Black Lives Matter and the Press : How Major U.S. Newspapers Covered Police Brutality Against African Americans, from Rodney King to George Floyd

Do African American lives matter to the nation’s press? And if they do, how does the press demonstrate this? These are the driving questions of this book, for which the author employed content analysis of eight U.S. newspapers with national or statewide readership to explore their coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement. More specifically the research examines how these newspapers covered police beatings and slayings of unarmed African Americans, beginning with the brutal beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police in 1991, through the killings of these citizens after that, taking in victims that include the 1995 beating and ensuing death of Jonny Gammage at the hands of police in suburban Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the 2014 slaying of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and ending with the 2020 slaying of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. These narratives took in far more than the fatal incidents. They included local and national protests, some of them violent; political fallout from presidents and senators to governors and mayors; funeral services that drew local and national civil-rights leaders and religious figures; and neighborhoods impacted and residents’ lives upended – all reported in varying degrees of depth and focus by the local and national newspapers.