Media and Social Movements: The Case of Black Lives Matter

• In Event: Methods for Race, Ethnicity and Politics

Abstract

To what extent does the national media distort activists’ demands and grievances? Distortion refers to the mismatch between the movement’s framing of their cause and media coverage of the movement’s framing (Ryan et al., 2005). While existing work tends to separately study activists’ demands and grievances as expressed on social media and their media coverage, this paper studies the two simultaneously. We investigate distortion on three specific cases that relate to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement: the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Marquez Arbery, and the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. We collected one original dataset of abstracts of New York Times (NYT) articles that appeared one month before and after these abovementioned events using NYT’s API, and another original dataset of Reddit entries collected around the same dates using Reddit’s API. We run topic modeling to see whether there is a (mis)match between the topics that the NYT touches upon and activists’ grievances and demands expressed on Twitter. Preliminary findings suggest that the NYT covers the broad themes that characterize the BLM activists’ grievances (e.g., racial injustice, or police brutality), but there is a mismatch. While extensively covering the BLM protests in the aftermath of the deaths of Floyd and Arbery, the NYT mentions looting and vandalism as frequently as protests. Regarding the Rittenhouse trial, the NYT mentions self-defense as frequently as the deaths of civilians. Opinion pieces revolve more around racism, and civil rights than news articles. In contrast, most activists perceive protests as rightful reactions to raise awareness about civil rights and police brutality and the unrest in Kenosha as “murders.” They complain about looting and vandalism, self-defense, and open-carry laws eclipse crimes against civilians. Our findings corroborate the distortion effect and parallel previous arguments that the utilization of violent tactics during protests mostly accounts for the distortion of movement messages.

Authors

• Basak Taraktas, Bogazici University

• Haluk Baran Bingol

• Susan Uskudarli, Bogazici University

• Utku Arık