Journalistic Routines and the Social Construction of Race: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Tyreek Hill Police Encounter

To gauge U.S. journalism’s post-2020 racial reckoning, this article examines news coverage of football player Tyreek Hill’s police encounter in September 2024. Using Critical Discourse Analysis to interpret and explain digital media texts, this project mimics the contingency of the internet and considers local, national, legacy, digital-only, and sports outlets. Overall, it finds that news discourse continues to operate through a white racial frame. Even outlets that acknowledged systemic inequities or foregrounded the perspectives of the racially marginalized could recreate this dominant perspective, reinforcing tropes such as Black criminality, victim blaming, and deference to official sources. It’s thus argued that routine journalistic practices such as descriptive reporting, bothsidesism, headline conventions, reliance on official sources, and other supposedly objective norms, actually limit social discourse and the ability to have honest, good faith conversations about race. The project further highlights coverage that did counter the white racial frame and ultimately argues such coverage should be the standard. These practices are more ethical (i.e., take responsibility for the social consequences of news narratives) and provide a more nuanced and rigorous approximation of truth.