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Perceptions of Black protest movements by both the public and most academics are filtered through White-centric news sources that tend to associate Black people and Black protests with violence and downplay systemic inequality. Intentionally centering Black perspectives provides an important balance and corrective to mainstream distortions. Using a much wider range of original data than any study addressing comparable issues, this paper compares mainstream White-centric newswire and Black newspaper coverage of Black protests about policing between 1994 and 2010 using several different quantitative measures: whether an event was covered at all, the volume of coverage an event received, and the prevalence of significant keywords in stories about a given protest episode. All approaches show the mainstream newswires much more focused on Black violence and on official and police perspectives, as well as exhibiting more concentration of their attention on fewer episodes in media cascades. Black newspapers not only covered a more diverse array of episodes but gave more attention to systemic issues, Black perspectives and Black community organizing. The data show how markedly different collective memories of policing and protests about policing have been constructed in different news sources. These differences matter both for current politics and academic research about Black movements. Note: This is a working paper in process. Comments welcome. Please check with the authors for an updated version if you are citing after June 2024.
Oliver et al. (Fri,) studied this question.