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Abstract
Demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd culminated into the largest social justice movement in U.S. history. While most of the protests were peaceful, violent imagery was prevalent across local and national broadcast news. Guided by previous research on the protest paradigm, this study examines visual framing methods to understand how broadcast journalists represented the Black Lives Matter movement. The research analyzed 3,627 images from 12 days of coverage across 6 broadcast television news stations. The analysis compares the proportion of visual frames from broadcast news to publicly available data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). The content analysis found two areas by which American broadcast news’s coverage perpetuated elements of the protest paradigm: coverage portrayed the protests as being more violent than they actually were, and coverage focused on protestor violence. However, the analysis revealed a shift towards focusing on police violence rather than protestor violence at the end of the sample period, indicating a transition away from pitfalls of the protest paradigm. As news media have historically relied on visuals to allow audiences to see for themselves, it is crucial to understand how the 2020 wave of Black Lives Matter protests were visually framed.
Published Version
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