Framing Racial Protest By American National Newspapers:a Comparative Study Of The 1992 Los Angeles Civil Unrest And The 2014 Ferguson Unrest

Research on the relationships between mass media and social movements or protests has largely concentrated on the ways through which newspapers and television networks represent the anti-war movements, feminist movements, global justice movements. Few has studied racial protests, which are not rare in the history of the United States.The 2014 Ferguson Unrest, as the most recent one, reminded many of the similar racial unrests in America, among which the most famous one is the 1992 Los Angeles Civil Unrest. This paper picks up the 1992 Los Angeles Civil Unrest and the 2014 Ferguson Unrest as research targets. Using the method of content analysis and textual analysis, and based on the theoretical framework of media framing, this paper inquires as to how the national newspapers---represented by the New York Times and the Washington Post, covered these two unrests and if there exits significant difference in the coverage of the two unrests, given their 22 years' time gap.The research finds that the national newspapers do make some progress in the coverage. Compared with the 1992 Los Angeles Civil Unrest, the reports of the 2014 Ferguson Unrest employed more non-official voices, reduced the racial stereotypes reporting. However, in analyzing social context for the 2014 Ferguson unrest, the coverage overwhelmingly blamed police force/militarization, thus reducing the significance of race issues, failing to point out the public policy that has caused the chaos in Ferguson. This failure manifests the popular color-blind racism nowadays in American society, which still functions to defend white advantages.This paper contributes to the research on relationship between media and social protests, and on the influence of social contexts on media report.