Subject - Framing Black Lives Matter

I

Visual Frames Emphasized Violent Aspects of the Protests

II

Coverage Focused on Negative Actions of Protestors

III

Police Violence Emphasized After Nine Days of Protesting

Coverage Focused on Negative Actions of Protestors

The protest paradigm contends that when the media covers protests, it tends to emphasize the actions and conduct of the protestors, particularly when they engage in violent activities.^7.1 Images which featured protestors as the primary subject in coverage depicted predominately peaceful actions. However, as established, the rate at which the nightly broadcast news programs displayed violent visual frames did not coincide with the makeup of the demonstrations nationwide.

Peaceful and Violent Images of Protestors

(n=2624)

ACLED Peaceful and Violent Protest Events

(n=4699)

Less than 8% of protests were recorded by the ACLED as being violent across the entire sample period, but frames featuring protestor-initiated violence comprised 27% of the entire sample. Through this emphasis on protestor violence, the nightly news coverage aligns with previous research on framing of Black Lives Matter protests that has found coverage to focus on protestors’ negative actions.^{7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5}

This excessive focus on the behavior of the protestors has been argued to take away attention from the underlying political goals and demands of the protests, ultimately undermining the legitimacy of the protestors.

(Chan & Lee 1984; McLeod & Hertog, 1999)

Coverage Provided Limited Attention to Police Actions

As the primary subject, police/military members were shown in about 18% of visual frames. Images that featured both protestors and police/military members accounted for 8.51% of visual frames.

Protest Images by Primary Subject

(n=3594)

These results both support and challenge findings by Cowart and colleagues (2016) who found that protestors and police were depicted with nearly equal frequency but were rarely featured in images together. The researchers argued that the prominence of images of police personnel supports a “law and order” theme in reporting,^7.6 which coincides with protest paradigm research arguing that demonstrations are often framed as “protestors versus police” (e.g. Arpan et al., 2006; Riddle et al., 2020).

The difference in findings between the current study and Cowart et al.’s (2016) research could be attributed to differences in medium (still images vs. video), differences in platform (social media vs. televisions), or differences in approaches to the categorization of images.

One of the challenges with interpreting results from visual framing studies is that images are often polysemic. A high proportion of images of police could be reflective of coverage which is forecasting violence and justifying the need for control at the demonstrations, or the images could be scrutinizing the presence of militarized police at the demonstrations.

It stands to reason that if broadcast journalists were more closely monitoring the actions of police/military members (as they did with protestors) the coverage would feature a higher proportion of images featuring police/military members.

Protestors: Violence Against Property

Police: Violence Against People

Examining specifically the violent visual frames in coverage, protestors were the most frequently depicted primary subject, accounting for 69.10% of those images which featured violence. Conversely, police and military members were featured as the primary subject in 25.93% of violent visual frames.

Action of Violent Frames with Protestors as Primary Subject

(n=709)

Action of Violent Frames with Police/Military as Primary Subject

(n=266)

Notable here is that protestors primarily engaged in violence against property (accounting for about 80% of violent visual frames featuring protestors), while police/military primarily engaged in violence against people (accounting for about 87% of violent visual frames featuring police/military). Journalists have argued that there is an important distinction to be made between property destruction and violence which physically harms others^{7.7 7.8} and that labeling property destruction as violent serves to legitimize the use of force against protestors.^7.9

Evaluations of police response following the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests found that across the nation, police forces were heavily militarized and poorly trained.^7.10

Leading to the injury of often peaceful protestors who faced tear gas, pepper spray, and projectiles.^7.11

Evaluations of police response following the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests found that across the nation, police forces were heavily militarized and poorly trained.^7.10

Leading to the injury of often peaceful protestors who faced tear gas, pepper spray, and projectiles.^7.11

Historically, police have been shown to respond to anti-police protests with a greater violence against protestors than other types of protests.^7.12 Given this context, it would be expected that coverage which does not follow the tenants of the protest paradigm would have placed a greater emphasis on police/military violence at the protests following the murder of George Floyd. The focus on protestor violence over police/military violence echoes findings from Reid and Craig (2021) that coverage minimized instances of police violence at these 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

The comparatively low sum of images of police violence supports the notion that coverage failed to adequately report on one of the central political goals of the Black Lives Matter movement: a critique on excessive use of force by police.

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