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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.
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