Do African American lives matter to the nation's press? And if they do, how does the press demonstrate this? These are the driving questions of this book, for which the author employed content analysis of eight U.S. newspapers with national or statewide readership to explore their coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement. More specifically the research examines how these newspapers covered police beatings and slayings of unarmed African Americans, beginning with the brutal beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police in 1991, through the killings of these citizens after that, taking in…mehr
Do African American lives matter to the nation's press? And if they do, how does the press demonstrate this? These are the driving questions of this book, for which the author employed content analysis of eight U.S. newspapers with national or statewide readership to explore their coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement. More specifically the research examines how these newspapers covered police beatings and slayings of unarmed African Americans, beginning with the brutal beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police in 1991, through the killings of these citizens after that, taking in victims that include the 1995 beating and ensuing death of Jonny Gammage at the hands of police in suburban Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the 2014 slaying of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and ending with the 2020 slaying of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. These narratives took in far more than the fatal incidents. They included local and national protests, some of them violent; political fallout from presidents and senators to governors and mayors; funeral services that drew local and national civil-rights leaders and religious figures; and neighborhoods impacted and residents' lives upended - all reported in varying degrees of depth and focus by the local and national newspapers.
Steve Hallock is a professor of journalism at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A longtime daily newspaper reporter, columnist and editor for nearly three decades, he earned a Ph.D. in journalism from Ohio University in 2005 and embarked on a second career in academia. His most recent books are a two-volume analysis of newspaper coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, A History of the American Civil Rights Movement Through Newspaper Coverage: The Race Agenda, Volumes 1 and 2, published in 2018 and 2020 by Peter Lang. He has published three other academic books analyzing journalistic histories and reportage. He also has published research papers in media journals and numerous op-ed commentaries in newspapers that include The New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Denver Post. He and his wife, Joanne, live in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania.
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Foreword - Introduction - Rodney King - Jonny Gammage - Michael Brown - A Succession of Slayings - George Floyd - A Litany of Fatal Brutality - Index.
