An Analysis of Frames, News Coverage, and the March for Our Lives Movement

Sojourners 265 Marching for Our Lives, Not Yours: An analysis of frames, news coverage, and the March for Our Lives movement Maren Tergesen University of British Columbia Abstract. This article examines youth activists from the “March for Our Lives” movement and how their identities impact their framing of gun violence. Analyzing speeches orated at one of the largest gun violence prevention (GVP) protests ever, this article ex- poses how the positionality and lived experience of white and/or affluent actors influences their framing and results in the exclusion of urban gun violence acted upon Black people and people of colour. This article finds that the MFOL movement reinforces racial hier- archies of worthy victims by describing the ‘characters’ and ‘settings’ of gun violence as those consistent with mass or school shootings. Despite the shortcomings of the MFOL movement, this paper suggests that the current issue attention cycle is conducive to conversations about the intersections of gun violence with race and that activists of colour are the ones leading these conversations. Introduction On February 14th, 2018, fourteen students and three faculty of Marjory Stoneman Dou- glas (MSD) High School were killed in a school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Within three days of the shooting, a group of survivors formed an organization dubbed “Never Again MSD,” planned a nationwide day of protest called “March for Our Lives” (MFOL) and raised $3.7 million dollars for the cause (Andone 2018). These youth activists were widely applauded for their swift action and “for reminding America that the shooting was not a freak accident or a natural disaster but the result of actual human decisions” (Witt 2018). Setting themselves apart from other mass shooting survivors, these youth entered the public eye “not only to control the media’s message about MSD, but to create a sense © 2021 Maren Tergesen 266 Tergesen of shared urgency among young people nationwide” (Bent 2019:58). Asserting the importance of their lived experience, the founders of MFOL understood themselves as the engineers of the gun violence narrative and they actively harnessed media attention to ensure their voices were heard. MFOL activists saw their voices and their experience as central to the debate on gun violence. In turn, the media responded by positioning them as authorities within this conversation. Due to the authority they were given, it is vital to consider how their lived experience with gun violence and their positionality shape their work. Given that MFOL actors are survivors of a mass shooting, a form of gun violence which comprised less than 2% of gun-related deaths in 2016 (BBC 2019), it is important to explore how their experience corresponds with the forms of gun violence privileged, or displaced, by this movement and by the media outlets that follow them. Further, as nearly all the key MFOL actors are white or white-passing and from an affluent, suburban area, it is equally as important to examine how their activism extends beyond themselves to serve those most frequently impacted by gun violence, namely people of colour, people of low socioeco- nomic status (SES), people from inner-cities and those existing at these intersections. In 2017, Black Americans accounted for more than half (59%) of gun homicides (Amnesty n.d.). Representing only 13% of the American population, it is clear that Black people are disproportionately victims of this form of violence (Amnesty n.d.). To begin addressing this overrepresentation, it is imperative that discourse center the specific expe- riences of Black people and advance the policies that will support them. Although MFOL has been praised for using their platform to speak about gun violence acted upon Black and Brown people, scholars have yet to examine whether this praise is merited. Following this gap in scholarship, I will analyze speeches and media coverage from the March 24th, 2018 MFOL protest in Washington, D.C. and ask two questions: 1. How do founding actors of the MFOL movement frame the gun violence issue in their speeches and which forms of gun violence do they privilege?; and, 2. Which MFOL actor frames, if any, are reflected in newspaper coverage of the event in America’s top three, most circulated newspapers? To answer these questions, speeches from eight key MFOL actors were an- alyzed, along with twelve news articles printed in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. My findings suggest that while MFOL actors wield the media presence to disseminate their frames, they both frame the issue in ways that neglect urban gun violence and use language that privileges mass shootings. In spite of their intentions to be inclusive, I argue that the work of these activists obscures the issue of urban gun violence and reproduces the racially unequal hierarchy of “worthy” gun violence victims. By analyzing the meaning behind MFOL speeches and the presence or absence of MFOL frames within the media, I will explore a central dynamic of this organization and uncover the extent to which these actors succeed at translating their interpretations into public discourse on this issue. Analyzing this process is significant as it will reveal whether they succeed at “shap[ing] how people think about social problems and their solutions” (Smith et al. 2001:1400), known as the agenda-building process. Before outlining my method- © 2021 Maren Tergesen Sojourners 267 ological decisions and analyses, I will introduce the social movement in question, then review the literature on MFOL, gun violence, and social movements and the media. Case Overview In the wake of the February 14th, 2018 mass shooting, a group of MSD students who were united under the banners of “never again” and “enough is enough” (Bent 2019:56) formed an organization with the mission of rejecting political “passivity and demand[ing] direct action to combat this epidemic” (March for Our Lives). Fitting into the gun violence prevention (GVP) sector, this organization is referred to interchangeably as Never Again M.S.D. and “MFOL,” the latter being how I will refer to them in this paper. Although there have been powerful GVP organizations, arguably what distinguishes MFOL from others is their relationship with the media. Seeking to flip the dominant narrative, these youth actively worked to destabilize their victimhood and the “thoughts and prayers rhetoric” that defines responses to mass shootings by getting in front of cameras and demanding legislative change. They also sought out media attention as they understood it could amplify their message and encourage mobilization. Their calls to action were met with both support from the public, including celebrities such as Oprah and the Clooneys (Andone 2018), and with great hostility, particularly from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and gun rights activists such as Colion Noir (Shear 2018). One month after the shooting, activists organized a national student walk-out, which was followed shortly after by the “March for Our Lives” (MFOL) protest. The protest event, which was scheduled for March 24th, 2018, remains one of the largest demonstrations against gun violence in history (Lopez 2018). Following the protest, a number of movement actors travelled across America to help people register to vote, to educate others and to inspire gun control action. Notably, within a year of the Parkland shooting, 67 new gun control-related policies had been enacted across the U.S. (Atkinson 2019). Literature Review MFOL and Gun Violence Though the MFOL protest represents one of the largest GVP rallies in history, there are few researchers who have studied this movement to date. Within the literature, a few researchers have focused on activist Emma Gonzalez and her rhetorical tactics (Cardell and Douglas 2020; Conti 2018), some on the authority of youth voices in activism (Bent © 2021 Maren Tergesen 268 Tergesen 2019), and others (Fisher and Jasny 2019) discuss how MFOL fits into a protest cycle, or “phase of heightened conflict across the social system” (Staggenborg and Ramos 2016:65), that has ignited across America. However, the literature discussing biases between forms of gun violence offers important insights for analyzing GVP movements like MFOL. Bernstein, McMillan and Charash (2019) explore how mass shootings and urban gun violence are treated as dis- tinct within our collective imaginaries. They contend that a consequence of dividing these forms of violence is that they are ascribed different - and unequal - importance. Shootings in cities acted upon Black and Brown people are seen as everyday occurrences unworthy of attention, while shootings involving white people in suburban areas are tragedies demanding justice. In other words, the effect of race, status and place are multiplicative, and it is the sum of being racialized and low-income and from the inner-city - a space that is deeply stigmatized and perceived through a lens of criminality - that drives these imbalances. Resulting from these differing perceptions along racial lines is that “Parkland be- come[s] the public face of a movement while the same and even larger loss of life that takes place during an average year in Hartford or a weekend in Chicago is dismissed as less significant” (Bernstein et al. 2019:1171). In other words, white GVP activists, like MFOL members, dominate a conversation that most deeply and directly implicates people of colour, resulting in a surplus of dialogue about mass shootings and a dearth of dialogue about gun violence and its intersections with race. Exemplifying this lack of dialogue is Merry’s (2018) study of gun control and gun rights Facebook groups, which reveals that among gun control groups only 3% of posts mention race-related issues. Posts about child victims and mass shootings formed the bulk of content in gun control groups (Merry 2018), which again lays bare the biases within this conversation and the shortcomings of activists.

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