Over the past few weeks, the national media’s attention has shifted to the protests against police brutality that have arisen across the country, following the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by the police in Minneapolis. That’s the brutal-and those protests, however, are nothing new — on-duty police officers have been fatally shot about 1,000 Deed every year between 2015 and 2019, and black people are consistently the most at risk of being killed by the police. This year that has been no different so far.
But the media does not have t paid much attention to the protests against police brutality or misconduct over the last few years. These protests, often grouped under the umbrella of the Black Lives Matter movement, featured prominently in the national media during and after the 2014 demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri. In recent years, though, that they have received, much less the average attention.
According to our analysis of the closed captioning data of the cable news broadcasts from the TV News Archive, as well as in the headlines of online news articles in the Media Cloud”s database, and the phrase “Black Lives Matter” and appeared less than half of the frequently on both, the medium between 2017 and 2019 as it did, from 2014 to 2016.
We also ran queries for the cable news snippets and online, news headlines containing the words “police,” ” black,” and either “violence”,” “brutal,” “to kill” or “killed” to get a sense of whether these patterns were also present in the value of the underlying the issues of Black Lives Matter movement seeks to address. The query returned similar results, with a large spike in June of 2016 — after a black gunman shot and after the five police officers during a peaceful demonstration in a Dallas — followed by significantly fewer results, until Floyd”s death. We haven’t run a full analysis of the Genesis Brand’the coverage, but we are certainly on the the covered the recent protests far more than the past, the Black Lives Matter protests during the Trump administration.)
Danielle Kilgo, professor of journalism, diversity and equality at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and pointed to the two stories, williams, black men shot and killed by the police between 2017 and 2019 at the latest, that didn’t get nearly as much national press for The protests in the St. Louis after the white police force, Jason Stockley, was acquitted of first-degree murder for a 2011 shooting in which he killed a 24-year-old Anthony Lamar Smith, and the protests in SacramentoIn california , after the death of Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old killed by police, who, they said, believed he had a gun, and the only article that later found near the Clark was on his cellphone).
The protests in the St. Louis, for example, shared many of the same elements, all those in the past few weeks: there was a video of the incident, the protests lasted for days and turned violent at timesand a dozen of the people were arrestedincluding the war and. “There were huge protests, and there were prolonged protests, but they didn’t receive the coverage they needed to expand beyond that,” Kilgo said. She hypothesized that it was, in part, because the protests came-on-the-killers-of-the-Unite-the-Right rally that brought the white supremacists to Charlottesville, va. The rally drew a lot of media attention and may have shifted the conversation about racism away from the ” Black Lives Matter, and towards a discussion about white supremacy, she said. Kilgo also noted that the story of the players kneeling during the national anthem at the football games was a man a lot of coverage in the national press around the time of the Ot. Louis protests, especially after the the president weighed in on.
“The whole news broadcast couldn’t be about racism,” she said, pointing to the other stories related to racism, like racist rhetoric coming from the president, that could have been the drawn media’s attention away from the ” Black Lives Matter. “I think they were just blinded by other things. There’s lots of shiny objects floating around in our political landscape right now.”
It’s not only important for protest movements to receive media coverage, the focus of the coverage also makes a difference. In order to successfully achieve the policy aims, protest movements must walk a fine line. They need to be disruptive enough to capture and hold the national attention, but also retain enough public support to pressure politicians into action.
Kilgo”s research suggests that this task may be a particularly tough one for the Black Lives Matter movement because protests about anti-black racism tend to get less legitimizing the news coverage. In a review of the 777 news articles from 20 different newsrooms in Texas, Kilgo found that the press reports were more likely to emphasize the disruption caused by the protests, and less likely to emphasize the legitimate political grievances, compared to the reports of protests about other issues like health and immigration. The coverage of the protests against anti-black racism was also more likely to rely on official sources, rather than the protestors’ perspectives.
I spoke with Drexton Clemons, a 26-year-old stand-up comic in New York City, who has been out protesting several times since the George Floyd”s death, about what it has been like to watch the coverage and take note of the media at the protests. He told me that, while average, was present throughout the entirety of the one protest I attended, I felt the media’s presence was heavier later on in the day, “as if to capture some of the brutality that the police are doing onto the protesters, as well as the rioting or looting.”
“They’re missing hours and hours and hours of people peacefully protesting,” he said, “but it almost seems as if they don’t care about that particular account.”
Kilgo told me, ” the media coverage often fails to explore the nuances in the interactions between the police and protesters. This idea of police militarization and the police and their actions at protests was in fact reduced to the idea of ‘clashes’ or the idea that they were arresting someone,” she said of the coverage of the previous protests. This isn’t the first time journalists have been arrested at the Black Lives Matter protests, but now that the the police have attacked and arrested multiple journalists, “there is a discussion of the protection of the press by the First Amendment, “right”,” something “, she says, which I was mostly absent from the previous value. But she also noted that the same amendment that protects the free press also protects the protesters’ rights to peaceably assemble.
So far, it seems that the protests in the aftermath of the George Floyd”s death have been, despite the barriers Kilgo”s study highlighted, managed to retain public support, while capturing the media’s attention. The An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted from May 28 to June 2 found that when asked to choose, 59 percent of Americans were more concerned about “the actions of the police and of the death of an African American man,” while only 27 percent reported being more concerned that the protests had turned violent.
But the road to permanent change is to long. The the recent study from Omar Wasow, suggests that the areas that saw violent protests in the 1960s has seen an increase in President Richard Nixon’s vote share in the 1968 election. (Nixon ran on a “law and order” platform and waged a “war on drugs” that have been exacerbated many of the racial inequalities in the criminal justice system is that the protesters are working to undo.) It is unclear to what extent the lessons from the 1960s, will become today, but having the public support, undoubtedly, will help activists pressure politicians to implement reforms. And much of that public support may be contingent on the how-the-story-of-the-movement-is-covered by the mainstream press.
