Come join us for our #APSA2021 presentation! This work extends our previous work on BLM news coverage to include International News. Additionally, we situate our work around the protest paradigm - the tendency for news to delegitimate protests that run counter to the status quo.
https://twitter.com/KathTX/status/1443956745622093841
Brief report of our findings on GitHub: github.com/marisaasmith/D…
Key words differentiating national news from intl. news hinted towards awareness of systemic racism, but with more subtle terms. Terms most telling of domestic outlets included “color,” referencing systemic inequality for “communities of color” and “people of color”
Intl. news opted to explicitly call out racism and America’s complacency in the face of racism’s persistent impact on African Americans. Words used to predict intl. news included “racism,” “white police,” and “racist”
Mentions of policy were used infrequently in the corpus, upholding the paradigm generally. However, when used, right- and left-leaning outlets emphasized policy favorable to their political party.
Right-leaning news sources demonstrated a greater propensity to mention “defunding,” “defunding police,” and “abolish". When accompanied with framing overwhelmingly focused on violence, talk about policy in this manner delegitimizes the BLM movement.
Left-leaning sources focused on voting rights, which have electoral consequences for Democrats due to the widespread support of Black voters for the party and motivations to counter Republicans’ attempts at voter disenfranchisement.
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