Watch the VideoLouis C. Greenwood Lecture Series
CWRU Law Downtown at the City Club
Due to the institutional arrangements between criminal courts, law enforcement and mass media systems, an anti-Black ideology is an intrinsic component of news narratives. This fact is no better demonstrated by examining mass-media construction and articulation of news narratives around the police-involved shooting deaths of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and the subsequent protests. By endowing certain institutional responses to those protesting (e.g., hypermilitarization) with a presumptive legitimacy, mass media advances a majoritarian orthodoxy under which “Whiteness” and social stability are re-idealized, and its own positionality as a mechanism of social control is re-affirmed. Mass media news serves as a basis of our social discourse, whose content enables us to build consensus (if not agreement) over myriad social problems, and solutions to problems such as the systemic injustices. It is thus critical to embark upon newsgathering and news delivery reforms which could contribute to dismantling majoritarian narratives that shape and sanction resistance against, if not violence toward, Blacks and other marginalized groups engaged in claims making through demonstration.
Speaker: Bryan Adamson, Director of Clinical Programs, Seattle University School of Law
