Framing the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests: a socio-legal study of partisan news coverage

Sammanfattning: The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests brought national attention to the issue of police brutality against black Americans. Across the US, millions of people participated in the protests. This study was conducted with the aim to study news coverage of those events from a socio-legal perspective. The purpose was to better understand the nexus of social movements, news media, and the law through the concept of legal culture as well as discerning how the legal issue of racially biased policing was framed by the news media. 180 news articles from two liberal (CNN and NYT) and one conservative news outlet (Fox News) were coded. The study concluded that the news coverage was highly polarized. The liberal coverage was mostly favorable to BLM, while the conservative coverage was mostly unfavorable. Furthermore, the polarized news coverage contained different descriptive meanings of racially biased policing which reflected different moral priorities of Democrats and Republicans.