From confrontations to civil liberties: Newspaper photo framing of police brutality and riots in Los Angeles 1992 and Ferguson, Missouri 2014

Abstract

This study compares the news media’s visual framing of the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 and the Ferguson, Missouri, riots of 2014. A visual content analysis of 387 news images published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Atlanta Journal-Constitution was conducted. Results show that newspapers’ visual portrayals of civil unrest have shifted focus from the confrontation between protesters and the police to an emphasis on the depiction of morality, human interest and civil emotions.

Police Brutality and Racial Justice Narratives Through Multi-Narrative Framing: Reporting and Commenting on the George Floyd Murder on YouTube

“…Classically, this has been the domain of the news media, described by Skolnick and Mccoy as a “powerful force for police accountability” (p. 522). A powerful institution in its own right (Skolnick & Mccoy, 1984), the media has a tradition of driving state accountability in the United States (Benson et al, 2017; Fridkin et al, 2017; Jacobs & Schillemans, 2016; Maia, 2009; Márquez-Ramírez et al, 2020; Wan et al, 2018).…”

“…Visual reporting has formed a critical aspect of civil rights and social justice throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries (Bowman, 2017; Evans, 2021; Kilgo & Mourão, 2021; Lee, 2017; Wan et al, 2018). Television broadcasts and photographs of events like the police beating of Rodney King, police violence against civil rights demonstrators, and the hostile response to school desegregation weaved a visual narrative that challenged the United States claim to a superior society (Bowman, 2017).…”

“…On YouTube, broad participation in news presentations afforded by commenting follows tonal flows from the video itself (Alshamrani et al, 2020; Edgerly et al, 2013) and demographic tendencies (Stocking et al, 2020; Stroud et al, 2016), with implications for the effect on the public engagement of news reporting. However, scholarly interest in news media portrayals (Fridkin et al, 2017; Wan et al, 2018) and social media content analyses (Campbell & Valera, 2020; Carney, 2016; Clark et al, 2017; Harlow, 2019) of police violence remain largely separate.…”