US News Coverage of Racial Issues in a Digital Era Carolyn Nielsen A
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Moment or Movement? U.S. News Coverage of Racial Issues in a Digital Era Carolyn Nielsen A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2017 Reading Committee: David Domke, Chair LeiLani Nishime Matthew Powers Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Department of Communication i ©Copyright 2017 Carolyn Nielsen i University of Washington Abstract Moment or Movement? U.S. News Coverage of Racial Issues in a Digital Era Carolyn Nielsen Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor David Domke Department of Communication This dissertation examined how reporters cover racial issues at a time when violence by police against African Americans has risen to a new level of salience among journalists. Drawing on Democratic Theory, I created a taxonomy of journalism about race across three paradigms: Traditional, Interactive Race Beat, and Journalism 3.0. I then performed a narrative analysis of coverage across the three paradigms. I employed the lens of Critical Race Theory to analyze coverage of three racial moments: the election of the U.S.’s first African American president, the rise of The Black Lives Matter Movement, and the civil unrest following the killing of an unarmed Black teen by a White police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Next, I conducted interviews with journalists in each paradigm to assess influences on their reporting and interpreted their responses using theories of new institutionalism. Overall, I found Traditional journalism broke with previous norms to more closely resemble the coverage patterns found in born-digital Journalism 3.0 coverage, which showed racism as systemic, foregrounded the lived experiences of the oppressed, leveraged social media to monitor and interact with the audience, and eschewed the professional norm of objectivity. This work illustrates a fundamental shift in ii Traditional journalism at an important time of national reflection on racial issues and it presents a benchmark for studying emerging Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 coverage. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables ii Chapter One: U.S. News Coverage of Race: Past, Present, and Emerging Paradigms 1 Chapter Two: Dissertation Design and Methodology 38 Chapter Three: The Stories They Tell: Coverage of U.S. News about Race 59 Chapter Four: The Storytellers: Reporting about Race in a Digital Era 140 Chapter Five: New Values in Contemporary U.S. Coverage of Racial Issues 202 References 228 Appendix A: List of News Articles Cited 243 Appendix B: Semi-structured Interview Instrument 253 i LIST OF TABLES Table Page 2.1 Outlets, Tools, and Dates Used in Search 42 3.1 Normative Criteria in Democratic Theory 62, 136 3.2 Detail of Data Set 65 3.3 Results of Searches 65 3.4 Sourcing Across Three Racial Moments 68 3.5 Narrative Across Three Racial Moments 90 3.6 Systemic Awareness of Racism Across Three Racial Moments 120 3.7 Changes in Coverage by Paradigm 137 4.1 Hierarchy of Influences by Paradigm 196 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS “If you want to change the world, you have to start with the narrative.” Dr. David Domke I’m not sure if Dr. David Domke knew at the time the impact that sentence would have on me, but it played a tremendous role in shaping this work and my identity as a scholar. I am sincerely grateful to him as my committee chair for his patient guidance at every step of this project, for his flag-mountain-river metaphors, for challenging me to do my best, and for helping me to find my voice as a scholarly writer. I am also indebted to my committee members, Dr. LeiLani Nishime and Dr. Matthew Powers, for setting high standards and offering me a high level of support not only in this project, but every time I had the honor of learning from them. I come away having gained different knowledge from each of you. I am grateful for the gifts of these things that continue to shape who I am as a scholar and as a professor. The richness of this work would have been impossible without the generous gifts of time and insights of my study participants: the journalists who agreed to be interviewed in the middle of and directly following a contentious presidential election. They spoke to me candidly and with such passion about journalism that their quotes still give me chills even though I have read them a dozen times. Their words reinforced that this was important work worth doing and showed me how much there is still to explore. I would never have embarked on a doctoral degree without the encouragement and regular “nudging” of my dear friend, colleague, and mentor Dr. Sheila Webb, whom I will always owe a debt of gratitude. And I would never have finished it without the enduring support, patience, and confidence of my fiancé, Claus Loos, who pushed me to get back to work when my energy flagged, supported me when life felt overwhelming, and was able to see how truly important this work has been to me. iii Finally, this work is dedicated to my children, Maren Nielsen-Thompson and Carter Thompson, who selflessly encouraged me as I pursued this degree while parenting them into their teenage years by myself. For all the times they were self-sufficient because I had to study or write and they pitched in without complaining. For all the times I was too tired or too stressed and they supported my efforts and encouraged me on. Their confidence in me kept me pushing through. I am so proud of you and the way you see the world with sometimes surprisingly critical, yet also hopeful, eyes. You will make it a better place by continuing to interrogate it. My goal was to love this dissertation work, to find it meaningful and inspiring, to hope to produce something that might make an important contribution in the field. Now I’ve accomplished the first two. I’m so grateful for the experience. iv v Chapter One News Coverage of Race: Past, Present, and Emerging Paradigms When it comes to selecting the most important news stories of the year, U.S. newspaper editors and broadcast news directors across the country have routinely chosen elections, the economy, natural disasters, foreign affairs, and sometimes even celebrity news in the Associated Press’ Top Ten U.S. News Stories of the Year annual poll. Issues of race relations are almost absent from the annual list. In 2014, however, journalists across the country voted police violence against unarmed African American men to be the top news story of the year (Crary, 2014, December 22). It was the first time since 1989 that a racial issue had appeared among the top 10 stories. 1 The ranking specifically noted the killings of Michael Brown, 18, in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, 43, in New York City, at the hands of police officers. Both prompted large public protests and generated significant news coverage and millions of social media posts, particularly on Twitter. These killings were not newsworthy because they were dramatically deviant: police killed at least 16 unarmed African Americans in 2014 (Quah & Davis, May 1, 2015), at least five in 2013, and at least 10 in 2012 (Desmond-Harris, June 8, 2013; Juzwiak & Chan, December 8, 2014). Therefore, the selection of the 2014 killings as a top news story showed a shift in news judgment that departed sharply from a decades-old pattern of racial issues being among the most underreported issues in U.S. news coverage (Heider, 2000). The following year, racial issues again appeared in the AP Top Ten U.S. News Stories of the Year poll. In 2015, journalists selected two stories about racialized violence. “Black deaths in 1 Associated Press, 1992; Associated Press, 1993; Barbour, 1989, Crary, 2001; Crary, 2002; Crary, 2003; Crary, 2004; Crary, 2005; Crary, 2006; Crary, 2007; Crary, 2008; Crary, 2009; Crary, 2010; Crary, 2011; Crary, 2012; Crary, 2013; Crary, 2014; Crary, 2015; Crary, 2016; Evans, 2000; Levinson, 1994; Levinson, 1995; Levinson, 1998; Levinson, 1999; Lythgoe, 1990; O’Neil, 1996; O’Neil, 1997; Schwartz, 1991. 1 encounters with police” in Baltimore, Chicago, Tulsa, and North Charleston, South Carolina ranked as the fifth most important story of the year (Crary, 2015, December 22). Ranked ninth was the murder of nine African Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina church, a crime that was notably deviant but ranked less importantly than the police killings. A White suspect who claimed affinity for white supremacist groups now faces trial in those murders. The trend continued in 2016, when journalists ranked “Black men killed by police” as the third most- important story after the election of U.S. President Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in the U.K. (Crary, 2016, December 21). The Associated Press description of the third-place vote read: One day apart, police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, fatally shot Alton Sterling after pinning him to the ground, and a white police officer shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop in a suburb of Minneapolis. Coming after several similar cases in recent years, the killings rekindled debate over policing practices and the Black Lives Matter movement. The 2016 poll was the first to mention the Black Lives Matter Movement in conjunction with the killings. As coverage of racialized violence has risen in salience in the minds of journalists, it becomes ever more important to examine how U.S. journalists cover issues of race in a changing journalism environment. This research draws on narrative analysis of news coverage to explore significant recent moments of news coverage about racial issues: the election of President Barack Obama as the nation’s first African American president and the questions it prompted about whether the U.S.