theconversation | A teenager held her phone steady enough
to capture the final moments of George Perry Floyd’s life as he
apparently suffocated under the weight of a Minneapolis police officer’s
knee on his neck. The video went viral.
What happened next has played out time and again in American cities after high-profile cases of alleged police brutality.
Vigils and protests were organized in Minneapolis and around the United States to demand police accountability. But while investigators and officials called for patience, unrest boiled over. News reports soon carried images of property destruction and police in riot gear.
The general public’s opinions about protests and the social movements
behind them are formed in large part by what they read or see in the
media. This gives journalists a lot of power when it comes to driving
the narrative of a demonstration.
They can emphasize the disruption protests cause or echo the dog whistles of politicians that label protesters as “thugs.”
But they can also remind the public that at the heart of the protests is
the unjust killing of another black person. This would take the
emphasis away from the destruction of the protests and toward the issues
of police impunity and the effects of racism in its many forms.
The role journalists play can be indispensable if movements are to
gain legitimacy and make progress. And that puts a lot of pressure on
journalists to get things right.
My research has found that some protest movements have more trouble than others getting legitimacy. My co-author Summer Harlow and I have studied
how local and metropolitan newspapers cover protests. We found that
narratives about the Women’s March and anti-Trump protests gave voice to
protesters and significantly explored their grievances. On the other
end of the spectrum, protests about anti-black racism and indigenous
people’s rights received the least legitimizing coverage, with them more
often seen as threatening and violent.
