"I can't breathe": a discourse analysis of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in American media

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the media coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests that took place across the United States during the summer of 2020 through corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis methods. These protests followed and were in many ways a direct response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police. Media coverage of pro-Black or anti-racist protests is often highly politicized and racialized in mainstream media outlets. Because of this, as well as the media’s tendency to uphold systemic racism, analyzing the language used to describe instances of protest is essential in not only understanding the extent of the media’s power in shaping public perception of protest, but also in working to dismantle anti-Black beliefs. Eleven media outlets are categorized into three groups: conservative, neutral, and liberal; and a corpus of 125 articles was compiled for assessment, containing approximately 129,000 individual tokens. Descriptive statistical analysis coupled with traditional close reading methods revealed a number of ways, both grammatical and semantic, in which anti-Black racism and the condemnation of pro-Black movements are upheld by mainstream media outlets. Analysis of this corpus reveals that the neutral-leaning political sources are less likely to employ racist terms, but all of the biases and outlets covertly uphold narratives of anti-Black racism that work to invalidate the protests.