“Too late.... You already wasted your life crying racism... ”: Interrogating digital news audiences’ legitimation and heroization of white masculine violence

Recent critical journalism scholarship and feminist media studies position news comment sections as sites where journalistic authority, news values, and audience agency are negotiated. Evidently, these studies clarify the opportunities and risks in today’s digital participatory journalism, especially for a “multiracial” democracy. I unpack Fox News, CNN, and The Free Press audiences’ discourse following Daniel Penny’s 2024 acquittal in the killing of Jordan Neely, especially as it concerns the heroization of white masculine violence in the United States. I show how the intersection of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and hegemonic masculinity remains instrumental to understanding how online news audiences do not evaluate acts of violence in the Republic in isolation; instead, they make sense of them through racialized discursive constructions that associate whiteness with heroism, innocence, authority, and protection and Blackness with danger and criminality. Therefore, white masculine violence heroization, as I show, serves as a discursive process through which news audiences transform racialized violence into moral heroism; hence reinforcing white supremacy and patriarchal oppression of Black lives while obstructing the historical and structural inequalities that render such discursive moves “natural” and “legitimate.” I extend the convergence of critical race theorizing and hegemonic masculinity framework to journalism and digital public studies.