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 state-wide 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 religions figures; and neighborhoods impacted and residents’ lives upended – all reported in varying degrees of depth and focus by the local and national newspapers.

From the cardinal Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that desegregated U.S. public education to the demonstrations, marches, and violence of the civil rights movement, A History of the American Civil Rights Movement Through Newspaper Coverage: The Race Agenda, Volume 1 traces the crusade for justice through the lens of major newspaper coverage to reveal the combating sectional press attitudes of the era. The book details attempts, blatant and subtle, to frame the major events of the movement in themes that have resonated from before, during, and since the Civil War. States' rights versus constitutional guarantees of freedom and equality, nullification versus federal authority, and regional social and cultural mores that buttressed the prejudices and political arguments of segregation and desegregation across the nation are some of the issues covered. This analysis of the press coverage of events and issues of that tumultuous period of U.S. history-by newspapers in the North, South, Midwest, and West-exposes perspectives and press routines that remain ingrained and thus relevant today, when journalistic treatment of political debate, ranging from traditional newspapers and broadcast platforms to those of cable, social media, and the Internet, continues to set an often volatile and oppositional political agenda.

The 2003 war against Iraq was not the first instance of a president taking the nation into foreign conflict assisted by a submissive Congress and national press corps that did not adequately challenge the case for intervention. All foreign U.S. military action since World War II has been undertaken without the constitutionally required declaration of war, and with the support of the national press corps. Factors behind this press complicity - which is at odds with the traditional press role of watchdog over government policies - include political, economic, and national security ideologies the press shares with administration and government officials - the same sources upon whom the press relies for credible information. Sending troops to fight in foreign lands is the most difficult, and most important, decision a president can make. Assisting this decision has been a press that, in failing to meet its watchdog responsibility during this key pre-war period, has instead helped construct and maintain a war agenda. With a comprehensive overview of all conflicts from the Korean War to intervention in Libya, this book examines the supportive relationship of press to power in building a conflict rationale during the vital period leading up to combat.