National Media Coverage Of Black Lives Matter Had Fallen During The Trump Era -- Until Now
Over the past few weeks, the national media’s attention has shifted to the protests against police brutality that have arisen across the country following the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. That brutality and those protests, however, are nothing new — on-duty police officers have fatally shot about 1,000 Americans every year between 2015 and 2019, and black people are consistently most at risk of being killed by police. This year has been no different so far.
But the media hasn’t paid much attention to protests against police brutality or misconduct over the last few years. These protests, often grouped under the umbrella of the Black Lives Matter movement, featured prominently in national media during and after the 2014 demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri. In recent years, though, they have received much less media attention.
According to our analysis of closed captioning data of cable news broadcasts from the TV News Archive1 as well as headlines of online news articles in Media Cloud’s database,2 the phrase “Black Lives Matter” appeared less than half as frequently on both mediums between 2017 and 2019 as it did from 2014 to 2016.
We also ran queries for cable news snippets and online news headlines containing the words “police,” “black” and either “violence,” “brutality,” “kill,” or “killed” to get a sense of whether these patterns were also present in coverage of the underlying issues the Black Lives Matter movement seeks to address. The query returned similar results, with a large spike in July 2016 — after a black gunman shot and killed five police officers during a peaceful demonstration in Dallas — followed by significantly fewer results until Floyd’s death. (We haven’t run a full analysis of FiveThirtyEight’s coverage, but we certainly covered the recent protests far more than past Black Lives Matter protests during the Trump administration.)
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/national-media-coverage-of-black-lives-matter-had-fallen-during-the-trump-era-until-now/
