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Abstract: This study investigates newspaper coverage of contemporary riots. An analysis of the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and the Cincinnati riots of 2001 demonstrates the media's role in situating riotous activity within very specific frames. The authors contend that newspaper coverage of recent riots represents a shift in the way media frame rioting. Race riots of the 1960s are often linked to and situated within the social protest frame by media (the authors contend that a great difference exists between the Civil Rights Movement and the race riot). Contemporary riots like those in Los Angeles and Cincinnati are most often framed as ineffective, illogical protests against established order, and not as mechanisms for progressive social change.
Keywords: riot, race, police, brutality, newspaper, mass media.
Media depictions of U.S. riots have been remarkably consistent in recent decades. Despite claims of objectivity, balance and fairness, coverage has almost exclusively served to reinforce the need for social order while vilifying those who actively seek to defy systemic forms of oppression and authority, particularly when the participants are non-White.
All Americans were privy to a unique view, via the mass disseminated, "objective" gaze of the video camera, of Los Angeles Police Department officers beating Rodney King. When the same police officers were acquitted on April 29, 1992, Black citizens of Los Angeles rioted so violently that America was shaken to its very core. Contemporary rioters are not linked to an established movement. As such, mediated depictions of modern riots represent a significant shift away from the more balanced and sympathetic media framing of riots and rioters during the 1960s. During that era, the media generally associated rioting with the Civil Rights Movement and other efforts to secure freedoms. According to Button (1978), such coverage supported what was at the time a rather widespread liberal perspective on rioting -- a sense that violent acts are inevitable in the struggle to redistribute power in any political system, and that efforts toward social and economic progress should alleviate the tensions that lead to rioting. In contrast, the 1992 riots, which are not linked with any recognized movement, have been framed by mass media as largely futile and even as an ill-expressed rage against order -- a frame that clearly supports a...