Representation of Race-consciousness in Obama Era: News Coverage of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown Case

• In Event: 2166 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 17: #BlackLivesMatter

Abstract

The murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 as the first high-profile and highly symbolic race-related legal case during the Obama presidency has seized the media’s attention nationwide. Equally sensational is the Michael Brown case on August 9, 2014 which has not only sparked violent racial tensions within the region, known as the Ferguson riot, and further stimulated critical public discussions on structural racism within the current U.S. legal system. Many existing scholarships have sufficiently proved the existence of a prevailing attitudinal shift of public sentiment on the Obama Era racial relations via both the theoretical and case study approaches, but few have examined the media coverage of the race-related murder cases and the possible inferences from a comparative perspective in this historical context.
This paper features and compares the ways in which three mainstream cable news networks CNN, NBC and CBS frame the two race-related cases and project the individual or collective images of the major interest parties involved in the two events. Using the analytical framework of news framing and on the theoretical basis of colorblind racism, this paper samples news materials and provides textual interpretations of these news samples to achieve such a research objective. This comparative qualitative study has yielded the finding that the basic framing strategies of the news coverage of the two cases have witnessed an identifiable change, namely from a predominantly personalized and dramatized colorblind frame to becoming more thematically meaningful and racially-aware.

Author

• Keqing Zhang, University of Hawaii at Manoa