Mainstream and Black-centric News Accounts of Black Protests about Policing in the U.S. 1994-2010

Perceptions of Black American protest movements both in public discourse and academic research are filtered through mainstream news sources that tend to associate Black people and Black protests with violence while downplaying systemic racial inequities. Intentionally centering Black perspectives provides an important balance and corrective to mainstream sources. Using two different analytic approaches and a much wider range of original data than any previous study on comparable issues, this paper compares mainstream newswire and Black newspaper coverage of Black protests about policing between 1994 and 2010. Mainstream newswires focused more heavily on protester violence and privileged official and police perspectives, concentrating their attention on fewer episodes in media cascades. In contrast, Black newspapers covered a wider array of episodes and gave more attention to systemic problems, moral critique, and Black community organizing. Overall, these findings show how different portrayals of protests about policing have been constructed in different news sources. These differences matter both for methods and theories of social movements in general and for racialized collective memories in the United States.