In August 2014 , journalists from around the world converged on Ferguson, Missouri, to cover the civil unrest that erupted after a white police officer killed unarmed African American teen Michael Brown, Jr. His death drew national and international reporters to the St. Louis suburb of 21,000 residents. The protests would span months. The Black Lives Matter movement, which started more than a year earlier, would rise to prominence in news coverage.
The Traditional news media would express surprise and begin to question its worn narratives of post-racialism. The story of Ferguson would play out in an unprecedented journalism environment, one in which technology enabled new ways of reporting, new modes of production and distribution, increased access to a global audience, and new paradigms of journalism built on different values. Not only did the audience participate in telling the story on social media, it provided critical feedback about the journalists’ coverage.
Ferguson was undoubtedly a watershed moment in news coverage of racial issues. But whether the story of Ferguson would become another event that disappeared when the protesters dispersed or if it would ignite a conversation about racial violence would depend, in part, on how the news media portrayed it. Columbia University Professor Fredrick Harris’s Washington Post column asked whether Ferguson would be a “moment or a movement.” He said that was dependent on whether it was seen as an individual event or an example of larger problems. If coverage focused on the case rather than examining policing policies, it would be only another moment. But the story of Ferguson did not begin in the summer of 2014. It began six years earlier. It began with the Democratic nomination of Barack Obama as a candidate who would become the nation’s first African American president.
This chapter takes a deep dive into the news coverage of the post-racial question sparked by Obama’s presidential nomination, the birth and growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the events in Ferguson from the day of the shooting through the release of the Justice Department’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. Based on narrative analysis of more than 1600 news articles, it looks at three facets of coverage across three moments of inflection and three journalism paradigms. The analysis began with Obama’s February 11, 2007, announcement that he would seek the presidency.1 It concluded on April 5, 2015, one month after the Department of Justice released a report that found the Ferguson Police Department had engaged in racist acts toward African Americans. The new paradigms, Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0, leveraged audience voices and insights in ways at odds with Traditional journalism norms of objectivity and reliance on elite sourcing. Interactive Race Beat journalism sought to widen, deepen, and contextualize the news. Journalism 3.0 sought to cover the topics most popular among the audience rather than setting the agenda and to highlight the voices of the oppressed. The analysis illuminates the differences among paradigms and shows how Traditional journalism is transforming. Articles were selected for analysis using a Lexis-Nexis database for Traditional publications, NPR.com’s search function for Code Switch, and Ahrefs database for Journalism 3.0. All articles in selected publications used the keywords “post-racial”; then “#BlackLivesMatter” or “Black Lives Matter” and “race or racial”; then “Ferguson and Michael Brown and black or African and race or racial.” These terms highlighted articles that specifically mentioned race or racial issues.
Normative Criteria in Democratic Theory
Theory (paradigm) | Who | What and how | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
Representative Lib. (Traditional) | Elite dominance/expertise | Detachment | Closure |
Discursive (Interactive Race Beat) | Popular inclusion | Deliberativeness/dialogue | Closure contingent on consensus |
Constructionist (Journalism 3.0) | Privilege the periphery/oppressed | Empowerment | Avoid premature closure |
I looked to see whether there were differences among paradigms and within each paradigm over time. In sourcing, I looked for whether the sources were detached experts or involved participants or a mix of both, and whether the sources were elites/leaders/elected officials, people living the issue, or a mix of both. I asked whether Traditional journalists’ coverage leaned heavily on detached, elite sources, whether the Interactive Race Beat paradigm coverage used a more populist approach to sourcing, and whether Journalism 3.0 coverage privileged the voices of those directly involved, particularly those portrayed as oppressed. This was particularly important because Critical Race Theory shows how the voices of those who have experienced oppression have the power to disrupt stereotyping.4
Detail of data set analyzed
News outlet | N | % |
|---|---|---|
The New York Times | 478 | 29.60 |
The Washington Post | 760 | 47.06 |
Code Switch | 80 | 4.95 |
BuzzFeed | 168 | 10.40 |
Mashable | 129 | 7.99 |
1615 | 100.00 | |
Paradigm | ||
Traditional | 1238 | 76.66 |
Interactive Race Beat | 80 | 4.95 |
Journalism 3.0 | 297 | 18.39 |
1615 | 100.00 |
This narrative analysis looked for events and anecdotes, who appeared in those events and anecdotes, who was left out, the overall plot development and characterizations, who was highlighted as significant players, and how those people interacted with other groups.7 News content is often relatively short and intended to chronicle how events unfold over time, including what appears in the narrative and in what context, what remains in the narrative, and what disappears from the narrative. Examining how news narratives evolved meant careful monitoring of news events and whether they became part of the overall narrative or were “one-off” items that were reported, then forgotten. For example, on February 1, 2008, Barack Obama was a junior senator from Illinois when the question of his presidential campaign prompted the term “post-racial” to move from relative absence in the news to 226 mentions in Traditional journalism in one year.8 As this chapter shows, the term “post-racial” continued to appear in the news in coverage of Ferguson, but the narrative surrounding it changed substantially over time. This chapter first examines sourcing patterns over time in each paradigm, then narrative of the conflict over time by paradigm, then systemic awareness of racism in coverage over time in each paradigm. It concludes by comparing what shifted and what stayed the same.
Sourcing
Who is present and who is absent in news coverage, who speaks versus who is spoken for, and who was spoken about? Sourcing is important in coverage of racial issues because including the voices of lived experience, rather than detached experts, has the potential to disrupt stereotypes, myths, and majority-held beliefs.9 Distinct paradigms of journalism have relied on different sourcing patterns.10 Traditional journalism has used elite sourcing and sources who represent the majority of stakeholders. Interactive Race Beat coverage has drawn on stakeholders from various viewpoints in a way that stimulates the audience to participate rather than spectating a conversation between elites. Journalism 3.0 has privileged the voices of the oppressed. Examining sourcing patterns over time shows whether Traditional journalism has stayed the same or changed and whether the two emergent types of journalism about race have differed in their sourcing patterns, which could potentially disrupt a culturally embedded narrative about racial issues.
Sourcing in Post-Racial Question Coverage
In this example, although there was a reference to a general denial of post-racialism, the question was addressed by a Harvard professor and was presented as a topic for debate along racial lines. This leaves an impression of “it depends upon whom you believe.”But African-Americans roundly reject the notion that Mr. Obama’s election has eased racial tensions or delivered the nation to a new post-racial reality.
“I think the great mass of black people have shown tremendous patience, discipline and understanding, recognizing the dilemma that he faces,” said Randall L. Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of “The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency.”13
This example also posited post-racialism as a question, depending upon the race of the respondent. White people liked the sound of it, while African Americans thought it was a false question. The prose conveyed a sense that some African Americans don’t face racism. Again, the source was identified by his race (black) and his credentials (Obama adviser), as though his credentials made him more qualified to speak to the question than did his lived experience. Although the sources were people who experience racism, they were speaking about it theoretically.To white ears, the word “post-racial” sounds like progress. But to African-Americans—particularly those who struggle daily with the lingering effects of generations of discrimination—it can feel like abandonment.
“I think Fenty’s overwhelming initial win blurred the continued racial bifurcation in the city, and fed into the post-racial narrative that many of us wanted to feel, even if we really didn’t believe it deep down inside,” said Cornell Belcher, a black pollster who advised President Obama’s campaign in 2008.14
Another article about racial concerns within the federal Teach For America program (which sends college students to teach in low-income schools) quoted an article in Jacobin and the co-authors of a study of the program.17 Thus, the sourcing represented broader perspectives, but in these cases, the sources were still detached, leaned more toward people who studied the issues, and did not include the voices of the people living the issue.“Among minority households, even those with relatively high incomes tend to be clustered in neighborhoods where most of their neighbors are the same race and many are poor,” the Huffington Post found. The racial gap in household wealth has exploded since the housing bubble burst in 2007. And in the MTV study, white millennials were significantly less likely to say they grew up in families that talked about race compared to people of color the same age.
There’s also good data suggesting that white millennials have a far rosier view on race relations than their contemporaries of color. This too makes sense when you think about the schools, the stark housing segregation, the fact that on average white people have hardly any friends of color, and, perhaps more importantly than we realize, the fact that they just don’t have much experience talking about this stuff. (In fact, it’s safe to assume that Roof has spent far more time discussing race than most people his age.) As Politico’s Sean McElwee put it, the data that’s out there “suggests that millennials aren’t racially tolerant, they’re racially apathetic: They simply ignore structural racism rather than try to fix it.”16
Journalism 3.0 sourcing of the post-racial question differed from the other two paradigms in featuring the voices of lived experience. Some articles contained elite sources, but never without a response from the voices of people living the issue, whose comments, both in number and in length, far outweighed elite sources’ comments. One example appeared in an August 8, 2015, Mashable article headlined “Black Armor: Some black American men are dressing up to deflect negative attention, as a conscious means of survival,” which focused on the voices of African American men’s individual-level lived experiences: “‘It’s like armor to me,’ he says. ‘When I have a suit on I feel like all of a sudden, the world sees me differently. Cops aren’t staring, people wave back, people shake my hand, they open the door for me. It’s like I’m the president of the United States.’”18 This article did not “give both sides” about how African American men feel they should dress, which would have reflected adherence to a norm of objectivity, nor did it feature dueling experts talking about whether the African American male experiences were valid. It did not offer debate about what wearing a hoodie meant or about how others might perceive it. It offered voices of the people talking about why they were afraid to wear hoodies because they feared they would be, at best, treated poorly by non-African Americans, and at worst would be in danger.
Most Journalism 3.0 coverage of the post-racial question focused on Obama’s 2013 speech about race given following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in Trayvon Martin’s death. Upset over the acquittal spawned the Black Lives Matter movement. In that speech, Obama spoke frankly of his own experiences as an African American man: “Trayvon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago.”19 The president is an elite source, but in this moment, he was speaking of personal experience rather than as a detached expert. The personal level on which Obama spoke was noted in news coverage as one of the reasons the speech received so much attention. In this paradigm, the president’s lived experience, rather than his views on racism as an academic question, was the emphasis.
Sourcing of the post-racial question conformed to expectations in each paradigm.
Traditional journalism reproduced the status quo with elites arguing whether the U.S. was or was not post-racial. Interactive Race Beat sourcing included multiple stakeholders with similar conclusions: studies have shown we are not post-racial. Journalism 3.0 sourcing also showed a single standpoint: people who experience oppression say we are not post-racial. It’s perhaps tempting to brush off the debate over the post-racial question as something ridiculous. But it was a tremendously popular news narrative within the past decade. And it set the stage for the emergence of a new civil rights movement.
Sourcing in Coverage of the Black Lives Matter Movement
The Black Lives Matter movement began as a Twitter hashtag following the July 2013 acquittal of neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, who fatally shot unarmed African American teen Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, on Feb. 26, 2012. Martin, 17, was walking through the neighborhood on his way home from the convenience store. Zimmerman told a 911 operator the boy’s hooded sweatshirt made him look “suspicious.”20 The meta-narrative of racial profiling and stereotyping earned national and international attention. There were marches and demonstrations across the nation, including high-visibility protests by the Miami Heat basketball team, state legislators, and church congregants wearing hoodies. News coverage of the verdict was the first story in 2012 to gain more attention than the presidential race.21 It was in this context that #BlackLivesMatter first appeared on Twitter. Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi started the hashtag that grew into an international, intentionally decentralized movement designed to call attention to an intersectional agenda of social justice. The movement’s mission was to raise awareness of the injustices faced by African American women, people of color in the LGBTQ+ community, to racialized poverty, undocumented people, and other issues.22 However, mentions of Black Lives Matter as a movement rather than a slogan were all but absent from news coverage until months after the streets of Ferguson went quiet. The vast majority of articles, particularly in Traditional coverage, misattributed the movement as a reaction to the shooting of Michael Brown, Jr .
Sourcing in coverage of the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement across all three paradigms showed strong, but anticipated, differences and consistent patterns similar to those seen in sourcing of the post-racial question. Traditional journalism relied on elite sourcing and notably ignored the voices of the movement’s three female founders. Interactive Race Beat sourcing relied on popular inclusion and largely studied the movement’s rise using sources that made academic arguments. Journalism 3.0 sourcing of the Black Lives Matter movement relied most heavily on those directly working for and with the cause. Journalism 3.0 also leveraged technology to regularly present those voices unfiltered by relying on social media posts, which they used directly rather than quoting or paraphrasing.
Sourcing in Traditional coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement showed a distinct pattern with almost no variation. The first mention of Black Lives Matter in the Traditional news outlets examined in this study appeared in The New York Times on Oct. 14, 2014, two months after Michael Brown, Jr., was killed and more than a year after the movement began. It appeared as a slogan chanted by a crowd. The article did not provide context or discuss the movement. The first substantive coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement in Traditional outlets appeared in a January 18, 2015, article questioning whether it was effective. The movement’s founders were identified, but not quoted directly. Cullors was mentioned only in the context of disrupting presidential candidates’ appearances. When Traditional coverage discussed the Black Lives Matter movement, sourcing came from outside the movement. Sources included police officers who were critical of the movement, older NAACP members talking about the difference between previous civil rights activism and contemporary activism, and people debating the slogan and the counter-phrase “All Lives Matter.” The sources described the movement as violent, ineffective, or divisive. There were almost no voices from within the movement talking about why they supported it.
We’ve done a lot of writing and reporting at Code Switch over the past year on deadly police shootings of unarmed black people, cases that have become such a part of our landscape that they have the tendency to melt into each other. Indeed, sometimes the pattern of facts seems to barely change: Just last fall, we followed the story of an unarmed black man in South Carolina who was shot following a police traffic stop. The officer in that shooting, like Michael Slager—the officer who shot Walter Scott in the back as he ran away after a traffic stop—was later fired and arrested once the video of that encounter surfaced and contradicted his initial report.
While names and places change, the backdrop against which these stories play out does not. We decided to pull together what we’ve learned along the way, along with some thoughtful commentary from other outlets about this case and the larger questions it raises.23
Intersectionality is a key tenet of the Black Lives Matter movement and a strong emphasis of its founders, yet was nearly absent from coverage. As in its coverage of the post-racial question, Interactive Race Beat sourcing of the Black Lives Matter movement featured academics and journalists rather than those with lived experience. By contrast, sourcing in the Journalism 3.0 coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement regularly and prominently represented the voices of the oppressed, and those sources appeared in coverage significantly earlier than in Traditional or Interactive Race Beat coverage. In December 2014, a Staten Island, New York, grand jury voted not to indict the white police officer who choked to death Eric Garner, an unarmed African American man whose final words were “I can’t breathe.” Garner’s last words became a Twitter hashtag used more than a million times. It was listed as the most important quote of 2014 in the annual Yale Book of Quotations.25 Although Garner’s death at the hands of a police officer preceded Brown’s killing, Garner did not make national headlines until after Brown was shot and killed. The following December, when a grand jury chose not to indict the officer who choked Garner to death, “die-in” protests (in which a group of people lays on the ground to simulate mass deaths) swept across the nation, many of them shutting down major streets in New York, Chicago, Washington, DC, and Atlanta. A Mashable article on December 3, 2014, featured some text about the protests, but was dominated by “die-in” images and featured 22 curated Tweets from across the country, many of them posted by journalists on scene for Journalism 3.0 outlets. Their Twitter accounts were mostly unaffiliated with their news outlets.Black queer girls who appear more “masculine” and black youth who identify as trans-masculine are often “treated really aggressively by police,” says Aisha Canfield, policy researcher and analyst at Impact Justice, a juvenile justice reform organization that contributed to the Equity Project research. In Canfield’s research, girls have told her stories of cops “slamming them against squad cars or fences and saying, ‘If you want to act like a boy, we’ll treat you like a boy.’”24
Other sources in the article included a protester who said, “This is the civil rights movement of our time. The movement exists,” and a spokesman for the organization Ferguson Action who said, “We don’t necessarily believe that any one group or any one person has the right idea. We think there is a silent majority of people that believe black lives matter, and we are giving them a way to make their voices heard… Social media allows people to take simple actions that resonate widely.”27 No police officers, mayors, or other official or elite sources were quoted in those articles. Similarly, a February 15, 2016, article by Mashable’s Katie Dupere, headlined “7 racial justice activists talk about the evolution of Black History Month,” featured the activists speaking in their own words through transcripts of quotes and without the “voice” or interpretation of the journalists.Another activist involved in the protests in San Francisco, James Nielssen, told us social media was “by far the most effective tool” in organizing the demonstrations.
“The mainstream news channels don’t cover what we’re doing,” the 20-year-old student said in an email. “The only way I found out about this was through social media, where the events are reported by the people directly involved with it.”26
In his coverage, Daileda embedded a tweet featuring a photo of a protester holding a sign that read, “Men lie, cops lie, cell phone cameras don’t lie #Shoot1stPlantEvidenceLater,” and a quote from a source who represented the point of view of the oppressed.One after another, black residents stood at the center of a circle of people on Friday at North Charleston City Hall, recounting times when they felt racially profiled by police. One woman said an officer ticketed her for leaving her car door open when she walked into her home. Another man said that nearly every time he’s pulled over, at least five police cars arrive on the scene.28
Sourcing in coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement mirrored patterns found in sourcing of the post-racial question. Traditional journalism used elite sourcing, Interactive Race Beat journalism relied primarily on reports and other journalists, and Journalism 3.0 sourcing emphasized the voices of people working within the movement, both via interviews and by curating audience members’ Twitter posts, which allowed the sources to speak without journalists as filers.
Sourcing in Coverage of Ferguson
News coverage of the killing of Michael Brown , Jr., and the aftermath in Ferguson represented an ideal test of sourcing patterns across paradigms. There were elites readily available at the scene, from mayors to police, senators, and aldermen. There were also less partisan voices such as professors who were invested in talking about and studying the events and issues. Protesters and other residents of Ferguson were readily available for interviews. Also, people within all of those categories were using social media to post from and about Ferguson. The sourcing journalists in each paradigm used was the result of value choices rather than access.
Coverage of Ferguson marked a turning point in Traditional and Interactive Race Beat sourcing. Although Traditional sourcing in coverage of the post-racial question and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement repeated old patterns, coverage of Ferguson shifted from reliance on elites to including popular voices. Interactive Race Beat coverage of Ferguson also marked that paradigm’s first and only shift in sourcing from popular inclusion to privileging the voices of the oppressed. Journalism 3.0 sourcing in coverage of Ferguson remained consistently dominated by the voices of those experiencing oppression. The shift in Traditional media occurred over time and bears unpacking.
At first, Traditional journalism sourcing in coverage of Ferguson depended heavily on politicians and public officials, including government sources in Washington, D.C., rather than Ferguson politicians. Initially, when coverage centered on the protests, Traditional journalists themselves were sources who produced live online updates from the field about the “danger” and “violence” over a period of two days. Then the sourcing switched to rely on government officials, including members of Congress who were not in Ferguson. As the breaking news of the protests waned, sourcing turned to focus on “people on the street” interviews from in and around Ferguson. Those sources answered Traditional journalists’ quintessentially Traditional questions about whether racism was a problem in Ferguson. Traditional journalism was the only paradigm to have a strong sourcing presence of white voices, including entire articles about how white people felt about Ferguson or how people who supported Officer Darren Wilson felt. Most of these articles adhered to the Traditional journalism goal of objectivity or showing the issue from “both sides.” However, white people who have never experienced racial prejudice are not in a position to understand how it manifests, particularly when their own lived experience aligns with a narrative of color blindness. The privileging of sources who discuss racism from a detached position rather than from a lived experience aligns with Traditional journalism values and positions racial oppression as something individual rather than systemic. That is why sourcing is an essential part of examining the values present in news coverage by looking at who is considered to have expertise. This type of “objectivity” reinforces dominant groups’ perspectives.29 White people discussing whether racism was a problem in Ferguson not only privileged a detached voice, it also served to make the presence of racism a question.
The article did not dig more deeply into what it might mean for white residents of Ferguson to say, “I am Darren Wilson,” other than that it was a “play on” the “I am Trayvon Martin” slogan. But the slogan “I am Darren Wilson” is difficult to understand because Darren Wilson was not the target of violence or racial profiling by a more powerful group. What his supporters meant by the slogan was an important part of the news story, but the coverage did not delve into that question. The slogan was later printed on wristbands that were worn by police officers, including some in Ferguson, until the U.S. Department of Justice banned Ferguson police from wearing them while on duty.33 So, although their slogan was not interrogated, or clear, white residents of Ferguson views’ featured prominently in initial coverage as a sort of “balance” to the assertions of racism levied by African American protesters. This idea of “both sides” reporting falls solidly into well-worn traditions established in the name of the Traditional news norm of objectivity.“The individual who started the fund didn’t realize it would get so big,” said a woman who organized Saturday’s rally. When pressed for her name, she said only, “I am Darren Wilson,” a play on the popular mantra that emerged after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, in Florida.…
“We are working around the clock to clear the hate [against Officer Wilson],” she said.32
Traditional coverage began with reliance on elites. Then, as protests waned, it turned toward privileging the voices of the oppressed. This is noteworthy because it has been typical for news coverage to disappear as protesters disperse, but the coverage continued and sourcing patterns changed. It’s more difficult for reporters to find sources when they are not protesting in the streets, but that is what happened.“I’ve been harassed on a daily, weekly basis by police,” said Jonathan Butler, 24, a University of Missouri student originally from Nebraska. He has traveled to St. Louis several times for protests since the Aug. 9 shooting. “So it’s important that I came out to show solidarity.”…
As the marchers passed by, Rashad Lartey, 27, of Kansas, stood on the courthouse steps holding signs declaring: “Bigger than Ferguson” and “2014 = 1964.” “This is a struggle for human rights,” he said.34
This type of coverage centers the sources’ voices by employing less of a reporter filter.Saulsberry agrees with what other folks say: This is not the kind of place where people protest. I ask her what it’s like, then, to have all this activist energy suddenly cohere in her neighborhood.
“It makes me scared”—because of the tear gas and rubber bullets—“but also proud,” she says.35
Interactive Race Beat coverage examined the conversation generated by #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, a Twitter hashtag used by more than 100,000 people who posted side-by-side photos of themselves that could be characterized in opposing ways (i.e., glaring at the camera versus hugging a child) to highlight problems with the photographs of Brown used in news coverage. Code Switch interviewed the people behind the Twitter posts, showing popular inclusion. Code Switch coverage from August 16, 2014, explained, “But we were still curious about the photos themselves, and the individuals behind them. So we reached out to a few of the tweeters and here’s what they told us.”36 The coverage was transparent about engaging the audience in a conversation by going to the source of the posts and allowing them to speak for themselves rather than speaking about them.
This sourcing dove into topics that did not have clear dividing lines. The retired officer represents the perspectives of the protesters and law enforcement. Much of the Ferguson coverage looked at the issues as African Americans versus police, so addressing African American police officers represented an approach in which identities did not fit into tidy boxes.For a lot of the people who police in our community, they don’t understand the community (that is, black or brown people). They’re misinformed and then become frightened and afraid, and so the gun is their friend because it’s the only thing that protects them…
…I think the power that police have is not the power of arrest, it’s the power to influence the quality of life of people. That’s how I did my job. The white community tell their children when in trouble, go to the police. Black people don’t do that. We protect our kids from police.
At the dinner table…white families will tell children how to interact with the police. They tell them the police are there to help. Blacks do not. My son is autistic and doesn’t drive or speak, so I give this message more to my daughter. I tell her, “If you’re stopped by police, this is the way you have to behave.” That’s not something white parents need to worry about.37
Sourcing in Journalism 3.0 coverage of Ferguson relied on people on the street protesting and on social media posts rather than on official sources. Journalists working in this paradigm drew on Twitter for eyewitness accounts of breaking news. Mashable coverage included several long-form articles in which the vast majority of the text came from sources’ quotes rather than journalists’ prose. In Traditional and Interactive Race Beat coverage, sources’ quotes make up only a fraction of the text, so a piece headlined “In Their Words: Ferguson, One Year Later,” which was a collection of stories about three people in Ferguson labeled as “the advocate,” “the ally,” and “the local,” was noticeably different. The perspectives of the three types of sources were featured using blocks of long quotes and photos.38 An April 23, 2015, Mashable article on police violence against people of color was told exclusively from the standpoint of the victims’ families, including their words and video and audio recordings, all of which worked together to privilege the voice of the oppressed and critique the news portrayals of a victim of police violence. “‘Me and my family decided to come out and be [Dontre Hamilton’s] voice, because they demonized him, made it look like he deserved to die,’ Hamilton says. ‘I couldn’t live with that. My spirit wouldn’t rest. That’s why my family is out here advocating for these voices, these lost lives.’”39 This approach was unique to Journalism 3.0 and gave the most prominence to the voices of the oppressed.
Overall, sourcing in coverage of Ferguson showed stronger differences than in sourcing of the post-racial question or the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Traditional sourcing moved from reliance on elites to more popular inclusion, but not all from the voices of the oppressed. Traditional sourcing was the only paradigm to prominently feature white voices saying racism wasn’t a problem in Ferguson. Interactive Race Beat coverage moved toward privileging the voices of the oppressed and paid special attention to social media as a phenomenon in Ferguson. It was also the only paradigm to feature an African American police officer, a source with a multi-faceted identity. Journalism 3.0 sourcing was consistent in privileging the voices of the oppressed by giving prominent coverage to protesters.
Changes over Time in Sourcing
Traditional journalism showed the strongest changes in sourcing across the three paradigms. Interactive Race Beat sourcing patterns changed only slightly and only in regard to Ferguson; Journalism 3.0 sourcing patterns remained consistent. Traditional journalism relied heavily on elite sourcing across all three racial moments, although coverage of Ferguson included “people on the street,” particularly in coverage of the protests, which included rare, first-person accounts in which journalists themselves were sources. After the Ferguson protests, Traditional journalism sources continued to include a mix of elite and popular voices who talked about local elections and whether Ferguson was healing or had changed. That broadened Traditional journalism sourcing patterns somewhat, although it’s important to consider that many of the “popular” voices were white people speaking back to accusations of racism rather than people of color who lived the issue of oppression. That means Traditional journalism moved from a Representative Liberal paradigm to a Discursive paradigm more similar to sourcing patterns typically found in Interactive Race Beat journalism.
Interactive Race Beat sourcing patterns changed only slightly and only in regard to early coverage of Ferguson in which Code Switch journalists took a constructive turn and privileged the voices of the oppressed by talking to Ferguson residents. Most articles in this paradigm followed a consistent pattern of using the journalist’s voice as the narrator to connect the reader to other sources: journalism produced by other outlets, interviews with the journalists who produced that work, academic studies, interviews with the academics who produced the studies, historical records, government reports and databases, and, to a lesser degree, curation of social media posts (Twitter posts produced by journalists working for other news media outlets). The way the Interactive Race Beat sourcing drew from multiple sources pointing to the same conclusion represented consistency across coverage in this paradigm.
Sourcing across three racial moments
Paradigm | Post-racial question | Black Lives Matter | Ferguson |
|---|---|---|---|
Traditional | Elite | Elite | Popular inclusion |
Interactive Race Beat | Popular inclusion | Popular inclusion | Voices of oppressed |
Journalism 3.0 | Voices of oppressed | Voices of oppressed | Voices of oppressed |
Evaluating the narrative structure of news articles offers an indication of how journalists cover certain events or people as most important, evaluates journalists’ use of descriptors, and unpacks how journalists portray complex issues. Narratives show insights into the journalists’ value systems in terms of who is affected, who created a conflict, how it might be resolved, and which people are identified as key players.40 Traditional journalists, whose codes direct them to remain objective, to obtain all sides of a story and avoid assumptions, nonetheless make value judgments in terms of who and what is most important. Sometimes their assumptions are more explicit than their standards would dictate, particularly in coverage of race, in which coded language and stereotypes serve as mutually understood shortcuts to creating understanding.41 In times of change, journalists have been shown to rely on narratives that seek to preserve order and/or the status quo. How the narratives evolved over the three racial moments showed deep inconsistencies in Traditional coverage.
Narratives of the Post-Racial Question
Traditional journalism’s detached approach posited the post-racial question as a legitimate inquiry. Traditional coverage defined “post-racial” in various and sometimes contradictory ways ranging from “Racism is over because we have a black president” to “Everyone knows racism exists, so we don’t need to debate it,” to “Hey, we were promised post-racialism.” Over time, that narrative evolved from assuming the nation was post-racial to one of occasional surprise that the nation might not be post-racial, to a narrative that blamed Obama for failing to lead the nation into a post-racial reality. Narratives blamed Obama for not talking enough about race or for not being “black enough.” The post-racial narrative in Traditional coverage took several different approaches, but all of them came from a majority/white standpoint. In Traditional narratives, a post-racial US was alternately described as one in which people don’t talk about race, people don’t see skin color, racism no longer exists, black people act like white people, white people can “tolerate” a black president, black people have power, or Obama has cracked the racial ceiling but barriers remain for black people. Not all of these definitions are mutually exclusive, but the first five share the kind of color-blind racism42 that perpetuates a modern, less obvious racism. Traditional narratives treated racism as something abstract rather than something experienced in the everyday lives of people of color and as something that lies in attitudes rather than in policies and systems.
Other coverage took the perspective that Americans needed to be reminded that racism was still an issue, including a July 23, 2009, New York Times article written after Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested at his own home when police suspected him of being a burglar. It stated, “But more deeply, many said that the incident was a disappointing reminder that for all the racial progress the country seemed to have made with the election of President Obama, little had changed in the everyday lives of most people in terms of race relations.”46Eight years after Mr. Obama first spoke at Selma, the dream of a post-racial society that some foresaw in his rise to power has receded into a murkier reality.
To Mr. Obama’s supporters, the fierce opposition to his presidency has been fueled by race, even if that is not openly acknowledged. And in that regard, paradoxically, race relations may seem worse today than before he was elected.
A new CBS News poll found that 50 percent of African Americans think real progress has been made in getting rid of racial discrimination, down from 59 percent last summer before episodes in Ferguson and elsewhere involving police officers and black suspects.45
Traditional narratives of the post-racial question ranged from the outright pronouncements that Obama was a “post-racial” candidate (without defining what that meant) to asking whether US voters had achieved post-racialism with Obama’s election. This meant a variety of things, from the idea that people no longer talked about race to the idea that racism didn’t exist, or that people understood racial barriers so there was no longer a need to point them out, to Obama’s responsibility to manifest, to a narrative of failure because news accounts showed racial prejudice and racial violence still existed, or that post-racialism might have been possible, but Obama did not do a good job of leading the country in that direction.After a series of police shootings, protests and riots, this latest eruption of violence reflected a country on edge and a president struggling to pull the American people together. Any hopes of what supporters once called a “postracial” era now seem fanciful as Mr. Obama’s second term increasingly focuses on what he termed “a dark part of our history.”47
The Interactive Race Beat narrative of the post-racial question began with denouncing the question. Code Switch, founded five years after Obama’s election, built its identity around the folly of the post-racial question. Its “About the Code Switch team” website reads, “Remember when folks used to talk about being ‘post-racial’? Well, we’re definitely not that. We’re a team of journalists fascinated by the overlapping themes of race, ethnicity and culture, how they play out in our lives and communities, and how all of this is shifting.” The post-racial question emerged in the news cycle in 2008, but Code Switch did not launch until 2013. Interactive Race Beat coverage of the post-racial question offered a historical narrative that examined why a post-racial question was harmful and asked readers to take a deeper look.
That same type of historical perspective was seen in this Code Switch article with a narrative that did not appear elsewhere—one in which African Americans were shown as nostalgic not for repressive laws, but for the sense of community they had under segregation; sources expressed frustration that they were still oppressed, but no longer had the quality of connection found in majority-black communities:Beginning in the 1930s, the federal government actually refused to back loans if black people lived nearby, and builders actively and openly prohibited black people from moving to new suburban developments. The net effect was that black people of all incomes were clustered in poorer urban centers, where they also received egregiously inferior public services, and where there was downward pressure on their abilities to create wealth.
But this kind of discrimination isn’t some practice from a darker, bygone era—it just looks different today. According to a study we wrote about recently, when white folks and people of color went to inquire about buying or renting homes, they got different treatment. Whites were shown more units and were offered lower rent. Everyone said they were treated courteously. There were no “Negroes Need Not Apply” signs on the doors. No real estate agents slammed doors in brown folks’ faces. They simply offered them fewer choices at higher prices.48
This narrative spoke against Traditional narratives of progress by showing how even when policies change, racial barriers remain. These narratives convey a sense of doubt that the US could ever be post-racial.“We had our own grocery stores, black doctors, lawyers, dentists, hotel, movie theaters, shoe repairmen, our own segregated YMCA,” Fields says.
It was a community, she says, where she felt supported, valued and welcomed. And where, because local colleges refused to hire black professors, her education in segregated schools was never substandard.
“Some of our teachers were Ph.Ds., or Ph.D. candidates,” Fields recalls. “We had the best of the best, the talented 10th, if you will, and they expected the best of us.” Segregation should not get in the way of excelling, Fields and her peers were told. They had to be ready to inherit the integrated world their elders were fighting for, and the wider opportunities that would surely accompany it…
Not even the fact that Americans elected a black president—twice—means that discrimination is over, says UCLA’s Brenda Stevenson. The belief by some opinion-makers that President Obama’s election has moved America into an era where race is no longer central, let alone relevant, says Stevenson, causes many black Americans more than a little cognitive dissonance…
Michelle Boyd says public education, with all its inequities, has been a glaring example of post-Brown v. Board of Education work that still needs to be done.49
Journalism 3.0 narratives dismissed post-racialism as a question. The exception was narratives about President Obama’s most powerful speech on race after becoming president. In the wake of the acquittal of the man who killed Trayvon Martin, Obama appeared unexpectedly early on a Friday in the White House briefing room. His decision to speak about the verdict was reported with surprise. Obama said the country was not post-racial, but he felt progress was being made. As BuzzFeed reported on July 19, 2013, “Obama said he sees America shifting away from the racial ugliness in its past, though he said the process is ongoing. He said it’s time for Americans to ask themselves if they’re helping that process move along.”51 The narrative of the post-racial question in Journalism 3.0 coverage was defined as progress toward reducing racial prejudice and systems of oppression. Journalism 3.0 narratives posited post-racialism as a goal to be achieved over a long period of time, not something that would become a reality after one election day, and not something unattainable.The marginalization of queer men and women of color is directly connected to disproportionate rates of HIV/AIDS, poverty, homelessness, and more. We aren’t post-racial, or post-black, or post-civil rights.
“Gay is the new black,” however, makes it sound like we can all pat ourselves on the back and move on to the next checkbox. Racism? Done. Next up? Gay rights. Uh, not quite, sister girl.50
In telling the story of the post-racial question, each paradigm featured narratives that aligned with its values. Traditional journalism treated it as a serious question with multiple meanings and answers; Interactive Race Beat journalism treated it with a “definite no and probably never” narrative; and Journalism 3.0’s narrative was “not yet, but let’s work together to make changes.”
Narratives of the Black Lives Matter Movement
Among the three key racial moments, narratives of the Black Lives Matter movement were the most complex. Coverage portrayed it in conflicting ways, particularly as it evolved from a social media hashtag to an in-the-streets protest movement. Some confusion might be expected when a movement that is intentionally decentered meets with a news media whose job it is to make sense of its mission. Allowing the movement to describe itself could have been an effective strategy, but that strategy was not employed. Overall, Traditional narratives of the movement shifted over time from showing it as rowdy and ineffective to politically powerful enough to impact the presidential election; Interactive Race Beat narratives focused on the movement’s ability to create a new civil rights movement under a larger, more inclusive umbrella, and Journalism 3.0 narratives focused on the danger to those fighting for their rights, then shifted to a narrative compelling everyone to be involved in a mission of equality.
a social media slogan used in protests in the streets;
a response to the death of Michael Brown, Jr. ;
comprised of young, naive people with too much time on their hands;
an anti-police movement;
a provocation for white backlash; and
a powerful movement that should be wooed by presidential candidates.
Later, this narrative shifted to one of political power, as seen in this January 15, 2016, New York Times article headlined “Looking at Later Primaries, Bernie Sanders Works to Strengthen Black Support”:Yet as the rift over debates versus town halls underscores, the young and sometimes cacophonous movement is struggling to find its voice, as the activists who fly its banner wade into national politics.…
Yet for all the movement’s impact, even some of its sympathizers question whether it needs a clearer organization and more concrete plan of action.…
But the ubiquity of the name itself—and the fact that anyone can use it—has caused complications. At some protests, for instance, marchers’ chants have called for violence against police officers. Critics, including several Republican presidential candidates, then equated Black Lives Matter to promoting attacks against the police.52
This second article showed how candidates were vying for the activists’ attention versus the other way around.Even minor missteps show Mrs. Clinton’s potential vulnerability in the Black Lives Matter moment, when a new generation of African-American voters is insisting on being wooed afresh. The Clinton campaign set off a small social-media uproar in December when it briefly adapted its logo to include Rosa Parks’s image; critics said it looked like an attempt to say that the iconic protester would have supported Mrs. Clinton.53
changing people’s minds (thus, if people’s minds were not changed, the movement was to blame);
speaking up when white people were killed by police;
being a catalyst for conversation;
bringing attention to everyday racism; and
coalescing the public’s attention around police violence against people of color.
As the coverage progressed, the movement, which was initially portrayed as disorganized, was later portrayed as powerful.The study was released amid concern over the use of force prompted by a number of high-profile police killings of unarmed civilians and by the Black Lives Matter movement. The study looks at patterns of how police interaction with the public has changed over the last 12 years, starting with the earliest data available in 2003 and continuing through 2014, and breaks down the data by age, race and gender.54
starting a “culture war” with white people;
dividing older African Americans who favored the more gradual tactics of the NAACP (negligible, because the movement was diffuse and divided and couldn’t coalesce around a particular issue);
nothing since the Ferguson street protests.
Traditional narratives about the movement were sometimes contradictory, for example, labeling it as a slogan versus a new civil rights movement. Traditional narratives shifted from portraying the movement as decentralized, and therefore unable to accomplish anything, to showing how the movement was a political force in the presidential election. The one constant in the narrative was its focus on the movement as primarily about police violence. This is noteworthy because the movement has defined itself in far broader terms.Many see themselves as building a new movement that goes well beyond what some called the “respectability politics” of civil rights leaders such as the Rev. Al Sharpton, powerful figures like Oprah Winfrey and politicians like President Obama.
“We don’t need people shifting the blame to poor black and brown communities for these tragedies,” said Daniel Camacho, 24, a divinity student from Long Island, who has participated in some of the protests in New York. “I’ve heard enough people complain about sagging pants, gangster music, fatherlessness, black-on-black crime.
Who’s focusing on holding the American state, the police, fully accountable?” Some older blacks are sympathetic but skeptical.
In an interview with People magazine, Ms. Winfrey said that while it was “wonderful” to see marches and protests across the country, “what I’m looking for is some kind of leadership to come out of this to say, ‘This is what we want. This is what has to change, and these are the steps that we need to take to make these changes, and this is what we’re willing to do to get it.’”55
Thus, coverage in the Traditional paradigm focused on division and competition, while Interactive Race Beat coverage focused on showing connections between the two movements.“One of the things that I think is really evident in the last year,” he [Nat Chioke Williams, president of the Hill-Snowdon Foundation in Washington, D.C.] said, “is that the Black Lives Matter movement has captured the hearts and minds and public consciousness in a way that the NAACP and other civil rights organizations have not captured.”…
“I think we’re witnessing the birth of a new phase of the ongoing struggle for black freedom, equality and justice in this country,” he said. “Historic organizations like the NAACP have to find ways in which to connect with the new energy and the new formations that are out there.”
L. Joy Williams is the 36-year-old president of the NAACP branch in Brooklyn, and she agrees with that. But she says she’s not really worried that the NAACP is becoming irrelevant, “because there’s no other organization like ours.” That is, with offices nationwide and lobbyists roaming the halls of power.56
This was one of few news articles to tell the story of the Black Lives Matter movement outside of police violence and not in connection with Ferguson. This March 9, 2016, Code Switch article was the only one of the more than 1600 articles analyzed to use the voice of one of the founders of the movement:Since the Black Lives Matter movement gained national attention in 2013, organizers have pushed to prioritize voices of black queer and transgender women. Two of the three founders identify as queer, and along with drawing attention to numerous brutal murders of transgender women of color, they have also driven conversations on how anti-black portrayals in media and popular culture can have serious consequences on black queer and trans women’s lives.57
A March 2, 2016, Code Switch article noting how the movement had spread to become “a major political force” also pointed out that the founders’ voices were largely absent from Traditional news coverage of the movement. In coverage of a study analyzing tweets about the movement, the study’s author noted that the voices of the founders were not as prominent as he had anticipated they might be:Before Black Lives Matter was a hashtag, before it was a slogan chanted by protesters in cities across the country, before it was a national movement, it was a Facebook post by an Oakland-based activist named Alicia Garza. She wrote it after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
It read in part: “I continue to be surprised at how little black lives matter, and I will continue that. Stop giving up on black life.” She ended by saying, “Black people, I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”58
Interactive Race Beat narratives of the Black Lives Matter movement were substantially different than those in Traditional coverage. Interactive Race Beat narratives defined the movement in consistent ways, portrayed it as a source of unity rather than fragmentation, and understood it as powerful and sophisticated rather than weak and naive and as intersectional rather than about police violence against unarmed African American men. Narratives in the Interactive Race Beat traced the movement historically and examined its growth and spread. Interactive Race Beat narratives of the Black Lives Matter movement used the voice of one of the founders and showed how the founders were largely ignored in Traditional coverage, which replicated a pattern of silencing women of color. However, Interactive Race Beat coverage featured more academics speaking theoretically about oppression than it did the voices of the founders of the movement.Black Lives Matter, the organization, was founded by three black women, and Twitter is a space in which the fascinations and voices of black women carry particular weight. But when the researchers looked at who comprised the “high centers,” or most influential connectors, in the networks most involved in discussions of police violence, they saw something different.
“If you look at the top 10…it’s half activists…some media folks,” [media scholar Dean] Freelon told me. “You’ll notice that only one of them is a woman,” he said, referring to Johnetta Elzie…Still, he said, when it comes to women and the movement, we could be seeing offline attitudes replicating themselves in the aggregate of the Twitterverse—like the way news stories tend to quote male sources much more often than they quote women.
“It just goes to show that when you have a big movement,” even one that’s ostensibly committed to doing things differently, and better than in the past, “you might end up falling back on these old institutional biases,” Freelon said.59
Journalism 3.0 coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement relied on narratives of empowerment, but the empowerment narratives were preceded by narratives of fear. Journalism 3.0 was the only paradigm with a narrative focus on how Black Lives Matter movement activists faced threats and violence. A December 3, 2015, Mashable article, “Police Raid Black Lives Matter Camp in Minneapolis,” contained a quote from the Minneapolis mayor, who claimed a protest camp set up outside of police headquarters after an officer shot and killed an unarmed African American man was dangerous because of the fires protesters were using to keep warm. The coverage, however, mostly featured the perspective of the protesters. It included tweets that showed a bulldozer destroying food and supplies donated to the movement. It featured a photo gallery of portraits of 11 of the people who had been living at the camp, thus putting a face on the movement. That Mashable article stated, “Officers tore down tents and trashed food, blankets and other items from the camp.”60 The coverage also frequently mentioned violence and threats of violence against Black Lives Matter protesters at the political rallies of Donald Trump. In a December 14, 2015, article about a rally in Las Vegas, a BuzzFeed reporter wrote about witnessing a protester who yelled, “Black Lives Matter. Muslim Lives Matter,” being dragged from the rally while someone in the crowd yelled, “Light the motherfucker on fire.”61
Journalism 3.0 narratives also emphasized something not found in Traditional and Interactive Race Beat coverage: a call for white people to be better allies. In a January 10, 2016, example in Mashable, reporter SaVonne Anderson created a listicle of “5 Initial Ways You Can Be a Better Ally to People of Color.”63 The journalist curated social media content and added her own prose. The ally narrative was seen only in Journalism 3.0 narratives. This aligns with that paradigm’s mission of empowerment. This paradigm was the only one to make the point that white people can and need to work against racism rather than leaving that responsibility to people of color.The water crisis in Flint, Mich. should be a signature issue for the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as political candidates and the private sector, one of the movement’s most prominent activists told BuzzFeed News.
In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Patrisse Cullors of #BlackLivesMatter said her organization has been coordinating with activists in Flint. This weekend, Black Lives Matter network chapters in Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids, Mich. will work together to deliver clean water to families, she said.
“Clean water is a human right,” Cullors said. “And I think that part what happens often times is that poor black communities end up getting the shorter end of the stick.”62
Finally, Journalism 3.0 narratives expressed hope for progress, such as in this line from a February 15, 2016, Mashable story about Black History Month: “But racial justice activists are pushing against the idea that black history isn’t currently in the making, referencing the powerful movements happening in our current society—like Black Lives Matter activism—as powerful proof.”64 Journalism 3.0 narratives showed the risks protesters faced and balanced them with a hope that their actions were making a difference. They showed how the movement had moved into other issues and contexts, and they called on white people to be better allies to people of color.
The narratives of the Black Lives Matter movement were substantially different across the three paradigms. Traditional narratives defined the movement in multiple, sometimes contradictory ways that ranged from discounting it to showing it as a powerful political force. Interactive Race Beat narratives were alone in addressing intersectionality and the history of the movement. Journalism 3.0 narratives showed the danger associated with activism and called on white people to be better allies. Each type of coverage stayed within its paradigm’s values.
Narrative of the Conflict in Ferguson
Unlike the post-racial question or Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged over time, narratives of Ferguson began with a series of major events: a killing that crossed racial lines, protests of police violence, lack of indictment of a police officer, a Department of Justice report about racism in the police force. Whether news narratives would cover the killing of Michael Brown , Jr., as an isolated event or part of a more complex story and how they would describe the reasons protesters were in the streets would come to inform the understanding of a national audience.
When an unarmed black teenager and a police officer crossed paths here last weekend with fatal results, the incident cast a blinding spotlight on a small police department struggling for authority and relevance in a changing community…
The office of Missouri’s attorney general concluded in an annual report last year that Ferguson police were twice as likely to arrest African Americans during traffic stops as they were whites.66
In Traditional coverage, the narrative of the conflict in Ferguson initially focused on problems portrayed as unique to Ferguson: a suburban town segregated on racial lines with poor blacks who attend “crumbling” schools and, on the other side of the tracks, whites who enjoy wine bars and a public pool; a problematic police department that had hired a bad-apple cop who had been booted from another police department; and an African American community that was like a powder keg waiting for a reason to explode. It portrayed all of these problems as things that might be addressed via official channels, that is, by hiring a new police chief, electing a new governor, or through a Department of Justice investigation. After the protests ebbed, coverage turned to focus on the legal actions involving investigations, including the grand jury deciding whether to indict Officer Darren Wilson.On one corner of a battered stretch of West Florissant Avenue, the epicenter of ongoing protests, young men pull dark scarves up over their mouths and lob molotov cocktails at police from behind makeshift barricades built of bricks and wood planks. They call the gasoline-filled bottles “poor man’s bombs.” The young men yell expletives and, with a rebel’s bravado, speak about securing justice for Michael Brown, the black teen fatally shot Aug. 9 by a white police officer, “by any means necessary.”
They are known here as “the militants”—a faction inhabiting the hard-core end of a spectrum that includes online organizers and opportunistic looters—and their numbers have been growing with the severity of their tactics since the shooting.
Each evening, hundreds gather along West Florissant in what has become the most visible and perilous ritual of this St. Louis suburb’s days of frustration following Brown’s death. Dozens have been arrested, many injured by tear-gas canisters and rubber bullets fired by a police force dressed in riot gear and armed with assault rifles…
They will not give their names. But their leaders say they are ready to fight, some with guns in their hands. “This is not the time for no peace,” said one man, a 27-year-old who made the trip here from Chicago.67
Looking back at this narrative, which highlights how the white residents of Ferguson are the minority, the backbone of the city (business owners, mayor, police chief), and yet seemingly blissfully naive about its racial tensions, and considering the racialized police abuses detailed in the Department of Justice report published more than a year later, this attempt at balance in coverage is a stark example of how Traditional journalism norms reinforce problematic patterns in coverage. The article was accompanied by a photo of Jim Marshall putting a pizza in the oven in the “busy family-owned pizza shop” he runs with his wife. The caption said, “Marshall and his wife Dawne say they have been falsely accused of racist behavior by protestors and on social media.” Dawne Marshall’s quote is a strong example of color-blind language. “‘We are not the type of people who they say we are!’ she said. She pointed to two black residents sitting in her restaurant. ‘When I see you, I see you,’ she said as she began to cry. ‘I don’t see color!’”69 This type of “yes, you are/no, we’re not” coverage aligns with the journalistic norm of objectivity, but strongly positions racism at only the individual level, where it’s left as an open question. The focus on the response of white people in Ferguson was present only in Traditional narratives, where norms guide racism to be covered as always questionable.The situation has forced many white Ferguson residents in this majority-black city—from small-business owners to the mayor and police chief—to question their beliefs about the community’s racial dynamics.
They have discovered that blacks and whites here profoundly disagree about the existence of racism and the fairness of the justice system. And now, whites who once believed their town was an exception in a country struggling with racial divisions have to confront the possibility it is not.68
Such analytical writing is a strong departure from what is typically seen in Traditional journalism. It also marked a turn in the Traditional narrative, one in which Ferguson became not a single place with racial tension, but a symbol of larger problems in the country. That was seen in this November 27, 2014, Washington Post article, “Ferguson Is Now a Symbol, Not a Place”:These were rare suburban riots, racial violence coming to the very place where many Americans—both white and black—had fled after the urban unrest of the 1960s. These were the most significant explosions of racial frustration since the election of the nation’s first black president, and so Ferguson forced the country out of the fantasy that America had entered a “post-racial” era.
For protesters and those who agree with them, the death of Michael Brown has joined those of Eric Garner in New York, Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., and Oscar Grant in Oakland, Calif., in a roll call of mostly young black men whose violent ends are a reminder of the reservoir of mistrust and misapprehension that divides African Americans from those in charge of the state’s use of force. But for many other Americans, the most concerning aspect of the events in Ferguson has been the disorder in the streets.
Instead of discussions about what might be done to diminish the likelihood of racial violence, the popular debate focused over the past week on how big the explosion of anger would be. In recent days, it was easy to find at least a dozen online polls asking something along the lines of: “Will there be race riots in Ferguson?”70
At this point, the Traditional narrative turned. It became hopeful, not only for the people of Ferguson to “heal” but for them to “turn anger into results” after, as The New York Times reported on December 5, 2014, “The shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., became an inkblot test illuminating the nation’s deeply rooted political and racial divides.”72Though it has been less than four months since Michael Brown was killed, the town seems to have entered the pantheon of places that stand as metaphors.
Ferguson’s symbolism now sits alongside Selma’s significance in the civil rights movement, Columbine as a symbol of teenage rage and gun violence, and Kent State’s historic link to antiwar protests. Those are places that have adjusted—some more smoothly than others—to their emblematic meaning.71
This article was a forerunner to the Post’s “Fatal Force” database, which compiled information on police killings of civilians and won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. That project began when reporters who covered Ferguson began asking questions about how often police shot and killed civilians—only to find there was no single source for such data. A team of journalists ultimately collected data on 990 fatal police shootings across the country and then used that data to produce in-depth coverage.74 The database has continued to be updated in real time for each year since.75 Fatal Force was part of a new national conversation about race and police violence.It begins with a relatively minor incident: A traffic stop. A burglary. A disturbance. Police arrive and tensions escalate. It ends with an unarmed black man shot dead.
That pattern played out in March in Madison, Wis., where police responded to reports of a man yelling and jumping in traffic.
It was repeated two months later in Los Angeles, where beachgoers complained that a homeless man was harassing people on the Venice boardwalk.
It surfaced again in Cleveland, where police were called to a burglary at a corner store. And in Tallahassee, where a man was reported banging on someone’s door. And last month in Cincinnati, where Samuel DuBose, 43, wound up with a bullet in his head after being pulled over for driving without a front tag.
Perhaps most infamously, the pattern played out one year ago Sunday in Ferguson, Mo., where a white police officer searching for a convenience-store robber shot and killed an unarmed black teenager. That incident sparked a national movement to protest police treatment of African Americans and turned 18-year-old Michael Brown into a putative symbol of racial inequality in America.
So far this year, 24 unarmed black men have been shot and killed by police—one every nine days, according to a Washington Post database of fatal police shootings. During a single two-week period in April, three unarmed black men were shot and killed. All three shootings were either captured on video or, in one case, broadcast live on local TV.73
The Interactive Race Beat narrative was not one of a growing movement, but one of resignation. Coverage included historical coverage of racial violence, highlighting a story similar to Brown’s , but 100 years before. Code Switch narratives focused on how little had changed while the list of African American names that became hashtags about police violence had continued to grow:But this was a strange reunion: We weren’t gathered for a birthday, or happy hour, but because a young black man’s body had lain out for four hours on a sweltering street.
In the 12 months since, the national conversation about police brutality has reached a higher pitch than we could have imagined. We’ve all become part-time cops reporters and part-time criminal justice reporters. We’ve interviewed weeping family members, scrutinized dash cam footage and witnesses’ YouTube uploads, and wrestled with the long-term political implications of what this moment might mean. At this point, I’m probably approaching 30,000 words on the subject of race and policing. It’s everything you want in a story—consequential, evolving, complicated. This work will matter in a way that so many other stories don’t or won’t.
But this beat has also been distressing and unrelenting. I’ve come uncomfortably close to handing in my resignation, asking to cover anything but this. I can’t even remember which case or video got me to that point, but I just didn’t want to do it anymore. Over the past month, I’ve talked to a dozen other black reporters who’ve covered race and policing since Michael Brown’s death—or even further back, since Oscar Grant or Ramarley Graham—and it’s been a relief to learn that I’m not the only one. That sinking feeling when a hashtag of a black person’s name starts trending on Twitter, the guilty avoidance of watching the latest video of a black person losing his life, the flashes of resentment and irritation at well-meaning tweets and emails sent by readers asking me to weigh in on the latest development in the latest case. The folks I talked to for this story share many of the same, contradictory impulses I wrestle with when a new case comes to light, torn between wanting to jump on a plane—or start sketching out a long essay, as the case may be—and wanting to log out of Twitter and block out emails from my editors.76
This narrative tone of outrage and hopelessness was not present in Traditional or Journalism 3.0 paradigms. These are not quotes from a source, but statements from the journalist.Brown’s name has become the latest in a long litany of names that in their totality represent an archetype: a black life snuffed out in an encounter with The System. He’s come to represent not only himself or his community, but a much broader universe of people…
Every time folks recite the litany, it reiterates the same idea: Black life is cheap. Every time a new person’s name is added to that macabre list, that name becomes another way of invoking this idea. The roll call only grows larger, as do the stakes: Michael Brown becomes the avatar for all black men, like Trayvon Martin before him and Oscar Grant before him and Amadou Diallo before him. And consequently, their actions and the outcomes of their lives come to represent that same thing for all black men.77
Interactive Race Beat narratives directly challenged Traditional narratives by showing everyday life in Ferguson, a small town described at the height of the protests as equally populated with journalists and protesters. Interactive Race Beat narratives portrayed Ferguson as unexceptional, just another place where a black man had been shot. An article headlined “Scenes from the Ferguson We Didn’t See on TV” accused coverage of magnifying conflict. It featured 14 photos of everyday life in Ferguson, including teenage boys throwing a football, neighbors sitting in chairs on the sidewalk talking, and people having barbecues. Code Switch’s Demby wrote on September 4, 2014, “I walked around the neighborhood chatting with people while they worked or relaxed, enjoying the last few weeks of summer, even as Ferguson had become the most recent locus for Our Ongoing National Conversation on Race.”78 Interactive Race Beat narratives of Ferguson showed it as another unsurprising episode in a long history unlikely to ever change. And it showed the exhausting toll taken on those who experience and fight racism.
Journalism 3.0 narratives showed the police, rather than the protesters, as violent and misguided. Rather than focusing on African Americans as hostile to their white neighbors, as Traditional coverage did, narratives showed abounding hospitality in Ferguson neighborhoods. Several days into the protests, Mashable published a curated photo essay titled “Ferguson or Iraq? Photos Unmask the Militarization of America’s Police.”80 The piece, which featured little text, addressed a narrative about police militarization that would continue to be part of the news cycle. It explained, “Residents protesting his [Brown’s ] death have flooded the streets this week, and photographs of police trying to contain them bear an eerie resemblance to a military operation.”81 The article featured a series of side-by-side photographs of scenes from international war and scenes from Ferguson. The article caught the attention of Time magazine, which the next day said, “The scenes from Ferguson have reached a point where Mashable has posted photos from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ferguson—and asked readers to try to figure out where they’re from.”82 Journalism 3.0 not only privileged the voices of the oppressed, it sought to put the larger audience in the shoes of those people facing danger in Ferguson.Police barricades constructed throughout the neighborhood where Brown was killed have essentially turned the area into a maze in which its residents are trapped. In order to get in or out, you have to drive your car up on to the sidewalk and or into someone’s yard.
“You don’t want to go in there,” a cop, who was white, told me when I asked for directions. He added that I could be shot.
But when I finally parked in the lot next to the apartment complex in front of the place Brown was shot, I found the exact opposite. [Community leader John] Bonds had his food truck parked nearby, blasting a rap song dedicated to Brown.
More than 100 people peacefully lined the streets, drifting in and out of the nearby homes. Kids on bicycles circled the parking lot as they laughed.
Grandmothers refused to shake my hand, offering hugs instead.79
Journalism 3.0 narratives focused on the lived experiences of African Americans in Ferguson and protesters across the country—and on the dangerous work they were doing on behalf of racial justice. Reporters’ first-person accounts put the audience, as much as possible, in the shoes of those doing that work and showed the obstacles they faced. This narrative of Ferguson was one of a nation at a turning point. One that acknowledged the world was watching. One that offered a sense of hope for change because a light of truth was being shined in dark corners where racist beliefs had long ruled.They were marching because they were sick and tired of living in fear that they or their loved ones could have their lives taken away for no reason, dismissed as just another thug.
The protests were not just cathartic demonstrations of grief and anger, but efforts to bring the pain experienced by communities of color every day into the consciousness of mainstream America. This often entailed the disruption of life and business as usual—from marching in the streets and blocking traffic, to staging “die-ins” in department stores, to interrupting Sunday brunches with chants of “Hands up, don’t shoot!”
While the Justice Package is still in committee, the Obama administration recently announced large reforms to the federal program that provides police departments with military hardware. This is a significant step in rolling back the transformation of local police into paramilitary forces, and it would not have happened without the ongoing protests of the past year.83
Changes in Narrative over Time
As with coverage of the post-racial question and coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement, the most noteworthy shifts in coverage of Ferguson were seen in Traditional journalism narratives, which changed dramatically. Traditional narratives of the post-racial question shifted from declaring the U.S. to be post-racial (although there was much inconsistency in how that term was defined) to one of surprise that the promise of post-racialism had been a myth. This turn became clear after Ferguson. Narratives largely blamed President Obama for making the nation believe it could be post-racial. Thus, although the narrative changed, Traditional journalism stayed true to the Representative Liberal paradigm in that it reported with detachment about the post-racial question. Traditional narratives of the Black Lives Matter movement and Ferguson changed more drastically. They shifted from ignoring the movement to portraying it as a social media slogan, to portraying it as disorganized and internally divided, to showing it as a movement with political clout worthy of the attention of presidential candidates. This move from a detachment to an empowerment narrative represented a shift from Representative Liberal to Constructionist values. Traditional narratives of Ferguson also shifted from one of dangerous African American protesters in a “problem city” burning and looting their own neighborhoods to a nationwide narrative of police violence against people of color that was being addressed at the ballot box and in policy changes. This represented another shift from Representative Liberal to Constructionist paradigm.
Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 narratives of Ferguson were consistent and stayed within each paradigm’s values. For Interactive Race Beat, that meant narratives that brought in historical understanding and put seemingly oppositional ideas into conversation. Interactive Race Beat coverage showed no narrative shifts over time. It maintained that the nation would never eliminate racism. Beginning with the post-racial narrative as a myth and showing how the next generation of millennials was not more racially liberal, it painted a picture of a problem with little hope of resolution. Although Interactive Race Beat narratives of the Black Lives Matter movement were the only ones to show the movement’s intersectional focus, the narratives also showed that while policies might change, individual attitudes probably would not. Although narratives in this paradigm showed that after Ferguson, the U.S. was more aware of racial issues, they did not show that this awareness would lead to changes. Interactive Race Beat coverage remained within the Discursive paradigm.
Narratives across three racial moments
Paradigm | Post-racial | Black Lives Matter | Ferguson |
|---|---|---|---|
Traditional | Detachment | Detachment to empowerment | Empowerment |
Interactive Race Beat | Deliberation | Deliberation | Deliberation |
Journalism 3.0 | Empowerment | Empowerment | Empowerment |
Systemic Awareness of Racism
There is an old saying in journalism that has several iterations and can’t clearly be traced to any one source, but mostly goes something like this: journalists are better at covering the storms than the oxygen. “News” is not the invisible, intangible, taken-for-granted thing understood as normal and unsurprising. But whether something is judged as novel or “just how things are” depends upon the status and lived experience of the person who decides what is news. “New” things such as the first African American president, a new civil rights movement, or police firing smoke grenades at protesters in the streets of Ferguson met the common definition of news. Systemic racism, for those who haven’t experienced it, is like the oxygen. Traditional journalism norms lead reporters in that paradigm to cover events. When issues of race are covered in isolation, it creates an understanding of racism as something experienced by some people some of the time, rather than an overall atmosphere or system of oppression.84 It can also lead the audience to believe that the person who experienced racism might have been to blame85 or that racism might not have been the cause of a problem or issue.86 That, however, is the dominant approach. Only 20 percent of Traditional news content produced between 2009 and 2014 showed racism as a systemic issue.87 This narrative analysis looked for systemic-level awareness in coverage across paradigms.
Systemic Awareness in the Post-Racial Question
Systemically aware coverage of the post-racial question would focus not just on the fact that the nation had never had an African American president but also on the history and context of racial barriers in attaining the presidency. Those factors might include the prejudicial attitudes of the white majority not only as voters but also the barriers to housing and employment that make it difficult for people of color to have the same educational, economic, and employment opportunities as white people. If coverage simply stated statistics of African Americans as a national group being less affluent and less educated than other racial groups, it would create the impression that this was either a choice or a defect rather than a byproduct of systemic racism and cast Obama as an exception—someone who chose another path rather than who overcame obstacles.
This article failed to acknowledge the structures and institutions that continue to oppress people of color. It accused Obama of igniting a racial debate (as though a conversation about race was something negative) by nominating a Latina. It repeated the race-based accusation of Sotomayor’s critics that she is a “reverse racist,” an inflammatory and inaccurate term that invalidates individual and systemic racism. This lack of systemic awareness was typical of Traditional coverage of the post-racial question.In the heat of his primary battle last year, Barack Obama bemoaned “identity politics” in America, calling it “an enormous distraction” from the real issues of the day. Many thought his inauguration as the first African-American president this year was supposed to usher in a new post-racial age.
But four months later, identity politics is back with a vengeance. A president who these days refers to his background obliquely when he does at all chose a Supreme Court candidate who openly embraces hers. Critics took issue with her past statements and called her a “reverse racist.” And the capital once again has polarized along familiar lines.88
This coverage provided an exemplar for showing how historical-legal context meets majority’s racial understanding of oppression.We are a society that largely believes that the struggle for racial equality ended with the laws passed during the civil rights movement and there was nothing left to be done. I think it is easy for many Americans to believe that laws on the books make us post-racial, even if the reality is decidedly racialized. The Supreme Court in decisions beginning in the early ‘70s and continuing through this year has largely confirmed that belief by its rulings.89
Journalism 3.0 coverage showcased Obama’s words, rather than pundits interpreting his words or other elites speaking back to his assertions. It let his words stand without comment or interpretation. That set it apart from Traditional coverage in which Obama either was portrayed as “making race an issue” or “avoiding talking about race.”Trayvon could have been me, 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a—and a history that—that doesn’t go away.
There are very few African-American men in this country who have not had the experience of being followed when they are shopping at a department store. That includes me. There are probably very few African-American men who have not had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me—at least before I was a senator.
There are very few African-Americans who have not had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had the chance to get off. That happens often.90
Systemic awareness of racism in the coverage of the post-racial question across three paradigms showed stark differences. Traditional journalism focused on Obama’s election as a bellwether of change without any acknowledgment of existing systemic barriers. Most of the Traditional coverage ignored historical context and treated racism as a question. In Interactive Race Beat coverage of the post-racial question, the opposite was true. History and context dominated the coverage and showed racial barriers as real, strong, and probably permanent. Journalism 3.0 coverage was scant, relying primarily on Obama’s remarks about the death of Trayvon Martin. This gave the impression that if the president of the U.S. experiences racism, the U.S. is definitely not post-racial.
Systemic Awareness in Coverage of the Black Lives Matter Movement
The Black Lives Matter movement began as a hashtag, but grew rapidly larger and spread geographically into a movement that was also in the streets. Given that, what the protesters were fighting against—systemic racism that manifests intersectionally in issues such as wage and job discrimination, housing discrimination, legal issues, police brutality, LGBTQA discrimination, an unfair immigration system and immigrant abuse, discrimination against people with disabilities, and more—seems like a logical concept to include in a news story about the movement. However, that was only the case in two of the paradigms. Traditional journalism was systemically ignorant in its initial coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement, but later became more comprehensive. Interactive Race Beat journalism produced the most systemically aware coverage by linking both conceptually and technologically—via clickable links in articles—to show a bigger picture and its historical roots. Journalism 3.0 conveyed systemic awareness of racism in coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement by showing how it had sparked discussions that became part of popular culture and everyday life from sports to entertainment to toys.
The death of Mr. Dubose, who was black, at the hands of Officer Tensing, who is white, joined a string of recent cases—in places including Staten Island; Cleveland; Baltimore; North Charleston, S.C.; and Ferguson, Mo., among others—that have raised hard questions about law enforcement’s use of force and the role of race in policing.
Video cameras have recorded many of these episodes and other, nonlethal encounters—like the arrest of Sandra Bland, who died three days later in a Texas jail cell—offering disturbing evidence of the confrontations that often contradict the accounts of those involved. Several hundred people braved an early-evening thunderstorm to rally for about 90 minutes outside the Hamilton County Courthouse, chanting “Black lives matter” and “I am Sam Dubose.”91
The article contained clickable links to 25 other news articles or studies about campus racism, violence demographics, and social media movements. This type of linkage is not possible in print journalism, and it is currently not done to that extent in Traditional journalism published online. When Traditional journalists do link to other articles, they are typically confined to articles produced by their own news organizations. No Traditional journalism articles in this study linked to coverage from other news media outlets. Thus, Interactive Race Beat showed a new type of systemic awareness by linking narratives both conceptually and technologically. This conveyed that racial oppression occurs at many levels in a variety of settings.One difference between the oldheads and today’s student protesters is an emphasis on curtailing “microaggressions,” those less obvious and more mundane instances of racial antagonism or ignorance.
“I mean, you’re asking me to solve racism,” said my friend who runs the black alumni group. She knows how to push the administration to hire more diverse faculty. But how do you create a five-point plan around getting people to stop saying things like, “It’s almost like you’re not black” and reaching to touch people’s natural hair?92
Journalism 3.0 coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement drew heavily on curation of audience tweets, which presented racism as systemic and part of everyday lived experiences. Coverage in this paradigm also showed systemic racism by referencing similar cases of racial violence across the nation. It largely understood the U.S. as a society based on systems that produce dangerous conditions for people of color and for anyone who tries to change the systems. Journalism 3.0 coverage of the movement addressed systemic racism via the stories of people living it at all levels and from different institutions such housing, employment, education, transportation, and public safety. It also showed backlash against the protesters in a way not seen in the other two paradigms. For example, Black Lives Matter movement protesters demonstrating in the wake of the killing of Jamar Clark by Minneapolis police officers in the Mall of America were threatened with lawsuits that would hurt them financially if they did not disseminate social media posts calling for the protests to be canceled. A December 21, 2015, Mashable article headlined “Black Lives Matter Says ‘Totalitarian’ Mall of America Wants to Silence Protest” featured as much content from social media as it did the journalist’s reporting and prose. The reporter wrote, “The move spawned an onslaught of criticism on Twitter, as supporters assailed the mall for choosing profit over racial justice, accusing it of standing on the wrong side of history. Many included a hashtag that expressed solidarity with the protesters, telling the mall ‘sue me too.’”93 In this article, systemic racism was shown in terms of backlash against those who tried to change the system, and solidarity was highlighted.
An article in Mashable’s business section, “American Girl Dolls Promote Empowerment, at $115 a Pop,” covered the existence (and cost) of a new American Girl doll, Melody, a 1963 civil rights activist from Detroit:As a whole, Black-ish is one of the best family sitcoms out there. But this past Wednesday’s installment—a bottle episode in which parents Bo and Andre try to explain to their kids the nuances of the Black Lives Matter movement—was this show at its best.
Their conversations were ones happening in every living room in America, bound by an ideal that needs little discussion: the desire to make the world a better place.95
The article credited the movement with inspiring the toy and detailed how the doll was created by an advisory committee that included civil rights activist Julian Bond and a former NAACP director. The article highlighted the context in which the doll was being released and the journalist asked the company’s spokesperson specific questions about political and social events not commonly associated with toys, thus creating an understanding of a bigger, systemic picture.The doll, which was announced during Black History Month, is being released in the context of today’s Black Lives Matter movement and heightened discussions about police brutality in the United States.
“We did not create her story in direct response to events happening today,” Julie Parks, a company spokesperson for American Girl, tells Mashable. “That said, we hope Melody and her stories will serve as a way to initiate conversations among girls and their parents who want to talk about these important issues in a positive and meaningful way.”96
In sum, systemic awareness in coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement showed one shift and that was in the Traditional paradigm, which originally portrayed the movement as protesting one death (Michael Brown, Jr. ), but later showed the movement fighting against something larger (although still limited to police violence against people of color). Interactive Race Beat coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement was systemically aware in showing historical context, taking on “invisible” racism present in microaggressions and linking issues conceptually and technologically. Journalism 3.0 focused more on the movement’s many facets and how they went beyond street protests to ignite discussions in other environments, such as entertainment media and toys.
Systemic Awareness in Coverage of Ferguson
This example was a rare glimpse behind the curtain to where news is made. It highlighted the subjectivity of “facts” and journalists’ role in understanding how they influence the audience.Editors on the news desk noted that “burly” has many apt synonyms, and though no official proclamation was made, word went out to Times reporters and copy editors to find alternatives.
Yonette Joseph, a news desk editor who is black, said that the use of “burly” depends on context. “If the articles were describing the actor James Earl Jones or William (the Refrigerator) Perry, I’d see no problem with the word burly,” she wrote in an email. “But in matters of race, when the context is crime and other malfeasance, I’d flag that word.” The same would apply, she wrote, for “anything that describes a black man ‘shuffling’ into a room.”97
Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 coverage remained consistent in the way they showed systemic awareness in coverage of Ferguson. Interactive Race Beat coverage showed systemic awareness by focusing on historical context and philosophical discussions of complex questions. Journalism 3.0 showed, again, a sense of hopefulness that highlighted people coming together to protest.
This article positioned Ferguson as a flashpoint of change that ignited an ongoing conversation driven by protests and social media posts.“In my lifetime, I haven’t experienced a moment like this,” said Craig Futterman, a law professor at the University of Chicago who founded the school’s Civil Rights and Police Accountability Clinic. “I’m usually more of a cynic and a skeptic, but this feels different.”
Activists and criminal-justice experts say the national ethos regarding race and policing has changed dramatically since a black teenager was shot to death by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014. Since then, sustained protests in multiple cities, an aggressive social media campaign and a steady drip of viral videos revealing questionable police shootings have eroded the societal reflex to defend police and blame the dead victim.100
Interactive Race Beat coverage of Ferguson was systemically aware throughout. As with coverage of the post-racial question and Black Lives Matter movement, Interactive Race Beat coverage showed systemic awareness based on history and context that extended well beyond the streets of Ferguson. Early coverage included a historical piece about the 1962 killing of an African American teen by a white police officer in St. Louis—and the riots that ensued. Code Switch journalist Kat Chow searched newspaper archives and found descriptions eerily similar to those telling the story of present-day Ferguson. Residents carried signs inscribed with phrases such as “Was murder necessary?” and “How much training have our officers had?” and “Will our son be next?”101 The similarities between the past and the present highlighted in this reporting underscored the sustained presence of systemic racism over decades.
Compared to the self-reflexive article in Traditional journalism, this article examined the trope in greater depth rather than focusing on whether to use it in journalistic narratives.After Michael Brown was shot dead in August, his mother, Leslie [sic] McSpadden, said, “My son was sweet. He didn’t mean any harm to anybody.” He was, she said, “a gentle giant.”
But when police officer Darren Wilson fired the shot that ended Brown’s life, he saw things differently. “I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan,” he said in his testimony to the grand jury. “That’s just how big he felt and how small I felt.”
Wilson said “the only way” he could describe Brown’s “intense aggressive face” was that it looked like “a demon.” He feared for his life.
Many observers, such as Slate’s Jamelle Bouie and Vox’s Laren Williams, pointed out that Wilson’s testimony has historical echoes of the “black brute” caricatures that portrayed black men as savage, destructive criminals.102
This Journalism 3.0 story was one of the first to use data available to all reporters to explore the underlying forces and contexts that led to the protests. It showed the conditions faced by the city’s low-income and African American residents. This contrasted with The New York Times article that began by offering the same information about Ferguson being predominantly African American but led by white officials. But while the Times piece turned into an opportunity for white residents to talk about how they were being unfairly accused of being racist, the Mashable article turned to examine racial profiling.The black population in Ferguson is almost twice that of the white population. Yet the powers that be—the Ferguson mayor, four of the five members of the city council and most of the police force—are white. When it comes to arrests, the statistics tell a skewed story, too. From January to April this year, there were 27 whites arrested in the city compared with 217 blacks, or about eight times as many black arrests as white arrests.
It’s a race issue, yes, but it’s one that’s also rooted in economics. One way to think of Ferguson is as an island of predominately black lower-income families struggling to make ends meet, surrounded by white middle-class neighborhoods… Over the past week, several of these protesters have told me their stories of the police brutality and racial profiling that they have endured for years. The concept of “Driving While Black” is something kids here learn from a very early age: When you get pulled over, always keep your hands on the wheel to avoid getting shot.104
Systemic awareness of racism across three racial moments
Paradigm | Post-racial | Black Lives Matter | Ferguson |
|---|---|---|---|
Traditional | Closure | Closure to avoidance of premature closure | Closure to avoidance of premature closure |
Interactive Race Beat | Closure after consensus | Closure after consensus | Closure after consensus |
Journalism 3.0 | Avoidance of premature closure | Avoidance of premature closure | Avoidance of premature closure |
My analysis of systemic awareness yielded what I consider to be one of the most compelling findings from this data: Traditional journalism, which has for decades covered racial issues as isolated incidents disconnected from larger systems of power, made a sharp departure from the arm’s-length, elite source-driven Representative Liberal paradigm toward embracing Constructionist values in which racism is presented as part of a historic and ongoing exploration rather than as a we-said-they-said debate. During and after Ferguson, Traditional journalism’s increased awareness of systemic racism was manifest in coverage that included other cases of police violence against people of color, deployed massive database research projects to examine police violence, used historical context to explain the roots of racist beliefs, provided explanations of the harmfulness of racial stereotypes, and delved into the institutions in which racial barriers are reproduced, such as elementary schools, universities, and the arts.
In the Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0, systemic awareness of racism was present throughout coverage. It was seen in coverage that presented history and context to show how racism manifests across institutions, beliefs, and practices, many of which could seem as invisible as oxygen to people not living with that oppression. Journalism 3.0 coverage drew upon examples from popular culture, such as TV shows and toys, to address these issues. Both Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 coverage relied heavily on hyperlinks, leveraging technology to show the interrelation of ideas and events. Only Journalism 3.0 coverage presented systemic racism as everyone’s responsibility to fight. Where Interactive Race Beat coverage showed systemic racism as unavoidable and unconquerable, Journalism 3.0 showed systemic racism as something that could be weakened or defeated.
Traditional Journalism Transforms
Changes in coverage by paradigm
Paradigm | Sourcing | Narrative | Systemic |
|---|---|---|---|
Traditional | Rep. Lib. toward Discursive | Rep. Lib. to Constructionist | Rep. Lib. to Constructionist |
Inter. Race Beat | Discursive toward Constructionist | Discursive | Discursive |
Journalism 3.0 | Constructionist | Constructionist | Constructionist |
Traditional journalism shifted in every category and at each racial moment with growing intensity. In sourcing, it shifted during coverage of Ferguson after the voices of the protesters supplanted the voices of elected officials. In the narrative of the conflict, coverage shifted during coverage of Ferguson, when reporters began interrogating the post-racial question and presenting the Black Lives Matter movement as a political force rather than as dangerous and disorganized. The shift in systemic awareness of racism also occurred after the smoke cleared in Ferguson.
Ongoing coverage after the protests ended showed differences in representations of the Black Lives Matter movement and the racial dynamics and systems in Ferguson. There was never a paradigm shift in Traditional journalism’s coverage of the post-racial question. The only other shift observed occurred in Interactive Race Beat sourcing. In that paradigm, sourcing briefly took a Constructionist turn during Ferguson coverage, but returned to Discursive values of popular inclusion.
Traditional journalism coverage of the three racial moments shifted most strongly to look like Journalism 3.0. Sourcing in Traditional coverage changed from a pre-Ferguson pattern of Representative Liberal reliance on elite expertise toward a Discursive paradigm of more popular inclusion that emphasized the voices of people on the street. Because many of those “everyday people” were white people debating the existence of racism, sourcing did not move all the way to the Constructionist value of privileging the voices of the oppressed. Traditional coverage continued to include popular voices after Ferguson, although elite voices remained part of the sourcing, particularly as the presidential election became a more frequent topic.
The more significant paradigm shifts in Traditional journalism occurred in the narrative of the conflict and awareness of systemic racism. The narrative of the conflict moved toward one of empowerment in terms of the political power of the Black Lives Matter movement (especially as a force in the presidential election), the ability of protesters to work for change after Ferguson, and, particularly, the portrayal of police violence against people of color as a widespread national problem. In this way, Traditional journalism also moved from a Representative Liberal paradigmatic expectation of “closing” the question of racial violence to a Constructionist paradigm’s avoidance of premature closure. Journalists presented it as an ongoing issue rather than a question of Ferguson as a singular incident.
Interactive Race Beat coverage mostly reflected Discursive paradigm values. The exception was in the sourcing of Ferguson, which took a Constructionist turn to privilege the voices of the oppressed (including African American journalists). Interactive Race Beat coverage showed Discursive values in presenting the narrative of the conflict and awareness of systemic racism. It presented the racial moments as intellectual questions not being debated in Traditional coverage. Interactive Race Beat coverage built consensus to answer questions about whether police violence against African Americans was a systemic problem. It definitively answered, “Yes.” Whether systemic racism could be eliminated was also a question that was closed, but the answer was “No.”
Journalism 3.0 coverage consistently reflected Constructionist values in privileging the voices of the oppressed, presenting an empowerment narrative that featured activists and called allies to action, and kept the question of ending police violence against people of color open with a sense of hope that spread not only into political arenas but also into popular culture, such as entertainment, sports, and toys.
Overall, Traditional journalism began to look more like Journalism 3.0, not just during the protests in Ferguson, but for a sustained period thereafter. Traditional journalism answered the question of whether Ferguson would be understood as a moment confined, as Prof. Fredrick Harris asked, to justice for Michael Brown , Jr., or would be a movement toward policy changes to eradicate systemic racism. Traditional journalism showed a movement in the way journalists shifted coverage of race.