“What’s going on” in Ferguson? Online news frames of protest at the police killing of Michael Brown

Abstract

Public reactions to protests are often divided, with some viewing the protest as a legitimate response to injustice and others perceiving the protest as illegitimate. We examine how online news sources oriented to different audiences frame protest, potentially encouraging these divergent reactions. We focus on online news coverage following the 2014 police shooting of a Black teenager, Michael Brown. Preregistered analyses of headlines and images and their captions showed that sources oriented toward African Americans were more likely to include content conveying racial injustice and legitimacy of the subsequent protests than sources oriented toward a general audience. In contrast, general audience sources emphasized conflict between protesters and police, making fewer references to the protesters’ cause. Whereas much work on media segregation addresses the propensity of audiences to consume different sources, our work suggests that news sources may also contribute to information fragmentation by differentially framing the same events.

A Systems View of Emotion in Socio-political Context

“…Given their study of individual group member’s reactions over time to multiple stimuli of different types, Reinka and Leach ( 2018 ) analyzed their data with mixed-effects models that could distinguish the effects of stimuli, stimuli type, individual, and individual’s group in ways that helped to identify the system likely in play for each effect. Additionally, at a macro-level, Riddle et al ( 2020 ) examined some of these same images in conjunction with headlines in news coverage of a police killing of an unarmed Black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. The differential use of images and words in Black-oriented vs. mainstream news suggested that the racialization of these information systems parallels that of the systems involved in the visual cognition and affect studied in Reinka and Leach ( 2018 ).…”

Rethinking the group: Group processes in the digital age

“…Several papers also prefigure debates around the so-called "cancel culture" or the pulling down of statues by exploring topics like the changing of Australia Day (Bliuc et al, 2020), or the support for hacking as a kind of "social banditry" (Heering et al, 2020). We also include a look back to protests at the previous killing of a young Black man (Michael Brown in Ferguson) and see how they were shaped by online news media outlets to address different audiences (Riddle et al, 2020).…”

“…In a similar fashion, Bliuc et al (2020) explore how naturally occurring interactions on YouTube videos can be categorised and analysed to provide multiple difference indices of polarisation and to elucidate the pathways to polarisation. Riddle et al (2020) show how online news can be analysed on a large scale to help understand how and why news outlets frame their reporting of events tailored to their target audiences, which contributes to information fragmentation along group lines and its societal effects.…”

“…To examine structural factors that influence how and why people mobilise and respond to racism and injustice online, Riddle et al (2020) analysed the differential framing of online news stories about the murder of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, by a White police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. News outlets targeting Black audiences framed the protest as a legitimate response to racial injustice, whereas news outlets targeting White audiences framed the protest in relation to the protesters' relationship with the police.…”

Visualizing Injustice or Reifying Racism? Images in the Digital Media Coverage of the Killing of Michael Brown

“…As the protests grew into a movement, mainstream outlets picked up the story, moving from "episodic" event reporting toward "thematic" coverage of the reasons underlying the protests, including systemic injustices highlighted by activists (Lee, Weitzer, and Martínez 2018;Mourão, Kilgo, and Sylvie 2021). Yet largely missing in analyses of coverage of BLM protests in the coverage is a focus on the images used to illustrate articles (though see Cowart, Saunders, and Blackstone 2016;Riddle et al 2020).…”