University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2014 Narrating Jackson State: An Examination Of Power Relations And Mississippi Newspaper Coverage Of The 1970 Shootings At Jackson State College Leslie Hassel University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the Journalism Studies Commons Recommended Citation Hassel, Leslie, "Narrating Jackson State: An Examination Of Power Relations And Mississippi Newspaper Coverage Of The 1970 Shootings At Jackson State College" (2014). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 872. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/872 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. NARRATING JACKSON STATE: AN EXAMINATION OF POWER RELATIONS AND MISSISSIPPI NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF THE 1970 SHOOTINGS AT JACKSON STATE COLLEGE A Thesis presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Southern Studies at The University of Mississippi by LESLIE M. HASSEL April 2014 Copyright Leslie M. Hassel 2014 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT The following thesis examines media coverage of a 1970 campus shooting at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi, during which two black students were killed and several others were injured. Over forty years after the shootings, the incident remains largely absent from the dominant historical narrative. This study posits that the contradictory accounts published by various Jackson-area news outlets blurred the lines between facts and subjective perspectives and as a consequence limited the resources used by historians to construct a narrative of the shootings.