Transmitting Race: The Los Angeles Riot in Television News
Citation
Smith, Erna. "Transmitting Race: The Los Angeles Riot in Television News." Shorenstein Center Discussion Paper Series 1994.R-11, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, May 1994.Abstract
The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, popularly known as the Kerner Commission, was appointed by the late President Lyndon Baines Johnson to find out what caused a series of urban riots in the summer of 1967 and what could be done to prevent them from recurring in the future. As part of its report, the Commission studied news coverage of the unrest and concluded that the so-called "white press" had not done a very good job. Of greater concern, though, was news coverage of the story of race relations in America when there wasn't a crisis and the news media's failure to bring more African Americans (and other racial minorities) into the profession, a concern echoed by news media professionals who gave testimony to the Commission.The Kerner Commission found that television news coverage was characterized by two main frames, or themes; the riots were portrayed as a confrontation between blacks and whites, and the coverage emphasized law enforcement and thus downplayed the underlying causes such as poverty, racism and unemployment. Twentyfive years later, had television's coverage changed, or were there similar news frames evident in coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riot? This is a study of how "frames" shape the way journalists organize the facts in news reports to give them meaning. Research is based on a content analysis of television broadcasts before, during and after the riot on ten television stations. To assess news framing effects, the results of a content analysis are compared to official reports on the ethnic background of the neighborhoods hit hardest by the violence and of the people who were arrested and victimized during the Los Angeles riot. The main conclusions of this analysis are threefold.
First, the study suggests that television news coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riot emphasized the involvement and impact of the violence on blacks and Koreans, but significantly downplayed the involvement of and impact on Latinos. While Latinos comprised more than half the rioters arrested in Los Angeles and perhaps one-third of the storeowners who lost property in the violence, they were only the main focus of just more than one-tenth of the television news reports.
Second, the study found substantial differences in the nature of the coverage on the three major networks and on local news stations in Los Angeles. The network coverage contained substantial commentary on social issues while the Los Angeles stations focused almost exclusively on discrete episodes of violence and the restoration of law and order.
Third, this pattern is consistent with the findings on local and national television news portrayals of racial minorities in general. On local news, people of color were most often depicted as criminals or victims of crime, and on national news, they were most often depicted as victims of society. The study concludes by considering possible reasons for these findings, and the implications of this study for our understanding of race relations on television news.
Jurors in the state trial of four Los Angeles police officers accused of unlawfully beating Rodney King reached their not guilty verdicts at about 1:00 p.m. on April 29, 1992 in Simi Valley, California, but prosecutors requested a two-hour delay so television news crews could prepare to broadcast the verdicts live in Los Angeles. The delay, not unusual in widely publicized cases, illustrates the enormous role television news played in the King case, and the four-day riot the Simi Valley acquittals sparked in late April and early May of 1992. The focus of this analysis of national and local television news in the Los Angeles riot is what the coverage told us about what happened and what it meant.
This is a study of the news framing of the 1992 riot in Los Angeles, asking whether or not the themes that journalists used in 1992 were the same ones they used to cover the civil disorders of 1967, or whether journalists had learned the lessons of the Kerner Commission.
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