News of Baltimore: Race, Rage and the City 1138651060, 9781138651067

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News of Baltimore

This book examines how different media approached long-standing and long-simmering issues of race, class, violence, and social responsibility in Baltimore during the demonstrations, protests, and public debates during the spring of 2015. Contributors take Baltimore to be an important place, symbol, and marker, though the issues are certainly not unique to ­Baltimore: they have crucial implications for contemporary journalism in the US. These events prompt several questions: How well did journalism do, in Baltimore, nearby and nationally, in explaining the endemic issues besetting Baltimore? What might have been done differently? What is the responsibility of journalists to anticipate and cover these problems? How should they cover social problems in urban areas? What do the answers to such questions suggest about how journalists should in future cover such problems? Linda Steiner is Professor in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, USA. Silvio Waisbord is Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University, USA.

Routledge Research in Journalism For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

12 Mindful Journalism and News Ethics in the Digital Era A Buddhist Approach Edited by Shelton A. Gunaratne, Mark Pearson, and Sugath Senarath 13 Profile Pieces Journalism and the ‘Human Interest’ Bias Edited by Sue Joseph and Richard Lane Keeble 14 Journalism and the Philosophy of Truth Beyond Objectivity and Balance Jesse Owen Hearns-Branaman 15 Democratizing Journalism through Mobile Media The Mojo Revolution Ivo Burum 16 News Across Media Production, Distribution and Cosumption Edited by Jakob Linaa Jensen, Mette Mortensen, and Jacob Ørmen 17 Pursuing an Ethic of Empathy in Journalism Janet D. Blank-Libra 18 Journalistic Role Performance Concepts, Contexts, and Methods Edited by Claudia Mellado, Lea Hellmueller and Wolfgang Donsbach 19 News of Baltimore Race, Rage and the City Edited by Linda Steiner and Silvio Waisbord

News of Baltimore Race, Rage and the City

Edited by Linda Steiner and Silvio Waisbord

First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-65106-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-62495-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To all those who work for a more just world

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Contents

Acknowledgements Map 1: Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood Map 2: The neighborhoods of Baltimore City Foreword

xi xii xiii xv

J an e R hod e s

1 News of Baltimore: Journalism and Public Expression About a City’s Problems

1

L inda S t e in e r and S ilv io Waisbord

Part I

News and the Politics of Place

19

2 Renewing the Lease: How News Characterizations of Baltimore Realigned White Reign of US Cities

21

Rob e rt E . G utsch e , J r . and C arolina Estrada

3 Racial Threat and Local Framing of Baltimore’s Unrest

41

A ndr e w Roj e c k i

4 The Sociological Eye in the News: Covering West Baltimore in the Aftermath of the Death of Freddie Gray

62

S ilv io Waisbord , Eissa S a e e d , and T ina T uc k e r

5 Order in Baltimore? On Place-Frames in US Journalism B arbi e Z e liz e r

81

viii Contents Part II

Voices, Visibility and the Public Sphere

101

6 “It’s not a pretty picture”: Visualizing the Baltimore Crisis on Social Media

103

S tuart A llan and L ina D e nci k

7 Linked Fates: Social Media as a Framing, Tactical and Witnessing Tool in the Black Lives Matter Movement

120

A shl e y H oward

8 The Black Press and Baltimore: The Continuing Importance of African American Journalism During Urban Uprisings

139

S arah J . J ac k son

9 The Case of “Misguided” “Thugs”: Baltimore Youth, Activism, and News

158

Khadijah C ostl e y W hit e

Part III

Journalistic Discourse and Criticism

177

10 Historical Continuities in News Coverage of the Baltimore 2015 Riots and the 1965 Watts Riots

179

B onni e B r e nn e n

11 Journalists as Victims and Perpetrators of Violence

197

M att C arlson

12 Who Speaks for Baltimore? How Journalists Understood their Authority and Ability to Represent “Place” During the 2015 Unrest

214

Katy J un e - F ri e s e n

13 “I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray”: The Hero Mom on Trial L inda S t e in e r and C arolyn B ronst e in

235

Contents  ix Part IV

Conclusion

257

14 Why Baltimore Matters: Lessons for Journalism Studies

259

S ilv io Waisbord and L inda S t e in e r

Contributors Index

273 277

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the authors of the chapters in this collection. They ­enthusiastically accepted our invitation to join in the project, and produced learned, thoughtful and provocative pieces. They carefully considered our original questions, and produced drafts and final versions in a timely fashion. Their ideas sparked further reflections and nudged us to refine the key arguments. We tremendously enjoyed our conversations and appreciate their dedication. At Routledge, Felisa  Salvago-Keyes has been a patient supporter of this project and believed in it from the beginning. We thank her and everyone at Routledge involved in the production process. The two maps were produced by Helen Lyons, a freelance journalist and graduate student in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.  ​Helen, who is studying data journalism and graphic production, showed remarkable composure as we explored the best ways to visualize where various events occurred around the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. We also thank Zoey Lichtenheld for editing assistance and especially for work on the index, and Katy June-Friesen, who researched possibilities for the maps of Baltimore. Finally, we find inspiration in the words and the actions of citizens who demand justice in Baltimore and elsewhere in the United States and the world. With them, we share the conviction structural inequalities that perpetuate prejudice and hatred must be confronted to achieve a more just world.

Map 1  Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. Map by Helen Lyons

Legend 1 Mount St. and North Ave., where police first saw and pursued ­Freddie Gray on April 12, 2015 2 1700 block of Presbury St., where Gray was arrested 3 Mount St. and Baker St., where Gray was loaded into the police wagon 4 N. Fremont Ave. and Mosher St., where police stopped and checked on Gray 5 Druid Hill Ave. and Dolphin St., where additional police units arrived to check on Gray, who asked for medical help 6 1600 North Ave., where Donta Allen was arrested and loaded into the wagon with Gray, who was by then unresponsive 7 Western District police station, where a medic determined Gray was in cardiac arrest and later, site of the first protests 8 Pennsylvania Ave. and North Ave., site of numerous protests, as well as fires and looting, including CVS which was set on fire during the unrest 9 Gilmor Homes, the public housing complex where Gray spent time and was arrested

Map 2  The neighborhoods of Baltimore City. Map by Helen Lyons

10 University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center, where Gray had surgery, then died on April 19, 2015 11 Oriole Park at Camden Yards, site of protests and clashes between protesters, police, and baseball fans 12 New Shiloh Baptist Church, where Freddie Gray’s funeral was held 13 Mondawmin Mall, where students and police clashed after rumors of an after-school “purge” action appeared on social media 14 Amtrak Baltimore Penn Station, part of a route that was cited by TV news commentators who had observed West Baltimore through the train window

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Foreword Jane Rhodes

Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. But this is a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been able to make it yet. And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. (James Baldwin, 1963, p. 346)

Just four days before the 2016 Presidential election, a 25-year-old black man named Joshua Beal was shot and killed by an off-duty Chicago ­police officer. The details of the incident remain murky—a traffic stop escalates into an argument, weapons are drawn, shots are fired, and another black male dies. Like many of the police-involved deaths in minority communities, parts of the conflict were caught on a shaky, indistinct video that circulated rapidly on social media. It provides a piecemeal, yet devastating, narrative of Beal’s final minutes and the panic and despair of witnesses. Mr. Beal’s death is heartbreaking, but the even greater tragedy is the ubiquity of such events despite their increasing visibility. In 1892, the pioneer black activist-journalist Ida B.  Wells published her pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, to unmask the killing of African Americans that was shrouded in secrecy and denial. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, when ­legally-sanctioned racial segregation and racial violence were social and political tools of containment, Wells used journalism to confront white supremacy. “Somebody must show that the Afro-­A merican race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so,” she wrote in the pamphlet’s preface. The cellphone videos and Twitter feeds of today’s “citizen journalists” perhaps unknowingly continue Wells’ mission to expose the violence done to black American communities. In Chicago, where I live and teach, the killing and maiming of poor people and people of color by the state can be a weekly, even daily occurrence. Sometimes these are clear acts of self-defense, sometimes they are acts of malice, but most

xvi Foreword often they are a quick-second overreaction to the specter of black and brown people as threatening and dangerous. The events surrounding Joshua Beal’s death are instructive—while he was cast as the aggressor by law enforcement his advocates were also deemed a menace. Because of social media, word of the incident traveled quickly and activists from Black Lives Matter went to console Beal’s family at the site of the shooting, in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood. This predominantly white community, home to police officers, firefighters, and civil servants, was not the usual site for critiques of police power. The group of black acti­ vists was met by counter-protesters shouting racial epithets and holding a Blue Lives Matter banner. A couple of days later, black students at a nearby Catholic high school received death threats after they announced plans for a protest. On Election Day 2016, shouts of “get out of our neighborhood,” and worse, greeted a Black Lives Matter march through the neighborhood’s business district. That this confrontation happened at the same time that Donald Trump was being catapulted into the Presidency may be accidental, but it’s also prescient. Since the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the acquittal of the man who shot him the next year, there has been a mobilized, organized and assertive multicultural voice of resistance. New media as well as 1960s-style demonstrations, boycotts and sit-ins are being used to demand an end to the deaths, regardless of the causes or the culprits. As the Joshua Beal case and many other examples demonstrate, however, the backlash is long and deep—now extending all the way to the White House. White Americans who see themselves as aggrieved subjects, and who deny Ida B. Wells’ observation of black lives as “sinned against,” evoke White Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter as counter-discourses. We are, to use the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s formulation, in the midst of a “moral panic.” Hall’s landmark study of the emergence of a campaign against black crime in Thatcher-era Britain provides a useful framework for understanding the contemporary crisis in the United States. He noted that “each surge of social anxiety finds a temporary respite in the projection of fears on to and into certain compellingly anxiety-laden themes: in the discovery of demons, the identification of folk-devils, the mounting of moral campaigns, the expiation of prosecution and control …” (1978, p. 322). Hall and his colleagues carefully outlined the ways that this “crisis in and of ideology” is fueled by politi­ cal maneuvering, media distortion, and racism to orchestrate the public perception that blacks are the culprits, not the victims; that they are not worthy of protection or legal consideration. In 1970s Britain and the twenty-first century United States, this racialized panic supports a “law and order society” giving the state the power to stamp out crime and ignore or mute dissent. No series of events epitomizes this more than then the protests and urban revolt that followed the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of the

Foreword  xvii Baltimore police in 2015. The Gray case, which is investigated in this volume, follows an historical pattern in which black Americans’ anger and protest is met with denunciation, repression, and inadequate solutions. On a sweltering August evening in 1965, the California Highway Patrol stopped 21-year-old Marquette Frye as he drove around Watts in his aging Buick. The accounts of the incident vary, but central to the story is that when Frye’s mother sought to intervene in the arrest of her son, the CHP officer twisted her arm and handcuffed her while ­Marquette was hit repeatedly by another officer. The crowds watching the event spread the story of the police assault, onlookers began throwing rocks and debris, the Los Angeles Police Department dispatched 80 officers to quell the crowd, and what would be known as the Watts Riot was underway. Marquette Frye and his mother survived. But 34 people died during the uprising and scores were injured, largely (but not exclusively) at the hands of heavily armed police officers, sheriffs, and the National Guard (see Horne, 1995). Watts was the beginning of a cascade of urban uprisings across the country—many catalyzed by the death or harsh treatment of black citizens—which underscored the depth of their dismay and sense of disenfranchisement that had been obscured by government and the media. These conflicts, mostly confined to poor, minority communities, were spontaneous and lacked clear political objectives. But in their wake, new social movements began to organize. Just a year later, in September 1966, sixteen-year-old Matthew ­Johnson was shot in the back and killed by San Francisco police officers, sparking an urban rebellion that resulted in numerous arrests, injuries, and widespread property destruction. This event helped to crystalize the agenda of a group that would call themselves the Black ­Panther Party for Self Defense. Enraged by seemingly unrepentant police violence in local Black neighborhoods, the Party’s founders Huey ­Newton and Bobby Seale wanted to take a direct stand against the police. When yet another young black man named Denzil Dowell was killed by a white police officer in nearby Richmond, California, this became the Panthers’ call to arms. Fifty years ago they formulated a platform that called for justice and equal rights in such basic needs as food, housing, and education. They also demanded the end of police brutality in black communities and recommended armed self-defense. The fledging Panthers staged protests at police headquarters, strategized with Dowell’s family, and investigated the case. The first issue of their newspaper The Black ­Panther, published in April 1967, was emblazoned with the headline “Why Was Denzil Dowell Killed?” The Black Panthers were quickly thrust into the public spotlight, framed by the media as terrorists and anti-white (Rhodes, 2017; see also Bloom and Martin, 2013). Within a year FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would famously cast them as the greatest threat to national security. This set in motion a concerted and successful government project to undermine and eventually eradicate the

xviii Foreword Black Panthers. Their emphases on monitoring and critiquing law enforcement and their strategy of visible and vocal resistance resonate for today’s black freedom struggle. The Movement for Black Lives, an umbrella for several dozen activist groups, states that a priority goal is to “End the War on Black People,” including state violence and mass incarceration. Their mission statement invokes this history: We have come together in the rich tradition of our ancestors to imagine new ways forward for our liberation. We are dreamers and doers knowing that our work draws on the best of our history but must go beyond it to forge a fierce, free and beautiful future together that we can only imagine into reality. Today’s global movements for social, racial and political injustice were inspired by—and organized around—the tragic, complicated, and yet unresolved deaths of Freddie Gray and the thousands of other black men and women lost to us all. May we learn from this critical research in the quest for a better, more just world.

References Baldwin, J. (1963). The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial Press. Bloom, J., and Martin, W. E., Jr. (2013). Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Oakland: University of California Press. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., and Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillian Press. Horne, G. (1995). The Fire this Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Rhodes, J. (2017). Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (2nd ed.). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

1 News of Baltimore Journalism and Public Expression About a City’s Problems Linda Steiner and Silvio Waisbord

The April 2015 arrest of Freddie Gray and his death a week later from a severe spinal cord injury suffered while in Baltimore police custody precipitated political debate as well as an eruption of protest and rage about extra-judicial killings by police of black people. The question of police power and police brutality intersected with long-simmering issues about race and institutional racism. It evoked rage, recalling James Baldwin’s (1961) famous quote, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time” (p. 205). Of course, that the United States was not a post-racial society was already clear, notwithstanding the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. Baltimore dramatizes how, in a city with black political leaders and black police officers, race continues to matter. The politics of race and class intersect without class erasing race. And racism brings enormous problems: joblessness, housing discrimination, violence, and lack of access to effective education and health care. Issues of inequality and poverty that were arguably connected to Gray and his neighborhood rarely get sustained attention from news media. So Baltimore represented an occasion to reinsert old questions about the plight of American cities onto the national agenda; doing so returns us to a century-old tradition, going back to the Chicago school of sociology, of foregrounding the analysis of a city as a microcosm of major media, social, and political issues. A crucible is an occasion of a severe test or trial during which various elements interact to produce something new. In this sense, Baltimore became a crucible: multiple political, social and media issues erupted and then condensed to a highly intense form. “Gray” and “Baltimore” represent not merely one man’s body in one city but a story of race poli­ tics across the United States, with broad theoretical implications. The premise of this book is that news coverage and public debate during a particularly sensitive moment offers a prism for analyzing major national problems—not merely the vulnerability of black men to violence at the hands of police but also larger issues of structural racism and inequality. Correspondingly, the coverage distilled everyday practices and current trends of journalism and the news industry amid unprecedented

2  Linda Steiner and Silvio Waisbord t­ ransitions—economic, technological, occupational, and ethical. The news coverage quickly became part of the story: The media were players, agents able to grant and withhold publicity and status, subjects of critique and debate on which seemingly everyone had an opinion. So this book analyzes Baltimore in terms of its implications for contemporary US journalism, especially journalism’s responsibility to cover state institutions that avoid scrutiny, neighborhoods or communities that may not be the preferred audiences for media management, and questions about who has the authority, credibility and the power to tell stories and to be heard. How well did journalists do, in Baltimore, nearby, and nationally, in explaining Baltimore’s endemic issues? What might they have done differently? What is the responsibility of journalists to anticipate and cover racialized issues? Did journalists explain the public rage or merely depoliticize it as outrage? Moreover, the resulting analysis contributes to theories of journalism in its current state of fragmentation and ambiguity and of the relationship between contemporary journalism and public expression. Certainly a variety of people, including many local and national black leaders worried about the impacts of the coverage on perceptions and collective memory of Baltimore, police, and African Americans. Even President  Obama criticized broadcasters for featuring violence as opposed to peaceful protest, although he also criticized the “criminals and thugs” engaged in violent demonstrations. One director at the Center for American Progress recalled that “racial imagery goes a long way toward shaping public impressions of all involved in dramatic and unfolding news events” (Fulwood, 2015). Rashad Robinson (2015), executive director of ColorOfChange.org, the largest online civil rights organization in the US, used even harsher language in urging responsible journalists to examine the factors that led to a break in a community “absolutely at its wit’s end with a downright unlivable climate of discrimination and police terror.” According to Robinson news media do “nothing but smear and condemn protesters, rather than ask important questions about the systemic conditions that created this conflict.… The dismissive, dehumanizing media coverage … instead relied on tired archetypes of thuggery and ignorance, precisely the kinds of stereotypical characterizations that reinforce biases, leading to tragedies like the death of Freddie Gray.” Eschewing simplistic demonizing, the authors here consider what’s fair and offer guidance for covering urban problems. Below we offer some context for the attention to Freddie Gray’s death and the protest this provoked. We first summarize key moments in Baltimore history and put Freddie Gray’s particular neighborhood into the context of a few relevant concepts. Then we provide a timeline of key events, including ones both before and after April 2015. After recalling some of the initial complaints about the coverage, we provide an outline of the chapters that follow.

News of Baltimore  3

Segregation and Discrimination in Baltimore Racism and segregation has a long history in Baltimore. In 1892, trying to figure out how to market its properties to well-heeled white families, a property company building elegant homes in a fancy neighborhood asked its lawyers whether it could legally exclude black buyers. The answer was no. At the time, although a white flight to the suburbs had already begun, blacks were about 12% of the population, and were unlikely to buy the expensive homes. But migration by rural African ­A mericans in the 1870s, 1890s, and 1903–1910 worsened already crowded conditions in the tuberculosis-ridden “lung blocks” in Old West Baltimore, where half of the city’s black population lived. In 1910, a Yale-educated black lawyer bought a house in an exclusive (­exclusively white) section of the city, intending to use it for his office. Soon after, Baltimore enacted the first law in the US to prohibit blacks from moving to white residential blocks (i.e., blocks where more than half the residents were white) and vice versa (Power, 2004). A New York Times headline on December 25, 1910 read, “BALTIMORE TRIES DRASTIC PLAN OF RACE ­SEGREGATION; Strange Situation Which Led the Oriole City to Adopt the Most Pronounced “Jim Crow” Measure on Record.” The Sun, however, campaigned for the measure (Pietila, 2016). Several Southern cities, including Richmond, Birmingham, and Atlanta, followed Baltimore’s model. Even after the US Supreme Court struck down the law, white ­Baltimoreans continued not only to move to suburbs but also to use legal and illegal means to exclude blacks (and Jews) from their neighborhoods. In the late 1940s, neighborhoods changed dramatically when the black population increased. After the Supreme Court declared restrictive cove­ nants and other private agreements unenforceable in 1948, blockbusting, redlining, flipping, and subprime mortgages were all used to limit where blacks could live. Meanwhile, the Sun essentially tried to avoid alienating people, as showed by Pietila (2016), whose Sun coverage of the police and black communities constituted “foreign correspondence.” In 1969, as it had in previous years, the Sun covered blockbusting but deleted the names of specific unscrupulous real estate speculators. Baltimore responded to the 1968 slaying of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. in ways that were not unlike 2015. During four days of protests, arson and looting, 6 people were killed, 700 injured, and 5,800 people arrested. As did reporters in 2015, reporters dodged rocks and faced off with jittery National Guardsmen and the 1968 violence fed ­ merican on similar problems discontent and resentment in the African A community over economic inequality, housing discrimination, and perceptions of being disrespected by local merchants (Wheeler, 2015). Moreover, transportation networks connecting the city to the outlying county deteriorated, so industry and employment left Baltimore: From 1950 to 1990 the city lost two-thirds of its manufacturing jobs (Kasperkevic,  2015).

4  Linda Steiner and Silvio Waisbord The  suburbs became increasingly white and people living in inner ­Baltimore earned 66% less than those in suburbs. Jeleni Cobb (2015) asserts that white flight from Baltimore was less the result and more the cause of violent crime and poverty in the city. In 1975 four advertising men, responding to an urgent plea from the mayor for help in counteracting Baltimore’s poor image, invented the nickname “Charm City.”

Structural Inequality and the Problems of Sandtown The history of Baltimore outlined above attests to long-standing issues of structural inequality,  referring to recurrent discriminatory patterns in laws, policies and practices that are systemically rooted in dominant social institutions. These conditions impact housing, employment, health care, criminal justice, and education. As a result, people of color have unequal status and opportunities, and suffer unequal distribution of income, wealth, and material goods. More specifically, structural vio­lence  describes the avoidable harms done by social structures or social institutions  that prevent people from meeting their basic needs. Structural violence, as seen most prominently with respect to racism, is anonymous, undramatic, and insidious. Although the two forms are interdependent, structural violence kills slowly, Johan  G ­ altung (1969) proposed, as opposed to direct violence, which is quick and dramatic. A physician and anthropologist similarly worried about structural vio­lence, Paul Farmer emphasizes that poor people, racial/ethnic minorities, and other disadvantaged social groups who persistently experience social disadvantage or discrimination systematically experience worse health and greater health risks than advantaged social groups, who enjoy (one might say, nearly monopolize) social, cultural, and medical resources. Referring to women with AIDS, Farmer insists: “[N]either culture nor pure individual will is at fault; rather, historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces conspire to constrain individual agency. Structural violence is visited upon all those whose social status denies them access to the fruits of scientific and social progress” (2001, p. 79). Systemic structural inequality is crucial to understanding Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park (SWH), the Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray and his mother and siblings lived. Consider statistics, each compared to Baltimore City (BC) overall. In 2011, according to the 2011 Neighborhood Health Profile published by the Baltimore City Health Department, 96.9% of the SWH population was black and 1.2% was white, compared to 63.6% and 29.7%, respectively, of BC. The median household income in SWH was $15,000 less than BC. The rates of unemployment, family poverty, energy cutoffs, and vacant building lots were all double that of BC. Nearly 37% of SWH households were single-parent households, compared to 26% in BC. In SWH 6.2% of residents 25 years and older had a BA degree

News of Baltimore  5 or more compared to 25% in BC. The density of stores in SWH selling alcohol (which is strongly associated with crime and community violence) and tobacco was about twice that of BC. The number of juvenile arrests (per 1,000) over the previous five years was 252.3 in SWH and 145.1 in BC. In 2012, the city’s unemployment rate was 13.9%, but the ­Sandtown-Winchester rate was 24.2%. Another direct manifestation of the impact of structural violence on health care, the rate of avertable deaths was 50.8% in SWH and 36.1% in BC. Moreover, nearly all of the report’s statistics about problems in child birth and for babies were evident for Gray and his twin sister: they were born underweight and two months prematurely to a mother who reported using heroin. Nearly 5% of SWH ­children had elevated lead levels; Gray and his siblings had lead poisoning, which can impair cognitive function and increase aggression. The W ­ ashington Post’s poverty, inequality and social justice reporter Terrence M ­ cCoy (2015a) quoted a Johns Hopkins University pediatrics professor who said Gray’s extremely high lead levels “in all likelihood affected his ability to think and to self-regulate and profoundly affected his cognitive ability to process information.” Children with lead poisoning are six times more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system (McCoy, 2015a). In 2008, because of their lead poisoning, Gray and his siblings sued the owner of the house where they lived; Gray sold $146,000 worth of his structured settlement to Access Funding for around $18,300, as did his sisters. Companies such as Access Funding exploit and manipulate poor and disabled people who win structured settlements, with ­Baltimore a prime target (McCoy, 2015b). McCoy’s Post report, which won a George Polk Award, prompted action in Maryland. Among other things, people now must go to the courthouse personally so that the judge responsible for approving these deals can better ascertain whether they understand (including having the cognitive ability to understand) what they are giving up by selling such settlements. Unequal treatment in the criminal justice system is another crucial mani­festation of structural inequality. According to a February 2015 report by the  Justice Policy Institute  and the  Prison Policy Initiative, ­Baltimore’s incarceration rate is three times that of the state and the nation. This report named Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park the “highest” incarceration community in Baltimore, adding the obvious: the $17 million spent annually on incarceration is money down the drain and cannot be spent improving the neighborhood. Among the many consequences of segregation are prospects for upward mobility. Each extra year a child spends in a better environment improves her outcomes; children whose families moved to worse areas suffer equal and opposite effects (Chetty and Hendren, 2015). More specifically, of the 100 largest counties in the US, Baltimore County was at the very bottom. That is, every extra year spent in Baltimore reduces a

6  Linda Steiner and Silvio Waisbord child’s earnings by 0.86%. Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren (2015) estimate that one-fourth of the gap in intergenerational mobility between blacks and whites can be attributed to the counties where they live.

A Timeline of Violence Freddie Gray must also be understood in the more specific history of black men around the country who died at the hands of police. Some of these deaths commanded huge public and press attention. Others, perhaps inexplicably, got little. Either way, the sense of cumulative effect was palpable. Each new name—each additional news story—added to the litany becomes a source of rage, although the political dimension of this rage is often ignored. In 2014, the notable cases included Eric Garner of Staten Island, NY, who was put in a (prohibited) chokehold by the arresting police officer. Garner repeated “I can’t breathe” eleven times while lying face down on the sidewalk, where he remained for seven minutes, without getting CPR, until an ambulance arrived. Although Garner’s death was ruled a homicide, the officer was not charged, precipitating public protests and rallies, including by the Black Lives Matter movement that emerged after Trayvon Martin’s murderer was acquitted in 2012. Michael Brown, 18, was shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, MO. Brown’s death and the lack of charges against the officer sparked also protests, some of them violent, in Ferguson and across the nation. Tamir Rice, 12, was killed by Cleveland police after they mistook his toy gun for a real weapon. Among other 2014 fatalities: John C ­ rawford, 22, who was holding a toy BB gun, was killed by a police officer at a Walmart near Dayton, OH; Ezell Ford, a mentally ill unarmed man, was shot three times, in Florence, CA; Akai Gurley, 28, was in a dimly lit New York City public housing stairwell with his girlfriend when a rookie police officer shot him; and Rumain Brisbon, 34, was killed by a Phoenix police officer who mistook a pill bottle for a weapon. In Chicago, typed and handwritten police reports claimed Laquan ­McDonald, 17, was shot because he was acting “crazed,” lunged at police, and refused to drop his knife. A few weeks after the shooting, however, a whistle-blower told a journalist about a “horrific” video. Eventually, journalists compelled the police to release videos showing that Officer Jason Van Dyke began shooting six seconds after exiting his car and that McDonald was walking away, knife in hand, when first hit; MacDonald was shot 16 times in 15 seconds. Protests were held over the next several months. Van Dyke is still awaiting trial, the Police Superintendent was fired, and the Cook County State’s Attorney was not reelected. In 2015, Tony Robinson, 19, was killed by a Madison, WI police offi­ hillip cer who was responding to reports of someone disrupting traffic; P White, 32, died while in police custody in Vineland, NJ, the police

News of Baltimore  7 having responded to a call about White acting erratically; Eric Harris, 44, of Tulsa OK, was killed by a 73-year-old reserve deputy officer who allegedly mistook his own gun for a Taser; a North ­Charleston, SC police officer was charged with murder  after a video surfaced showing him firing his gun at Walter Scott, 50, who was running away, having been stopped for a broken taillight. Jamar Clark, 24, was killed by ­M inneapolis police who said he reached for an officer’s gun. Then, on April 12, 2015, Lieutenant Brian Rice, one of three police officers patrolling on bikes, made eye contact with Freddie Gray and another man. Gray ran two blocks before he was stopped and arrested. Officers found a knife on Gray during the arrest; a couple of hours later, when Gray was in the hospital, police issued a summons against Gray for possessing a switchblade. The knife that police found on Gray, however, was not a switchblade but knife that is legal under Maryland law. In any case, as Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake explained a week later, having a knife is not necessarily a crime: “It is not necessarily probable cause to chase someone.” Gray apparently did not resist arrest once stopped, and the officers claimed they did not use force against him. Three minutes after the initial contact, a van was requested. Videos shot by witnesses show officers kneeling by Gray, who is shackled and lying face down on a sidewalk. When the van arrived, officers lifted Gray up and dragged him over, putting Gray inside the back of the van with his hands cuffed behind his back. He was not buckled into his seat, although this was required by a BPD policy that had gone effect a few days before. A few seconds after driving off, Officer Caesar Goodson, the van driver, pulled over so that, police said, paperwork could be completed. While the van was stopped, Gray, who was described as angry, was taken out, placed in leg irons and put back into the van. The trip resumed and then stopped a second time. Gray was dragged up from the van floor and put back in his seat, but again not strapped in. At 8:59  a.m., another prisoner was picked up and put in the back with Gray; separated by a barrier, the two men could hear but not see one another. While the second prisoner was getting into the van, Goodson asked for backup to check on Gray. At 9:24 a.m., the van arrived at the police station, about six blocks from the site of Gray’s arrest. Gray could not talk or breathe. Paramedics provided care for 21 minutes before moving Gray to a trauma center. With 80% of his spine severed as a result of “a sudden, traumatic blow to the spine” (Collins, 2015), Gray had spinal surgery on April 13. That day, with Gray in a coma, Baltimore police defended their actions at a news conference. On April 18 hundreds of people gathered in front of the police station where Gray had been taken. Gray’s stepfather asserted: “If this happens to him, it could happen to any of you.” On April 19, having never regained consciousness, Gray was pronounced dead. After that announcement, the protests became violent. On April 20, Baltimore

8  Linda Steiner and Silvio Waisbord officials announced the suspension of the six police officers involved and the Justice Department launched a federal investigation into Gray’s death the next day. But protests continued. ­Baltimore  Police ­Commissioner ­A nthony Batts congratulated the protestors for being peaceful: “They’re sharing their thoughts, they’re sharing their concerns, and I hear them and I understand.” On April 23 Gov. Larry Hogan deployed the state police to Baltimore as protests grew. Outside the Baltimore Orioles baseball park on April 25, for example, protesters threw rocks at the officers dressed in riot gear. Rioters smashed the windows of police cars and storefronts. Widely republished photographs showed looting of a 7-Eleven and a looted CVS going up in smoke. After Gray’s funeral on April 27, city-wide rioting and looting erupted. Fifteen structures and at least 144 vehicles, including police cars, were set on fire and 200 people were arrested, despite pleas for peace from ­Baltimore residents and Gray’s family, including Fredricka Gray, his twin sister. Mayor Rawlings-Blake instituted a weeklong curfew. ­Declaring a state of emergency, Gov. Hogan called up the National Guard. The Orioles postponed a game; other events were also cancelled; Baltimore public schools and many local colleges were briefly closed. Peaceful protests also continued, including in several other cities. In Ferguson, MO protestors called for police reforms and chanted “No justice. No peace. No racist police.” A Ferguson Police Department spokesman announced that three people were shot during one night’s protest; all three survived and a 20-year-old man was arrested for one of the shootings. The events in Baltimore evoked expressions of hope for better ­policing—and better coverage of police-community relationships. But underneath the concern for Baltimore was an unease about where the next problem might erupt. In fact, police violence against black men did not end with Freddie Gray. Predictably, such violence provoked more rebellion. In July,  2016, a Baton Rouge, LA police officer, apparently responding to a 911 call that a man selling CDs outside a convenience store had brandished a gun, shot and killed Alton Sterling, allegedly after Sterling tried to pull a gun from his pocket. The next day Philando Castile, 32, a school-cafeteria supervisor, was stopped in a St. Paul, MN suburb for driving with a broken taillight. According to his girlfriend (she and her child were in the car), Castile told the officer his licensed weapon was in the car; as Castile was putting his hands back up, the officer shot him. He died in a hospital about 20 minutes later. Protests soon began and spread to other cities. In Baton Rouge, more than 100 people were arrested during a protest, including journalists, activists, and a nurse from Brooklyn, whose photograph of her in a summer dress facing a battalion of helmeted armed police became an iconic image of the Black Lives Matter movement. In Oakland, CA 1,000 demonstrators shut down a major highway for several hours to protest both shootings. After a week of peaceful protests, violence between protesters and police

News of Baltimore  9 in St. Paul broke out. During a July 7 protest, a gunman shot and killed five Dallas, TX police officers, saying he was upset with the other shootings. On July 17, a Missouri man shot six Baton Rouge, LA law officers, killing three of them before being killed by a SWAT officer. In August, 2016, three-day uprising erupted in Milwaukee, WI after Sylville Smith was killed by an African American policeman. Police claim that Smith had a stolen handgun when he was shot. Milwaukee police had attracted controversy for multiple incidents involving the deaths of black suspects. Compared to whites in Milwaukee, blacks, who are about 40% of the population, have higher rates of unemployment and incarceration; and lower incomes and lower educational attainment (­ Patterson, 2016; Workneh and McLaughlin, 2016). In September 2016, Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man, was shot by a white police officer in Tulsa, OK. A few days later, Keith Scott, an unarmed veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, died during an encounter with Charlotte, NC police. Protests erupted after Scott’s death; during a clash with police one man was shot and killed. Protests also erupted after police shot and killed an unarmed Ugandan refugee in a San Diego, CA suburb; his sister had reported that he was having a mental breakdown. Police later confirmed Alfred Olango had no gun, but was holding a silver e-cigarette. This is an incomplete list. It omits, among other things, police shootings of black women. The “Say Her Name” movement highlights how police brutality is gendered and racialized (and intersects with biases against trans and queer black women) and emphasizes that the media pay less attention to black women killed by police.  Factors of gender and mental illness as well as others relevant to Gray arguably came together in the highly fraught case of Korryn Gaines, 23, in Randallstown, MD. Gaines had earlier been stopped for driving without a license plate. I­ nstead her car had a piece of cardboard that read “Any government official who compromises this pursuit of happiness and right to travel, will be held criminally responsible.…” Gaines posted videos to Instagram of the encounter and subsequent arrest. Lead poisoning may have contributed to her aggressive behavior during that arrest; in 2012, Gaines filed a lawsuit in Baltimore alleging lead paint poisoning, which, her attorneys said, caused neurological impairment. Baltimore County police came to her apartment to serve a bench warrant in connection with her failure to appear in court over those charges and also to serve her fiancé, whom Gaines had charged with domestic violence. The fiancé left the apartment with their toddler son, telling police she was off her medications (Knezevich and Rector, 2016). But for six hours, Gaines, with her five-year old son, engaged in a standoff, which she filmed; she posted to Facebook, Instagram, and Snapshot, until, at police request, Facebook deactivated her  accounts. After Gaines allegedly threatened police officers with her shotgun, the police shot and killed Gaines, wounding Gaines’ five-year-old son.

10  Linda Steiner and Silvio Waisbord In September 2015, Mayor Rawlings-Blake announced that Baltimore accepted civil liability in Gray’s death and would pay a $6.4 million settlement to his family. According to Rawlings-Blake, the settlement made sense for the city, given the prospect of significant legal expenses, and would bring closure to Gray’s family, the community and the city. The six police officers involved in Gray’s arrest were charged with crimes ranging from reckless endangerment to second-degree murder. At the time, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby said: “I have heard your calls for ‘No justice, no peace.’ However, your peace is sincerely needed as I work to deliver justice on behalf of Freddie Gray.” The trial of the first officer to be tried ended in a hung jury. Apparently Fox News, CNN and NBC were so wedded to the narrative of potential violence that they found signs of a pending explosion where none occurred (Zurawik, 2016). After three more officers were acquitted, journalists turned to consideration of whether prosecutors could convict anyone in Gray’s death, and the odds against Mosby’s high-stakes approach to combating police brutality. Indeed, Mosby dropped charges against the last two officers. In any case, given the lack of violence or major protests, national news media lost interest. As the time of this writing, five of the six officers are suing Mosby for defamation, false arrest, false imprisonment and violation of constitutional rights. Their complaint accuses Mosby of exceeding her authority and making “statements for purposes of quelling the riots rather than prosecuting police officers who had committed a crime.” Meanwhile, Mosby says she is pushing for policy reforms to investigate and prosecute police misconduct, including by granting police powers to the State’s Attorney’s Office in Baltimore City, involving federal prosecutors in some misconduct cases, enacting legislation to allow prosecutors and judges the ability to reject defendants’ preference for a bench trial, and having civilian participation on review boards. Baltimore’s murder rate skyrocketed after Gray’s death; 2015 was the city’s deadliest year on a per-capita basis. The Washington Post real-time national database of fatal police shootings (http://wapo.st/1eY1FSK) showed that African Americans are 24% of those fatally shot by the police but 13% of the US population. Of all unarmed people shot and killed by police in 2015, 40% of them were black men, although black men are 6% of the nation’s population. About 13% of all black people who have been fatally shot by police were unarmed, compared with 7% of all white people.

Complaints About the Coverage One explanation for whatever were the failures by reporters turned on the overall diminishment of journalism, including in Baltimore, in the wake of well-known intersecting technological and economic challenges,

News of Baltimore  11 that is, the loss of advertising and audiences in response to the rise of web-based news, leading to loss of revenues and, soon, devastating reductions in reporter positions. This theme emerges quite explicitly in essays by 27 people (Hill and Broening, 2016) who had worked at The Baltimore Sun in an era when reporting was fun—“the life of kings,” as Sun reporter H. L. Mencken put it. Launched in 1837, the Sun was slow to recognize, much less condemn, racism, including in Baltimore. But the essayists are largely proud of the paper. Several complain that while the highly respected and admired paper survived the sale in 1986 to the Times Mirror Co., an indulgent patron, the subsequent sale in 2000 to the profit-minded Tribune company brought devastating cutbacks (ultimately 80%) to staff and resources more generally, especially the death of its foreign bureaus and the Washington bureau, and ended its commitment to first-rate journalism. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that The Tribune insisted that the new Sun be exclusively a local paper, providing local news. By this token, the Sun should have been able to report substantively on Baltimore. Certainly the local news ecosystem was challenged. A Pew Research Center (2010) study found that during 2009 the Baltimore Sun produced 32% fewer stories on every subject studied than it did in 1999, and 73% fewer stories than in 1991, when the company published an evening and morning paper with competing newsrooms. Pew’s point was that new media were not making up the difference: eight out of ten stories produced in the Baltimore local news simply repeated or repackaged already published information, most of its from newspapers. But bad reporting is not a foregone conclusion. One former staffer described the April 2015 coverage as “broad, energetic, and deep” (Banisky, 2016, p. 260). Indeed, deploying all of its resources—and suspending its paywall during the crisis—the Sun was able to make intelligible the rage of the Baltimore black community. Journalists are not, of course, directly responsible for cases of police violence or for the eruption of protests that result from it. But certainly journalists of various kinds were savaged—by other journalists, journalism critics, and non-journalists. The criticisms had to do with the sheer amount of coverage, especially what got attention when; and the form the narrative took or didn’t take. The textual and visual focus on violence drew particular attention. Journalists were criticized for their word choice, such as using “riots,” which implies chaotic and random acts of mayhem by unruly mobs, instead of referring to “protest” or “rebellion,” which would have implied principled actions with deep-seated causes. Many critics complained of a racial double standard, such that crime stories overemphasize race when the alleged perpetrator is black but ignore race when the purported criminal is white. Fulwood (2015) noted that news outlets called a violent shootout in Waco, TX a “brawl” and, at least in early reports, ignored that nearly all of the biker gang members were

12  Linda Steiner and Silvio Waisbord white. In contrast, the black protesters in Baltimore were “thugs” engaged in “riots.” Noting that media had ignored six days of peaceful protest, a protestor complained to MSNBC anchor  Thomas Roberts: “So now that we’ve burned down buildings and set businesses on fire and looted buildings, now all of the sudden everybody wants to hear us. Why does it take a catastrophe like this in order for America to hear our cry?” Likewise, a Baltimore City College student described in a Baltimore Sun op-ed how proud she felt “to fight against the deplorable powers that be” when marching with “justice-seeking  Baltimoreans in an attempt to bring justice, not revenge, to Baltimore.” But Leah Eliza Balter (2015) went on to describe feeling crushed “because the ­revolution … was not televised for what it truly was or is.” She accused news media of choosing to provide a “gross distortion” of the protests, emphasizing violence, flag burning, looting, and breaking of police car windows. Painting with one brush would be unfair. Journalists were not all the same. In summarizing media coverage of Gray, Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik (2015) said his respect for local TV increased but not for several national news outlets: some were “so ideologically oriented they might be beyond redemption.” Once rioting started, all the major media outlets arrived, but it didn’t make for better coverage. Before the rioting began, CNN used high-profile reporters to cover Baltimore prominently and frequently. During the peaceful protests immediately following Gray’s death, only CNN was in Baltimore with any serious coverage, and on April 24 even the CNN correspondents and camera crews went home (Zurawik, 2015). But Fox News ran only a few short reports on Baltimore (McMurry, 2015). Of the largest twenty-five newspapers in the US, twenty-three (data from two were not available) increased their coverage only after the protests became more dramatic (Williams, 2015). CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News increased their attention by 162% on April 27–28, when violence erupted, compared to April 25 and 26, when the protests were peaceful. Of course this can be put in the context of ratings. In the key demographic group of adults 25–54, according to Nielsen, CNN ratings rose 574% over the previous Monday and Fox News went up 121%. Attention on Twitter was limited before the violence erupted, but increased during the violence—mainly under the hashtag ­#BaltimoreRiots—and waned as the violence subsided (­ Williams, 2015). That is, when news media stopped focusing on the riots, so did Twitter users; on the other hand, the increased prominence of the ­#BlackLivesMatter hashtag and the creation of the hashtags suggesting social justice alliances between Baltimore and other cities suggest that Twitter users tried to reframe the conversation. Notably, the cultural critic Néstor García-Canclini (1995) describes the anthropologist as entering the city by foot, the sociologist

News of Baltimore  13 by car, and the communications scholar by plane (p. 4). We might add: the national journalist parachutes in. And then leaves. While the extra comma in punctuation expert Lynne Truss’s book title is incorrect for the  panda, the out-of-town visual journalist really eats, shoots, and leaves.

The Book News and the Politics of Place The chapters here raise questions for journalism, to challenge journalists to cover cities, minority communities, and conflicts between people and police in different ways. Part I looks at news and politics and relevance of space and place, particularly in the context of the city, indeed, a city with a large black population, including in comparison to other cities with histories of racism and police violence. Critical geographers such as Edward W. Soja and David Harvey persuasively argue that spaces that lack equitable distribution of resources, services, and access constitute unjust geographies. George Lipsitz (2011) refers specifically to how a white spatial imaginary creates “unjust geographies of opportunity,” with residential segregation simultaneously enlarging elites’ economic opportunities and power, and obscuring the privileges enjoyed. The primary vector for spatial injustice is race; with the spaces of black people marked as unsafe and unhealthy, and thus the people who live there as dangerous. Referring to newspaper coverage of the Trayvon Martin case, two sociologists argue that depictions of white communities as pure, safe, and calm spaces allow whites to link danger and violence to people of color and their neighborhoods: “Racialized constructions of safety and space are the dominant paradigm through which crime is viewed and the hyper-vigilant surveillance of people of color legitimized” (Varela and Moore, 2014, p. 39). Robert E. Gutsche, Jr. and Carolina Estrada analyze coverage from nine US newspapers of the Baltimore unrest, specifically looking at newspapers in cities that were home to their own high-profile deaths of black men by official or pseudo-police officers already before Gray’s death. Looking at news “here” from “there,” they apply notions of “news place-making,” through which journalists characterize geography in order to justify interpretations of urban disorder and decline that lead to efforts of and for order. They consider how journalistic constructions of place provide opportunities for ideological realignment, which contributes to white control of black space. Andrew Rojecki studies how eight newspapers from across the US framed the unrest in Baltimore that followed the death of Freddie Gray. Rojecki applies the post-World War II concept of racial threat, which posits that competition for resources and political power influences

14  Linda Steiner and Silvio Waisbord majority attitudes toward minorities to his study of how local public opi­nions vary by the the degree of separation from the white majority. The racial threat hypothesis predicts that black-white antagonism will increase as the black population increases in a given area. This is contrast to the “contact hypothesis,” which predicts that diversity and inter-racial exchanges lead to lower levels of antagonism and intergroup conflict. Silvio Waisbord, Eissa Saeed, and Tina Tucker make the case for sociological news stories, ones that invite readers to imagine realities beyond their own lives and provide insights into the lives of ordinary citizens and communities that otherwise are rarely covered. By putting readers in contact with others, sociological news helps imagine other people’s lives - their concerns, demands, everyday lives as well as their actions to overcome abysmal conditions and hopelessness. Freddie Gray offered a major opportunity for journalists to cover Baltimore’s “social question,” given that journalists can rarely explore the connections between individual lives and social dynamics and structures. Barbie Zelizer observes that in covering Gray’s death, journalists’ long-standing practice of situating current events in a particular physical location reflected an inability or refusal to situate what had happened against larger national patterns of segregation, poverty, discrimination, racism, police violence and structural inequity. Journalists thereby missed an opportunity to contextualize Gray’s death in a way that went beyond small, overly contained place-related frames. Zelizer focuses in three ways of invoking place—three place-frames—in the news of Gray: the neighborhood, the city, and the nation. Zelizer’s chapter analyzes the downsides, significant oversights, of journalists’ long-standing practice of connecting current events to specific locations as an easy way to render news issues more tangible and concrete. Voices, Visibility, and the Public Sphere Given increasing attention to how journalists understand their presence in their stories and how they make choices—whose stories they tell, what words they use to tell those stories—the chapters in the ­second section emphasize new voices and new forms of public visibility. The internet has enhanced the power—a word used cautiously—of specialized media such as the black press to offer alternative perspectives. Social media enable everyone to express opinions, share news, and debate interpretations. The authority of so-called legacy news media to offer dominant views, to confer (or withhold) visibility and status, and to present themselves as models of ethics and professional standards is under significant challenge, if it survives at all. Digital media are central to the politics of “sousveillance,” describing the watchingfrom-­below, often specifically and self-consciously, in order to monitor official and informal authorities who engage in “surveillance.” On the

News of Baltimore  15 other hand, what is increasingly evident is the dynamic, partial, and disruptive nature of voice: counter-hegemonic views may in turn be taken out of context, or commented on in ways that interpret, reinterpret, and, arguably misrepresent and distort the original position. The four chapters in this section examine various sites of news production and meaning-making. Stuart Allan and Lina Dencik take a diverse journalistic ecology as a starting point for their particular focus on visual images carried on social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. They look at the “amateur video” taken of Gray’s arrest, taken by one of Gray’s friends, which garnered intense public and media scrutiny. They go on to look at visual imagery produced by photojournalists and citizen journalists and consider the effectiveness of such “lens-reversals” in confronting institutions of authority and disrupting the politics of visibility. Ashley Howard takes a broad view of how black activists used social media as tools for framing and witnessing as well as for tactical purposes in the aftermath of the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray. She puts this in the historical context of how black activists have used media of various kinds to construct a collective consciousness—from narratives about life under enslavement to the post-Civil War black press. She contrasts the 1960s to the contemporary moment, including the speed and scope with which these narratives are disseminated, and their ability to give agency to black voices, as citizen journalists, commentators, social media users. Sarah J. Jackson offers a detailed examination of the black press, in its role as the embodiment of the black public sphere, to see how it made sense of the events in Baltimore. Analysis of the coverage from black run and/or black targeted print and online news outlets allows her to test and ultimately challenge claims about the declining ability of post-Civil Rights era black newspapers to contest mainstream narratives about race, violence, and national belonging. Studying how effectively the black public sphere engaged with Gray’s death and with police brutality offers a test of the ability of new technologies and new forms of journalism to extend the reach of diverse counter-normative viewpoints. Khadijah Costley White asks what youth themselves think of news media portrayals of their activism and indeed, what they think more generally about news outlets available to them. She interviewed teenagers from Baltimore (most of them African-American) about the news coverage of the protests, including the video of Gray’s arrest; since all of her interviewees themselves participated in protests, rallies, and vigils for Gray and against police brutality, she asked them about how they got involved in the scenes they saw laid out on TV screens, newspaper photographs, and social media. In particular, she wondered about their perceptions of mainstream media coverage of young Baltimore protesters as looters, criminals, and rioters.

16  Linda Steiner and Silvio Waisbord Journalist Discourse and Criticism The third section of the book focuses on journalists’ criticisms of their own performance. Structural racism is rarely covered and news organizations are ill-equipped to report effectively on race issues. An evalu­ation of news content in 2006–2007 found harmful misconceptions resulting from problematic coverage: “Clearly, the lack of comprehensive reporting on structural racism and its impacts is one of the reasons that so many Americans believe discrimination has been eradicated” (Frisby & Associates, n.d., p. 4), making it difficult to rally government, private and nonprofit resources to improve social, health and economic conditions. Of course, the suggestion is that news performance fails to match the lofty expectations for journalism, but the authors here are mindful not to exaggerate either the material or symbolic powers of news. Bonnie Brennen compares legacy newspaper coverage of the Baltimore 2015 riots to the Watts Riots of August 11–17, 1965. She notes that Watts coverage of fifty years ago framed much of the subsequent discussion about civil rights, race and class in both California and the rest of the country. The questions are whether key issues that got raised during and after the Watts Riots—police racism, segregation, class issues, and economic disparities—were also raised about Baltimore, and given the silences, omissions and distortions of 1965 coverage, whether the 2015 uprisings were covered any better. Matt Carlson’s chapter contrasts journalists’ coverage of the urban unrest in Ferguson, MO, in 2014 and 2015 and Baltimore in 2015 to analyze how journalists were introduced into the story as actors—or rather, how journalists brought themselves into the story. Journalists typically position themselves as detached neutral observers, but Carlson notes that an Al-Jazeera America news crew was seen as courageous for risking danger in order to bear witness to the violence perpetrated by Ferguson police and protesters. Journalists’ emphasis on the violence in Baltimore, was vigorously decried. Carlson explains these two sets of discourses, both in terms of the accusations made against journalists and the responses of journalists to these narratives. Katy June-Friesen notes—as did local journalists themselves—a certain lack of humility among journalists who presumed they could understand, know, and explain Baltimore on the basis of parachuting in, or even, literally, seeing it through an Amtrak train window. She notes that critics agreed in a vague sort of way that “context” was the solution to poor reporting, yet few critics addressed the absence of articulations of events by people in the actual local places being reported on. Moreover, critics’ calls for context foregrounded narratives of despair and community deficits, not unlike some of the coverage they were criticizing. Linda Steiner and Carolyn Bronstein analyze the implicit racism in the coverage of Toya Graham, the black mother seen slapping and hitting

News of Baltimore  17 her son to prevent him from participating in the riots. The video, originally taken by an ABC photojournalist, was circulated on social media, national and international television, and legacy media and activist and commentary websites. Steiner and Bronstein consider what logics motivated both the celebration of Graham as a “hero mom” acting out of love and concern for a black child in harm’s way and condemnation of her physical aggression as something “good” mothers avoid. In sum, the contributors tackle how journalists cover (or ignore) complex issues and make visible (or exclude) alternative voices. They examine how news outlets, including local and regional legacy news outlets, social media and new platforms such as Twitter, as well as specialized news outlets such as the black press approached long–standing but uncomfortable questions about racism, policing, violence, social responsibility, and social justice. As we elaborate in the book’s last chapter, the analyses point out problems but also achievements, potentials, and possibilities for journalisms of all kinds.

References Baldwin, J. (1961). The Negro in American Culture.  CrossCurrents, XI, 205–224. Balter, L. E. (2015, April 27). Baltimore’s real, untelevised revolution. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/1FsTho9. Banisky, S. (2016). Tribune: The rupture. In Hill, F. B. and S. Broening, The Life of Kings (pp. 249–260). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Chetty, R., and Hendren, N. (2015, April). The impacts of neighborhoods on intergenerational mobility childhood exposure effects and county-level estimates. Harvard University Working Paper. Cobb, J. (2015, May 11). City life. The New Yorker. http://bit.ly/1OR3HDY. Collins, S. P. (2015, May 1). Doctors disagree with the Baltimore Police about Freddie Gray’s spinal injuries. Think Progress. http://bit.ly/1F2mJCJ. Farmer, P. (2001). Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. Oakland: University of California Press. Frisby & Associates, Inc. (n.d.) Evaluating media coverage of structural ­racism. America’s Wire. http://bit.ly/2f3Kuzu. Fulwood, S., III  (2015, May 20). Race and beyond: Choosing our words ­carefully. Center for American Progress. http://ampr.gs/2fAGyYj. Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research.  Journal of Peace ­Research, 6(3), 167–191. García-Canclini, N. (2001). Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflict. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hill, F. B., and Broening, S. (Eds.) (2016). The Life of Kings. Lanham, MD: ­Rowman & Littlefield. Justice Policy Institute  and the  Prison Policy Initiative (2015, February). The right investment? Corrections spending in Baltimore City. http://bit. ly/2fmJmd5.

18  Linda Steiner and Silvio Waisbord Kasperkevic, J. (2015, April 28). In Freddie Gray’s neighborhood, more than a third of households are in poverty. The Guardian. http://bit.ly/2fAFCDD. Knezevich, A., and Rector, K. (2016, November 5). Investigative files provide new insights into Korryn Gaines’ 6-hour standoff with Baltimore County police. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/2fM4evB. Lipsitz, G. (2011). How Racism Takes Place. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. McCoy, T. (2015a, April 29). Freddie Gray’s life a study on the effects of lead paint on poor blacks. The Washington Post. http://wapo.st/2fzYlRF. McCoy, T. (2015b, August 25). How companies make millions off lead-­ poisoned, poor blacks. The Washington Post. http://wapo.st/1hFlT5e. McMurry, E.  (2015, April 29). How much did Cable News Networks cover Freddie Gray before buildings burned? Mediaite. http://bit.ly/2fQbpDH. Patterson, B. E. (2016, August 17).  These stats show why Milwaukee Was primed to explode. Mother Jones. http://bit.ly/2aZ2sAh. Pew Research Center (2010, January 11). How news happens. http://pewrsr. ch/2ejj4JN. Pietila, A.  (2010). Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Pietila, A.  (2016). Foreign assignment: Black Baltimore. In Hill, F. B. and ­Broening, S. (2016). The Life of Kings (pp. 69–80). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Power, G. (2004). Meade v. Dennistone: The NAACP’s Test Case to “… Sue Jim Crow Out of Maryland with the Fourteenth Amendment.” 63 Maryland Law Review, 773–810. Robinson, R. (2015, May 1). Media’s Biased and Dehumanizing Coverage of Baltimore Fails to Tell the City’s Real Story. The Root.com. http://bit. ly/2d9G75m. Varela, K. S., and Moore, W. L. (2014). He looks like he’s up to no good. In Fasching-Varner, K. J., Reynolds, R. E., Albert, K. A., and Martin, L. L. (Eds.), Trayvon Martin, Race, and American Justice: Writing Wrong (pp. 39–42). New York: Springer. Wheeler, T. B. (2015, April 28). City rioting evokes memories of 1968 unrest. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/1EnG5Pm. Williams, A. T. (2015, May 13). Did the media cover only the violent protests in Baltimore? The Washington Post. http://wapo.st/2eSAuZP. Workneh, L., and McLaughlin, M. (2016, August 17). ‘Milwaukee Uprisings’ Reflect Wisconsin’s Terrible Treatment of Black Lives. The Huffington Post. http://huff.to/2b3tvwB. Zurawik, D. (2015, April 15). Hard lessons learned in the year after Gray’s death. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/1XzQNuD. Zurawik, D. (2016, June 10). National media lose interest, switch storylines in Freddie Gray case. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/1tnvN1g.

Part I

News and the Politics of Place

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2 Renewing the Lease How News Characterizations of Baltimore Realigned White Reign of US Cities Robert E. Gutsche, Jr. and Carolina Estrada About two weeks after Freddie Gray died in police custody and droves of residents – many black—took to Baltimore streets to protest anti-black policing and official violence, police in Charlotte, NC, decided, in the words of one Charlotte Observer news story, to “engage in dialogue on officer-involved deaths” (Wootson, 2015). Citing the deaths of black men at the hands of non-black police officers in Baltimore, New York, Ferguson—and locally in the slaying of a black youth in Charlotte in September 2013 and in February 2015 in North Charleston, SC, when police killed what the newspaper described as a mentally ill black woman—the newspaper promoted “talk” about the violence during “community conversations” led by Charlotte police. At the same time, the newspaper editorially attacked Baltimore “rioters” for “inexcusable, but also unsurprising” responses to Gray’s death, with one editorial labeling residents as “the drivers behind Baltimore’s pain” (Charlotte ­Observer, 2015). Outside of the paper’s editorial pages, news coverage of local police outreach efforts to maintain calm on Charlotte’s streets highlighted the perilous and virtuous job of police but journalists sidestepped the systemic forces that might just make public actions in Baltimore a form of resistance against power structures rather than simply serve as signs of social strife (Jeffries, 2015). Indeed, in describing local police efforts to open “dialogue” about “when and why police pull their guns,” one news article described the police department’s “chief weapon: a simulator that allows people to see what it’s like for officers in a use-of-force situation” (Wootson, 2015). In fact, much of the Charlotte Observer’s local coverage of Gray’s death and related public unrest over the police department’s tactics that are thought to have killed him focused on a highly routine element of journalistic work, the “localizing” of news (Kaniss, 1991; Lindell and Karlsson, 2016). Days after Gray’s death and at the beginning of unrest in Baltimore on April 29, 2015, for instance, the Charlotte Observer explained that some 85 local police officers would begin wearing “lipstick-sized cameras” to record police interactions in the wake of “highly publicized shootings that have focused attention on police” (Off, 2015). Yet, in listing the shootings and

22  Robert E. Gutsche, Jr. and Carolina Estrada where they took place—“in Missouri, New York, South Carolina and ­Maryland”—the newspaper held off until the bottom of the story to discuss its own local ties: Locally, the deaths of two African-Americans at the hands of CMPD officers have provoked controversy. Jonathan Ferrell, 24, a former Florida A&M football player who moved to Charlotte to be with his fiancée, was shot and killed in September 2013. Ferrell had wrecked his car, approached a house to ask for help and was mistaken for a burglar. Janisha Fonville was shot in February after officers were called to a domestic dispute. Police said Fonville, 20, lunged at the officer with a knife, although a witness disputes that claim. Randall Kerrick, the officer who shot Ferrell, was charged with voluntary manslaughter. Mecklenburg County District Attorney ­A ndrew Murray ruled that Officer Anthony Holzhauer was justified when he shot Fonville. Other local news coverage by the Observer that discussed Gray’s death or unrest in Baltimore focused on the virtuous practices and purposes of local police, including comparing the horror in ­B altimore to a calm and uncontested public-police relationship in ­C harlotte— despite the city’s recent history. A May 2, 2015 news article headlined “CMPD has rules for safe transport of prisoners,” for example, reads as a promotional aid for police relations, stating, “As in ­B altimore, Charlotte-­Mecklenburg police have rules in place that aim to prevent deaths like Freddie Gray’s” (Gordon, 2015). The article expands upon local police standards on transporting “persons in custody”: ­“According to their policies, C ­ harlotte-Mecklenburg officers approach these ­situations with care.… As such, the rules seem designed with the security of prisoners and officers in mind.” In turn, and as this chapter argues, Charlotte’s daily newspaper and newspapers across the US that were home to their own “Freddie Gray cases”—i.e., ­n ationalized instances of racialized p ­ olice violence that led to the death of a black man1—used news about Gray’s death as an opportunity to distract attention away from local racial strife (King and Stapleton, 2013). Our analysis of newspaper coverage from nine US cities about the Baltimore unrest examines the role of “localization” of place and people to demarcate and characterize geography and its social conditions in a way that explained the need for local police violence and virtue in a quest not only to “maintain calm” on city streets but to maintain ideological control over the role of police and local undesirables ­(Derickson, 2016; Yancy and Jones, 2013). We argue that racialized news coverage

Renewing the Lease  23 of Baltimore in newspapers whose own geographies were home to high-­ profile deaths of black men by official and pseudo-police officers prior to the Gray protests realigned (and renewed) structures of white control in these spaces.

Myths of Place and News Scene-setting of White Supremacy The press have a longstanding role in the creation of dominant ideo­ logy in the US, specifically when it comes to explanations of people and spaces of urban environments (English, 2011; Hirsch, 2002). Moreover, the press function alongside corporate, governmental, and police institutions in advancing explanations of everyday life that benefit white populations—particularly in terms of social conditions within urban geo­graphies, thus creating notions of both “inner-cities” and of nations (Bhabha, 1990; Gutsche and Rafikova, forthcoming; Said, 1979). Lule (2001), for instance, analyzes the role of cultural myth in news constructions of “The Other World,” a space of racialized disorder placed within a Westernized (read US white) environment. The “othering” of space leads to dominant news discourse of judgment and measurement of vali­ dity in the narratives of meanings that come from within those spaces. Ideological examinations of place-making has been extended in recent years and appears among an interdisciplinary set of research about how domestic media discuss urban areas of the United States. This work contributes to delineation between geographic interpretations of space and place (Lefebvre, 1991; Lipsitz, 2011; Massey, 2010). Here we understand space as a geographic location with a particular social function and meaning, such as a baseball park or a school classroom. Place, however, holds deeper cultural meaning; this is where the baseball park becomes a geography of building nationhood as “America’s pastime,” and where the classroom is represented as a space for building community and breaking stereotypes through education. Certainly, dominant meanings of spaces and places, however, can be contested (Soja, 2010): baseball parks are meaningless to some while classrooms are oppressive to others. It is within the role of news myth—the journalistic storytelling of culturally resonant tales of similar situations to espouse meaning to a current issue or event— that some of the deepest meanings of dominant society are embedded, from issues of gender and race to those of nationhood (Schudson, 2005). Myth not only operates at a larger semiotic level of interpretation and meaning-making, but functions as a means by which to set local news agendas that, in turn, can also influence local socio-political policies, debates, and outcomes (Macek, 2006; McCombs and Funk, 2011). Even mediated local events can be shifted into larger, national spotlights of discussion. For example, the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon

24  Robert E. Gutsche, Jr. and Carolina Estrada Martin in 2012 by a white-Hispanic neighborhood watchman outside of Orlando, Florida, has been cataloged in recent media memory as a moment that forced public recognition of police violence against blacks (Gutsche and Rafikova, 2016). Contributing to discourse on the plight of black youth at the hands of police through visual rhetoric—similar to the open-casket photography of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for flirting with a white woman (Berger, 2011)—images of Martin in a hooded sweatshirt held spatial components of meaning related to the explanations for the violence. The local and national public discourses that presented the cases of Till and Martin as expressing Southern racism and violent sentiments thereby released Northern communities of responsibility for less-publicized acts of hate under white-issued guarantees of property and of home (Kurtz, 2013; Pulido, 2015). Popular and press discourse that began to connect dominant ideo­logies of the US to black-white hatred halted around the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, turning to specific issues of Islamophobia (Carr, 2016). Only recently have public and press platforms provided an opportunity to rekindle discourse related to anti-black racism as a form of domestic terrorism; this in itself is a war of terror with direct geopolitical extensions (Muhammad, 2010; Thompson, 2016). “Spatial turns” in recent work on news, digital media, and geography have reappeared scholarly discourse (Adams and Jansson, 2012; Couldry and McCarthy, 2004; Falkheimer and Jansson, 2006; Hess and Waller, 2014; Reese, 2016). However, much of this work ignores racial and class delineations of both ideological and physical spaces captured in a mediatized world (Grimm, 2015), tending to normalize a white space of sorts in which elite mechanisms of media coverage and racialized language in the form of metaphor and explanation serve as social maps of resistance to black identity of self and space (Hodges, 2015; McLemore, 2015; Yancy and Jones, 2013). It is the combination of critical race theory, human geography, and journalism studies that provides a dynamic intersection of meaning related to the role of media control (Monmonier, 1996), although much of this work operates within mainstream explanations that whitewashes intersections of news, race, and space as a form of cultural and social control (Giroux, 2015).

Media Acts of Surveillance, Control, and Policing Journalists operate within an interpretive community that measures and maintains a paradigm of approved journalistic practice (Berkowitz and TerKeurst, 1999; Carlson, 2006). In “boundary work” research, however, the word “community” retains a sense of spatial connection when the boundaries being examined operate within “hyper-local” environments or even in digital spheres (Campbell, LeDuff, Jenkins and Brown, 2012; Robinson, 2014). In other words, mediation of issues and events can rarely escape a geographic start to where an event or issue begins.

Renewing the Lease  25 Even in an age when journalistic “objectivity” has been replaced with “fairness and balance,” journalists function amid professional standards of observation, a “waiting and watching” of their spatial environments (Gutsche, 2015a). Surveillance of populations, “communities,” and geo­ graphies is core to journalism’s role and function (Shoemaker, 1996; Shoemaker and Cohen, 2006), yet surveillance is meaningless if absent of the cultural explanations for what one may see, particularly in terms of surveillance related to race and space. Debate about colorblindness in a supposed post-racial society—one said to be influenced less and less by issues and identities of race—and the role of journalism in it (Alemán, 2014; Bonilla-Silva, 2010; Feldman, 2016; Hodges, 2015) continues to be at the center of public storytelling about policing, policies of security, and notions of physical meanings of space (Macek, 2006). Police myth, as a set of narratives that revolves around the altruistic naturalized authority of police (Manning, 1997), also operates as a press function via myths of journalists as heroes, as agitators, and as citizens engaged in “policing” of the powerful and of the poor (Ehrlich and Saltzman, 2015). These narratives of power combine in a merged interpretive community of press-police in ways that establish and maintain messages of public and policing p ­ olicies ­(Gutsche, 2015). Often rooted in racialized interpretations of and for social structures, the work of journalists operates within boundaries of implementing oppression that are rarely challenged by journalistic boundary research (Duggans, 2012; Klaehn, 2005). In terms of spatial connections amid these boundaries of social structures (Burgess, 1985; Yanich, 2005), spaces of belonging and of banishment and the complexities of media systems that stretch beyond physical borders to related ideological ones remain tied to fundamental and socially conservative positions of thought and action that render communication as a central element of divides that the press purports to challenge (Beckett and Herbert, 2009; Graeff, Stempeck and Zuckerman, 2014). To address interactions of place and race in how Gray’s death and Baltimore protests appeared in local news across the US, we ask the following questions: First, how did journalists outside of Baltimore who had covered their own, local events of police violence cover Baltimore protests and police actions? Second, in what ways does this coverage identify a fluidity of racialized norms in press coverage of urban (read, black) and police activity? Third, what explains the role of locality and place-making in press explanations of what happens “here” through coverage of what is happening “there?”

Exploring Press Characterizations of Place and People Our analysis of news place-making in this case relies on press characterizations of geography, populations, and social conditions that appeared in 152 articles from nine city newspapers across the United States at the time of unrest in Baltimore (see Figure 2.1).

26  Robert E. Gutsche, Jr. and Carolina Estrada

Figure 2.1  Cases and Articles Selected for Study.

Each of these newspapers had covered police brutality and racialized violence within their own cities that had garnered local and national press attention in the last few years, beginning with the February 26, 2012 murder of a black teen, Trayvon Martin, by a white Hispanic neighborhood watchman in Sanford, FL. We searched online news data­ bases and newspaper archives for “Gray” and/or “Baltimore” in each of

Renewing the Lease  27 these newspapers for one month starting April 18, 2015 when protests related to Freddie Gray’s death began in Baltimore. We selected news articles, editorials, and wire material from the Associated Press and other services and read these texts repeatedly (Berkowitz and Eko, 2007), making notes and discussing content and story forms, paying particular attention to how news explanations of Baltimore’s unrest localized the event to the respective outlet’s geography and to coverage of previous local events of racialized policing (El-Burki, Porpora, and Reynolds, 2016; Gutsche and Salkin, 2015). 2 Through our readings, we identified three major themes of how local news descriptions of sources/characters, environmental settings, conflict, dialogue/quotes, and explanations—key elements of journalistic storytelling (Parisi, 1998; ­Schudson, 2005)— functioned to ascribe meanings of spaces from “there” to “here” in ­coverage of another space (Gutsche, 2014).

News of Racialized Narratives, Narratives of Racialized News By and large, local coverage of Baltimore protests in newspapers whose cities had their own instances of nationalized police violence against black men focused on information updates about Baltimore’s unrest and the potential causes for violence that were rooted in national narratives of racialized disorder. The Tulsa World, for instance, ran a wire story from The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson that focused on the role of parenting; it blamed disorder in the streets on disorder in the home, claiming that “[m]any of the rioters who set Baltimore on fire on ­Monday evening” were “teenagers” who, under the guidance of Baltimore city officials, needed parents to “get their kids out of the streets and stem the wave of chaos” (Tulsa World, 2015). Additionally, articles that ran in national newspapers, including The New York Times, repeated language from local officials that cast the violence as the fault of “thugs” and “criminals” (Stolberg, 2015a). This language used by national newspapers and wire stories that appeared in local newspapers, such as in the Orlando Sentinel. One Tribune wire service story that ran in the ­Sentinel, for instance, outright racialized news stories of figures (“teenagers”) involved in Gray’s case by using terms such “thugs” in r­ eference to protesters. It thereby placed the protestors in a context of racial tension (e.g. Mozingo and Phelps, 2015), as the term “thugs” frequently appears in news to associate urban blacks with crime ­(Bonilla-Silva, 2010; Gutsche, 2015; Macek, 2006). Discussing the political maneuvering of State Attorney Marilyn Mosby in charging Baltimore police officers with Gray’s death, an Associated Press wire story that also appeared in the Orlando Sentinel discussed how Mosby had ousted “an established white opponent last year, accusing him of being too cozy with police officers and too out of

28  Robert E. Gutsche, Jr. and Carolina Estrada touch with the citizens of Baltimore” (Nuckols and Meyers, 2015). The story added that Mosby and “her husband, a Baltimore city councilman, are black and live just blocks from the poverty-stricken community where riots broke out Monday following Gray’s funeral.” At the same time, newspaper articles overtly described Baltimore as a warzone. The New York Times described armored vehicles lining “this battered city’s main thorough­fares” while “thousands of law enforcement officers and National Guard troops worked to maintain order” (Stolberg, 2015b) although the same article acknowledged only “scattered reports of unrest after a day of largely peaceful protests.” Amid reporting that moved back and forth between official police reports and editorial rhetoric about the challenges of living in urban (read, black) America, newspapers ran articles that presented Baltimore as a warzone where residents were always on the brink of violence, such as in local reporting of Cleveland’s Plain Dealer (Ewinger, 2015). Meanwhile, major official players, such as the officials who activated the ­National Guard, were presented as calm, prepared, heroic, and virtuous peace-makers, such as in a wire story that appeared in the Post and Courier (Milloy, 2015). With the dryness of foreign war correspondence a Washington Post news article reported: “The troops were in Baltimore before midnight” (Hermann, Harris and Halsey, 2015). Interjected into the fray of official reports and distant voices of violence, local newspapers coupled national wire stories of Baltimore with reporting about how the protests threaten their own “peaceful” communities. And it is in this local coverage of city meetings, art installations, and school news that the Baltimore case became more about local racial order than about Baltimore itself. A Cleveland Plain Dealer local news story about a county commission discussion of public funding for arts and development, for instance, highlighted a speaker from the audience who, having referred to himself as “a black man in Cuyahoga County,” spoke about racial inequality in local contracting work (Litt, 2015). The paper characterized the man as being concerned with what the news­ paper called “this week’s civil unrest in Baltimore.” More specifically, the Plain Dealer quoted the man as saying that local inequality will make for “the next Baltimore—Cleveland and Cuyahoga County.” The article made no mention of the 2014 police killing of Tamir Rice, nor any other local and racialized violence similar to what was occurring in Baltimore. In May 2015 the Wisconsin State Journal published a local news article about police opposition to artwork placed in a library depicting “a black boy pointing a toy gun at three riot police officers who have their weapons aimed at the child” (Ehlke, 2015); the artwork was presented as becoming controversial “as demonstrations endure nationwide to protest the killings of black suspects by white police officers.” The State Journal mentioned that the debate emerged because of Gray’s death. As such, a police shooting in Madison, WI in May 2015 was presented as

Renewing the Lease  29 an afterthought: “In March, a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man in Madison, sparking demonstrations.” Articles appearing in newspapers from local reporters and wire services that either relayed information from afar or related the coverage from “there” to issues, people, and places of “here” generally cast Baltimore as a dangerous urban environment – even without the protests—and full of morally corrupt youth and black agitators (i.e. Milloy, 2015; Robinson, 2015). News coverage and opinion columnists alike contributed to overarching narratives of urban, black culture that, when aligned with stories of reaction to Baltimore in local spaces, created a widespread construction of place that justified and legitimatized violence to calm unrest. In describing protests in Baltimore as leading to “devastation” in “blighted neighborhoods on both sides of town,” for instance, a New York Times news article referred to the violence “part of a heavy blow for ­Baltimore,” itself characterized as “a long-suffering city that has in recent years shown encouraging signs of a comeback” (Shane, 2015). Indeed, the national paper quoted a Baltimore resident who discussed systemic conditions that influence her neighborhood: “This is the land that time forgot,” the resident said. She continued, referring to residents and officials, “They want to act like the CVS is the Taj Mahal. They have dilapidated buildings everywhere. They have never invested in the people. In fact, it’s divested. They take every red cent they can from poor black people and put it into the Inner Harbor.” Press legitimization of normalized disorder and oppression in ­Baltimore neighborhoods emerged in national news analyses that were republished locally, preparing a palette of racialized explanations for protests and of justifications for state-issued violence in Baltimore and at home that would curb the immediate conflict. These narratives of racialized disorder painted a picture of ideological meaning for local audiences across the country that were judged in terms of “civilized” responses to injustice—such as in the case of a Washington Post column that appeared in the Tulsa World, asking in its fatalistic headline, “Will anything change in Baltimore?” (Dvorak, 2015b). These were balanced against questions posed locally, such as by one news Tulsa World column: “Through the emotional toll, how has Tulsa escaped the destruction other cities are experiencing?” (Graham, 2015). The newspaper provided this answer: “a quick admission by the ­Sheriff’s Office that the death was an accident, the tenor set by the victim’s family, nonviolent attitudes of demonstration organizers, the arrest and charge of Bates and the decades-long work in reconciliation led by several organizations and faith leaders.” And amid claims from community organizers, city officials, and residents that efforts to bring people “together” have kept the peace, the story ends with one local pastor’s tempered comments about the relationship between racially diverse North Tulsa and the larger city: “North Tulsa has been the stepchild of this

30  Robert E. Gutsche, Jr. and Carolina Estrada community,” the pastor told the newspaper. “There is a level of frustration that comes with that and hostility among people. But the voices of reason have been able to prevail so far.”

Localizing National Justifications of “Virtuous” Violence Through a combination of hometown and national voices in reporting and opinion pieces, local newspapers presented Baltimore as home to racialized disorder. This was exemplified in claims of poor parenting and out-of-control youth that were included in an op-ed from the Wisconsin State Journal (Henck, 2015), in a local news column in ­Cleveland’s Plain Dealer (Morris, 2015), and in an editorial in C ­ harleston’s Post and Courier (McArdle, 2015). A Washington Post column republished in the Tulsa World, for instance, mentioned a “blighted, joyless place of boarded up buildings in one of Baltimore’s poorest areas” (Dvorak, 2015a) and told stories of reckless and untamed youth through the journalist’s first-person tale from Baltimore: “I wanted to ask the protesting kids what they were feeling. I got my answer when one of them knocked into me and took my phone and as I chased after him, others knocked me to the ground. Some of them had rocks and bricks in their hands.” But journalists also identified counter-narratives to dominant press explanations of black responsibility in the creation of social unrest, including arguments about systemic economic and political policies that oppress black communities, such as in a Tulsa World news column (Jones, 2015), in a republished wire story (Tulsa World, 2015a), and in a Washington Post news article (Schwartzman, 2015). An ­O rlando Sentinel news story, for instance, featured local civic leaders who described finding justice through religion and faith groups ­(Kunerth, 2015), while news articles in The New York Times provided perspectives from personal stories about racial discrimination by police ­(Stolberg, 2015b; 2015c). A Washington Post news article described the role of perceptions of race, power, and policing in Baltimore neighborhoods (Parker, 2015). Yet, local newspapers maintained that dominant narratives of black “culture” and “violence” were influencers that not only led to social unrest in Baltimore but that could bleed out into streets across the country. The World, for example, reported on controversy in a Tulsa high school: a student used a “racial slur” in a private tweet about the “Baltimore riots” (McCracken, 2015). While the tweet was not republished in the newspaper, the student’s apology was. The student also was quoted saying, “I am proud of my country and disappointed in the people in it.” In another case of local controversy related to the Baltimore unrest—a sign that the faraway disorder can (and does) make its way “home”—the Plain Dealer ran a story about how Cleveland teachers allayed their

Renewing the Lease  31 students’ concerns about a pending verdict in the prosecution of a ­Cleveland police officer charged in 2012 with shooting and killing two black homeless people (Ewinger, 2015). The Plain Dealer quoted a letter from school leaders who urged teachers to “talk with your students about how they might be feeling, how they think students should or could respond, why they think students in Baltimore responded the way they did, what students might be able to do in a positive way to make their voices heard.” (Ewinger, 2015, emphasis added). The reporter added parenthetically that a school district communications officer said “the letter is ‘just to keep the staff mindful of what we see in other cities’” (emphasis added). In other words, the article served as a press release of officials wanting to maintain local control because of unrest elsewhere. Indeed, the online version of the article included a photograph of firefighters observing a “blaze” in Baltimore; the caption mentioned rioters who “plunged part of Baltimore into chaos, torching a pharmacy, setting police cars ablaze and throwing bricks at officers.” By ignoring narratives of political and economic oppression as underlying causes for anti-black policing and social conditions in Baltimore— and by slighting the power of protest as personal and collective agency to create change—local newspapers rationalized “virtuous” violence from “virtuous” police (der Derian, 2009). This diverted attention away from concerns of white power structures, and to the need for increased control. Cleveland Plain Dealer news columnist Phillip Morris (2015a), for instance, used his assessment of the “motherly” instinct shown by Toya Graham, a Baltimore mother who slapped and pulled her son out of the protests on live television, to argue for control. In a column headlined, “What a mother bear can teach about maternal skills, respect and survival,” Morris equated Graham’s actions to an “angry mother bear” who had charged at tourists in Yellowstone National Park. Morris added, “We need more two-legged mother bears” to model good parenting in homes of black families. “It is often said that the pen is mightier than the sword. Now the camera is potentially more powerful than both. But each of these tools fails in comparison to the power of a committed mother bear ushering her children across the bridge of life.” Longstanding connections between animalistic or savage behavior and black folk (Ewen and Ewen, 2008) recur in local news­papers’ over­ altimore arching presentations of unapproved behaviors of blacks in B and elsewhere, such as in an editorial in the Plain Dealer, titled, “Poor communication and pointless rioting” (Plain Dealer,  2015). All nine newspapers reflected on how such a “lack of values” is not just ­national in nature, but local. A St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial, for example, found local lessons in the challenge of finding “rays of hope” in recovery from unrest in Baltimore: “This is our challenge, and it is what Baltimore, and the nation, can learn from Ferguson” (Post-­Dispatch, 2015).

32  Robert E. Gutsche, Jr. and Carolina Estrada

Applying “Police Myth” to Explain White Crime “There” and “Here” By setting a stage of disorder and fear that could (and did) spread into communities outside of Baltimore, newspapers compared their communities to Baltimore, presented as a singular place that was under racialized duress and so required a mythically virtuous police force and action (violence) to create calm. A Plain Dealer editorial, for instance, characterized the violence in Baltimore as an unwarranted revolt against institutional order: “Demonstrators—and we use that term loosely— have looted and burned buildings, and fought with police, injuring at least 20, in a senseless spree of criminal behavior” (Plain Dealer, 2015). In an example of boosting the authority of physical force in creating calm, a New York Times news story about the lifting of the curfew and sending home the National Guard stated that in Baltimore the “deployment of thousands of soldiers and the curfew … had been central to the peace strategy” of the mayor and governor (Blinder, Fausset, and Stewart, 2015, emphasis added). In fact, local newspapers consistently published that “peace” was central to policing in both Baltimore and at home; moreover, “peace,” while never defined, was directly affiliated with policing. An editorial published in Charleston, South Carolina justified military style policing in Baltimore by comparing the events there to other spaces in the nation: “Recall though that in Ferguson, MO., the authorities were faulted at first for staging a ‘militaristic’ show of force at protests over a white policeman’s killing of black 18-year-old Michael Brown. Then they were blamed for not exerting enough control to quell riots” (Post and Courier, 2015). Such writing confused the situation by criti­ quing state-issued violence while also praising it, ultimately justifying police actions. For instance, the Charleston newspaper ran a syndicated ­column from Bloomberg View that argued that even within a world of “the white power structure,” violence can change little. “ ­ Oppression does not usually lead to rioting, and when rioting does happen, oppression is not always its target. Sports fans riot—sometimes after a win, sometimes after a loss. Economically oppressed blacks have rioted against the white power structure; so have whites against their city’s black population.” (McArdle, 2015). The above-mentioned two articles appeared alongside news of a recent “crime spree” by teenagers in downtown Charleston, which city officials described as having, in the words of one news story, “absolutely no con­ altimore” nection to the local shooting of Walter Scott or the violence in B (Boughton, 2015b). Still, the police chief was quoted as saying that the local violence “was an aberration and certainly something that was unusual and we hope never happens again in the city.” A few days prior to the local violence, that Post and Courier news article reported that the

Renewing the Lease  33 shooting of Scott “may have been what sparked a Monday night town hall event in North Charleston,” but “the violence in Baltimore is what turned the discussion into a comparison of two embattled communities” (Boughton, 2015a). In a story datelined Milwaukee published in Madison’s Wisconsin State Journal, an Associated Press reporter referenced local unrest related to the police killing of a man in 2014, to highlight a “march [that] came as Baltimore recovers from rioting and looting” amid “protests and rallies in Milwaukee over the last year [that] have been largely peaceful” (Antlfinger, 2015). A St. Louis Post-Dispatch news article reported that business districts were slowly mending after “riots” related to protests in nearby Ferguson (Gallagher, 2015). And while the Post-Dispatch listed local initiatives showcasing how the region is “beginning to change,” journalists there—as at other local newspapers—challenged the degree to which their city’s strife resembled that of Baltimore. “That is not to say that Ferguson (or, more broadly St. Louis) is Baltimore,” one editorial claimed (Post-Dispatch, 2015). Neither the victims nor the “cases and circumstances” were the same, the newspaper asserted; and the “respective histories of the two cities are significantly different.” In Cleveland, a headline for a news story about a verdict expected in late April or early May 2015 on a police-involved shooting from 2012 quoted Cleveland’s mayor saying officials are “ready for ‘a variety of contingencies’” (Naymik, 2015). The reporter also praised local officials for their ability to control protest: “Jackson’s administration and the police department have successfully managed protests in response to the November police shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by clearing the way for demonstrators and letting them talk to the police chief and other officials.” In the Plain Dealer some news stories at the time focused on providing the public “pointers on handling protestors” (Pelzer, 2015), while other news stories reported the frustration of Rice’s mother, who cried, “How long do I have to wait for justice?” (Shaffer and Heisig, 2015). Elsewhere, a Tulsa news columnist related the protests in Baltimore and ­Ferguson to how “Tulsa has survived the type of anger leading communities to ashes” (Graham, 2015) that resulted from both an April 2, 2015 “accidental” shooting of a black man by a white volunteer ­sheriff’s ­deputy, and a 1921 “race riot” that destroyed much of one Tulsa neighborhood following violence against a black youth (Hirsch, 2002; ­Marshall, 2015). Comparing the racialized violence of the April 2 event and the 1921 riot, the columnist suggested that local protests related to the April 2, 2015 shooting appeared as a “racially, economically and generationally mixed crowd” that gathered “to protest for change.” “No  blows have been exchanged, no glass broken, no property damaged, no fires set and no looting,” the columnist insisted, and indicated that Tulsa had become civilized in its protesting, including when “[t]hree years ago, Tulsa had

34  Robert E. Gutsche, Jr. and Carolina Estrada a soul-searching moment when two men gunned down five black men, killing three, because of their race. Tulsa didn’t explode. The city held firm with an even hand.” Newspapers that described “civilized” local protesting of police-involved shootings—if residents protested at all—used local scenes of “calm” as a way to further the contrast to the radical actions of B ­ altimore residents. Typical of such local racialized violence was an Orlando ­Sentinel news article that, during the Baltimore protests, mentioned a man who stood in front of an Orlando courthouse to “show support for Baltimore residents” (Lotan and Comas, 2015). Like other press coverage in local newspapers at the time, characterizations of protestors whitewashed descriptions of local institutionalized racism that contributed to local killings at the hands of police or pseudo police, such as in the case of Trayvon Martin near ­Orlando and a volunteer reserve officer in Tulsa. Three days after the story of the Baltimore supporter appeared, the Sentinel reported that ­Orlando police officers would begin to wear body cameras; the paper explicitly called this a solution to ease “tension between police and the public [that] escalated nationally, erupting into protests and violence, including in Ferguson, Mo., and … Baltimore” (Weiner, 2015). Apparently, except for a passing mention that four area police officers had been charged with the use of excessive force locally, the Orlando area—like the other geo­ graphies home to their own instances of local racialized ­policing—­escaped having to respond to its striking similarities to Baltimore.

Conclusion News place-making did ideological work in shaping coverage of Freddie Gray’s death and subsequent protests in Baltimore that appeared in local news across the US. Narratives and explanations of racialized policing and subsequent protests in Baltimore that appeared in news of local conflict exemplified the fluidity of national, racialized narratives of naturalized police authority to control urban spaces. Furthermore, words like “thugs” and characterizations of poor parenting—rather than narratives of oppression and racialized violence by police—appeared in wire stories that provided both information and ideological explanations about unrest in Baltimore as well as in local news reporting about local conflict. Such use of national press explanations in local coverage and coverage created independently by local journalists reveals the power of widespread and dominant ideological explanations used in the journalistic community to express ideas such as “police myth”—that which presents police as a natural and virtuous authority to institute social control (Manning, 1997)—and of other myths related to urban conditions and cultures. Indeed, a correlation between press and police narratives of police violence (e.g. Araiza, Sturm, Istek, and Bock, 2016) created journalistic boundaries for authorized, official explanations of social order via force.

Renewing the Lease  35 Here force against a portion of the citizenry is viewed as justified and necessary. More specifically, this chapter shows the role of the press in borrowing from and applying a version of “police myth” as a form of news myth used to complicate the geographic nature of the Baltimore story in ways that made the story appear as a local issue absent of larger, systemic issues. Our second conceptual contribution concerns the power of news place-making as a process by which journalists characterize geo­ graphy in order to justify interpretations of urban disorder and decline that lead to efforts on behalf of order. We thereby extend the notion that journalistic constructions of place construct dominant explanations of social conditions in everyday news and that these provide opportunities for local white control of urban black space. And while journalists localize news as a way to relate information from afar to audiences at home, the role of local news storytelling, including of news from far way, then, becomes a territory for characterizing people and places from “here” and “there” within an arena of control and subjugation. The processes of connecting what happens “there” to “here” warrants further examination as an ideological indoctrination not to local community needs, but as a means to maintain national power. These explanations of everyday life borrowed from far away provide a sense of community belonging beyond local boundaries. In this case, newspapers in cities with their own national, racialized instances of police violence against black men, with the assistance of wire services and digital access to tweets, public statements, and television broadcasts of voices close to the proximity of the news event, covered Baltimore protests not only as a news story deserving attention but as a means to justify local police actions and to prod public examinations locally of race, place, and policing.

Notes 1 We recognize and sympathize with the police-involved killings of black women, which have also gained national press attention, and we recognize that many more have not been publicized (see Embrick, 2015; Gross and Hicks, 2015). For our current purpose, however, we focus on specific cases that have been tied together in coverage of police violence against black men (see Figure 2.1). 2 To be clear, while the role of the Associated Press and other wire services is to provide coverage of spaces spanning wide geographies, the material is selected for publication by local journalists and often undergoes editing to reflect local values and information (Kaniss, 1991).

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3 Racial Threat and Local Framing of Baltimore’s Unrest Andrew Rojecki

The 2016 presidential campaign showed that race continues to be an active ingredient in American politics. The question, as always, is what form it takes at any given time. As Malcolm X quipped, “racism is like a Cadillac, they bring out a new model every year.” Donald Trump’s remarks in the summer of 2016 to black members of what were predominantly white audiences provided a picture of the latest model: “You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 per cent of your youth is unemployed—what the hell do you have to lose?” Some media commentators interpreted Trump’s comments as a hamhanded attempt at courting black voters frustrated by continuing racial inequality and injustice. An alternative interpretation declared that Trump was instead attempting to win over white voters whose picture of African American life in general was based on an image of life in a black ghetto and the complicity of its residents in maintaining them. A  ­plausible network of associations in the mind of an unsympathetic white begins with this image and leads to images of lawlessness in Ferguson, MO, Baltimore, and other segregated cities. There local chapters of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement staged demonstrations to protest the killing of black men by the police. Critics of BLM called out the movement for its seeming indifference to the high incidence of homicides committed by blacks themselves (black on black crime). Thus the chain of associations ends with an image of black criminality and movement hypocrisy. In a stroke, an overgeneralization is legitimated and a movement delegitimized. The thesis of this chapter is that these chains of associations are more likely to be forged in locales where racial segregation is high and where crime is a principle driver of racial animus. Although crime is much less prominent in the national media than in it was in the 1990s (Dixon and Williams, 2015), it continues to draw local media attention (Gilliam and Iyengar, 2000). This is significant because local conditions are among the most important drivers of black disadvantage and of white racial attitudes (Gilliam, Valentino, and Beckman, 2002). The interaction of these two elements supports the dynamics of a vicious circle.

42  Andrew Rojecki This chapter studies how local print media framed the unrest in ­ altimore that followed the death of Freddie Gray. His death symbolB ized the continuing vulnerability of black men to police brutality and to larger issues of structural inequality. Gray’s death and the unrest that followed spawned sharply conflicting accounts of the causes of the tragic interactions between black men and police in US cities. At the heart of the scholarly analysis of this phenomenon is the concept of racial threat coined by V. O. Key (1949) and later explicated by Blalock (1967). This study offers several hypotheses on how local climates of opinion, driven by racial threat, vary by the size of the local population and the degree of its separation from the white majority. After summarizing recent scholarship in political science, criminology, and media studies on the origins of racial threat, I analyze how eight newspapers from across the US framed the unrest in Baltimore for their respective readerships.

The Ambiguities of Racial Diversity The racial threat hypothesis declares that competition for scarce resources and political power influences the majority’s attitudes toward minorities. Key (1949), for example, argued that whites who lived near large numbers of blacks were more likely to become politically engaged to protect their perceived political and economic interests; this explained white backlash in “the backbone of southern conservatism” (p. 43). A recent variation on the hypothesis posits that fear of black-on-white crime also drives white attitudes (Liska and Chamlin, 1984; Chamlin and Liska, 1992; Eitle et al., 2002). Despite its intuitive appeal, methodological and theoretical problems have led to inconsistent empirical support for the hypothesis. The chief methodological problem is what geographers term the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP). At issue is the precise nature of the geographical unit of analysis—political boundary, zip code, or census tracts—on continuous data (Tam Cho and Baer, 2011). Thus incidents of crime can be interpreted in various ways depending on whether they are viewed as contained by the boundaries of neighborhoods or of a city. For example, the sharp rise of gun violence in Chicago elicits differing reactions depending on whether one considers the city itself or specific neighborhoods as the areal frame of analysis. As we shall see below, the units of analysis chosen are critical for locating the precise boundaries of racial threat felt by whites. Theoretical issues include the precise nature of the mechanism driving racial threat and the ambiguous role of racial diversity in promoting harmony or strife. Enos (2016) sorts the variety of mechanisms underlying racial threat into instrumental (material, interest-based) and psychological categories; but notes that these categories are confused because they are not always mutually exclusive. Politicians may use coded appeals

Racial Threat and Local Framing of Baltimore’s Unrest  43 based on stereotyping to stoke fear for short-term political gain among white constituents who then perceive their self-interest threatened, say, by blacks seeking to integrate a school or neighborhood. With respect to racial diversity the “contact hypothesis” predicts that diversity and inter-racial exchanges lead to lower levels of antagonism and intergroup conflict (Oliver and Wong, 2003; Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006). But, the racial threat hypothesis predicts a contrary rise of blackwhite antagonism as the numbers of blacks grow in a given area (Dixon and Rosenbaum, 2004; Eitle, D’Alessio, and Stolzenberg, 2002; ­Fossett and Kiecolt, 1989; Giles and Evans, 1986; Jacobs, Carmichael, and Kent, 2005; Parker et al., 2005; Tolbert and Grummel, 2003). Because racial diversity by itself is insufficient for explaining racial harmony, an overview of the research helps set some empirical markers that lead to theoretical refinement. One key is residential segregation coupled with structural changes in the economy that have exacerbated the dire living conditions in black ghettos. Life there does not reflect the experience of all African Americans, as Donald Trump implied. ­Nevertheless, all African Americans suffer by this association; meanwhile, unsympathetic whites see those who live in ghettos as authors of their own misery.

Diversity and Segregation In The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) Wilson argued that post-Fordist changes in the economy and demographic shifts in the black population had led to concentrated poverty and its associated problems among a new ghetto underclass. In Wilson’s account, globalization eroded a manufacturing base that once provided a base of low-skilled jobs for blacks deprived of the skills needed to compete in the broader economy. As unemployment increased among low-skilled blacks (especially among men) and social disorder rose, working-class and middle-class blacks who had benefited from the civil rights movement began to leave urban ghettos for more prosperous neighborhoods. This resulted in a drop in the availability of marriageable employed men in the ghetto and spawned a host of mutually reinforcing social problems. While Wilson focused largely on changes in the economy, Massey and Denton (1993) argued that segregation continued to be the most important cause of urban black poverty and its associated problems. In Massey and Denton’s view, job-related changes in the economy merely exacerbated the existing, compounding disadvantages leveled on blacks by residential segregation: poorly funded schools, absence of job opportunity, routine violence, and diminished political influence. Segregation was the worst of two worlds: it increased exposure to problems and reduced access to resources and opportunities (Iceland and Farrell, 2013). Segregation is self-perpetuating as it undermines the future of following

44  Andrew Rojecki generations, who remain trapped in neighborhoods that deprive them of the resources essential for social mobility. Later research has confirmed the importance of segregation in maintaining black disadvantage. To wit, Cutler and Glaeser (1997) estimated that a one-standard-deviation reduction in black-white ­segregation (13%) would eliminate one-third of racial differences in rates of employment and income, high school completion, and single parenthood. In an extensive review of intergenerational income panel and census data, Sharkey (2013) summarized the compounding disadvantages of residential segregation on blacks: “The reason children end up in neighborhood environments similar to those of their parents is not that their parents have passed on a set of skills, resources, or abilities to their children.… Instead, parents pass on the place itself to their children” (p. 21). One feature of segregation that may help explain inconsistent findings in the research on racial threat is that although racial separation magni­fies disadvantage for blacks it does not do so for whites, at least in the short term. This is because segregation isolates whites from the toxic mix of social problems confined in black ghettos. In their analysis of FBI homicide and census data for large US central cities, for example, ­Peterson and Krivo (1999) found that segregation had a pronounced influence on black but not white killings. As we explore below, this discrepancy affects the degree of racial threat felt by whites. To what extent does racial residential segregation remain a pervasive problem? Analyses of 2000 and 2010 census data reveal two layers of findings that provide a helpful context for the racial threat hypotheses. On the one hand, between 1980 and 2000 segregation dropped by 10% or more in about half of US cities. Cities that experienced the largest declines (15% or more) either had a multiethnic population— with an above-­average presence of at least one other nonwhite group—or had a black population of less than 10%. Most of these cities were in the West and Southwest. The more significant finding, however, was that black-white segregation remained very high in 28 cities, more than half of these in the East and Midwest; these were the areas that had also experienced the most serious erosion of their manufacturing sectors (Charles, 2003). The 2010 census revealed the persistence of segregation in what Logan and Stults (2010) termed the “ghetto belt,” eight cities located in the East and Midwest. Between 1980 and 2010 the dissimilarity indices in rust belt cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago dropped only slightly from figures above 80 into the 70s. In assessing long-term trends in the most segregated cities, Logan (2013) concluded, “The decline in black–white segregation is painfully slow, and at the current rate, it will be another two decades before it reaches even the level of Hispanic segregation today” (p. 166).

Racial Threat and Local Framing of Baltimore’s Unrest  45 It’s worth noting that most declines in segregation have occurred where the black population was already low. This indicates differential thresholds for white residents, who have greater sensitivity to the presence of blacks than blacks to the presence of whites. The racial differential threshold thus explains how in some cases segregation increases as a minority’s population share rises (e.g. Logan, Stults, and Farley, 2004; Blanchard, 2007; cf. DeFina and Hannon, 2009). One representative study found that whites perceived schools to be inferior if the black population rose by as little as 7% in a four-to-five year period, despite the absence of any objective changes in school quality or safety. Perceptions of school inferiority led to segregation and subsequent white opposition to policy that would reduce segregation (Goyette, Farrie, and Freely, 2012). Oliver and Mendelberg’s (2000) related study found mixed support for the racial threat hypothesis (likely the result of the MAUP), but they identified a set of specific conditions in specific geographic areas that led to higher white hostility toward blacks: If whites in low-status contexts are more racist because of the economic or political competition they feel from a nearby black population, then we would expect to find the highest levels of racism in those low-status zip codes in metropolitan areas with the greatest number of blacks. Yet this is not the case: the racial hostility of low-status zip codes does not increase in heavily black metropolitan areas. Instead, we find that interracial material competition seems to drive white attitudes only toward specific policies. Opposition to race-targeted public policies does not simply increase uniformly with the educational and racial composition of the context, but varies specifically in relation to the relevance of the policy to the social environment. (p. 583) Echoing Oliver and Mendelberg’s findings, Enos (2016) conducted a natural experiment in Chicago that neatly circumvented the MAUP by looking at the razing of public housing units. He found that after the public housing units were torn down, whites who lived closest to CHA housing were less likely to go to the polls and also less likely to vote for conservative candidates, direct support for Key’s argument. Criminologists’ tests of the racial threat hypothesis produce inconsistent but nevertheless revealing findings. Some find that police use of deadly force (Chamlin, 1989) and imposition of the death penalty (­ Jacobs and Wood, 1999) rise in step with the relative size of the black population. Yet other studies fail to find this pattern. Scholars attribute this inconsistency to a policy of intended neglect in cases of b ­ lack-on-black crime. As Stolenzenberg and his colleagues (2004) put it, “[R]acial segregation acts as an instrument of state control whereby problem popu­ lations are managed passively without the need for an excessive reliance

46  Andrew Rojecki on the police” (p. 693). Put another way, unless targets are white victims of blacks, crime rates by themselves are insufficient for predicting racial threat. Public attitudes are influenced by the interaction of local news with segregation. A large body of scholarship addresses the impact on white attitudes of local news coverage—much of that content focused on black crime (e.g.  Gilliam et al., 1996; Dixon and Azocar, 2007). National media attention to crime varies with respect to large-scale trends (Dixon and ­Williams, 2015). In contrast, while local coverage sensibly addresses l­ocal conditions, studies find that local media pay more attention to violent crime committed by blacks than that committed by whites ­(Bjornstrom et al., 2010). Experimental subjects exposed to such coverage expressed increased support for punitive measures such as long prison sentences and the coverage reinforced the black stereotypes to which they subscribe (Gilliam and Iyengar, 2000). In a study that resolves the ambiguity of the influence of diversity on racial threat Gilliam, Valentino, and Beckman (2002) found that whites who lived in racially integrated neighborhoods were less negatively influenced by black criminal stereotypes in the news than those who lived in segregated neighborhoods. Whites who lived in racially segregated neighborhoods were more likely to favor more punitive policies to address crime, to express more negative stereotypic evaluations of blacks, and to feel more distant from blacks as a group. Whites from integrated neighborhoods exposed to the same stereotypic coverage were either unaffected or endorsed less punitive crime policies, less negative stereotypes, and felt closer to blacks as a group. These findings are consistent with research showing that white attitudes are susceptible to racial threat at the metropolitan level but not in specific neighborhoods. Oliver and Wong (2003), for example, found that racial hostility is likely to be high among whites who live in all-white neighborhoods but heterogeneous cities. Echoing Gilliam et al. (2002), Oliver and Wong found that whites who resided in hetero­ geneous neighborhoods were less likely to express less racial hostility. In short, residential segregation is a key component in the creation of local climates of opinion relative to racial threat. These patterns of findings help generate hypotheses regarding local press coverage of racial unrest. Here I assume that local coverage reflects the imprint of senior editorial judgment as to the relative importance of an issue in a given metropolitan area. Large cities in the East and Midwest, for example, have large segregated areas of black residents and active chapters of the Black Live Matters Movement, which may drive media attention to local conditions. The racial threat hypothesis suggests that the sheer number of blacks elicits support for measures of social control. Diversity by itself, however, is not sufficient. Integration may increase tolerance and understanding. My working assumption is

Racial Threat and Local Framing of Baltimore’s Unrest  47 that local reporters and editors will respond to national issues based on their reading of local race-based opinion linked to their perceptions of majority ideological beliefs (see Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2010). This leads to two major hypotheses, with the second having a corollary: H1: Newspapers in cities with small but relatively integrated numbers of African Americans are likely to publish less coverage of the unrest in Baltimore than those with large numbers of segregated blacks. Derived from the analysis of research on racial threat, the following hypotheses refer to issue framing: H2: Framing most sympathetic to African American racial unrest will occur in areas with a comparatively large and integrated African ­A merican population. The least favorable will take place in areas with a large, highly segregated African American population. H2a: Areas with a comparatively small but highly segregated population will have the least favorable framing of racial unrest.

Method I use frame analysis to analyze mediated discourse on the underlying causes of racial unrest in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray. Frame analysis assumes that a news account cannot avoid offering one or more mutually exclusive perspectives on an event, person, or issue (Lakoff, 2008). The political approach to framing assumes a process that concludes with the allocation of a scarce resource. Accordingly, the deliberation among political and media elites and citizens can be efficiently conceptualized as the identification of a problem, a diagnosis of its causes, a solution thought best to address it, and a moral judgment that serves as the motivational engine for action (Entman, 1993). Chong and Druckman (2007) developed a useful heuristic for identifying and assessing the potential impact of such a frame, its presumed influence on attitudes. In the case of Baltimore and similar instances of racial unrest a relevant attitude would be one’s disposition to policy intended to address the underlying problems raised by the events. Such a disposition can be conceptualized using the conventional expectancy model, a theoretical perspective from psychology that defines an attitude as a “summary of a definable set of beliefs that an individual holds about an object” (p. 105). The model posits that individuals will modify an attitude based on information they receive and the weight they assign to those values and beliefs. For example, if a news item emphasizes the horrid conditions of ghetto life (the implied cause of unrest) and a reader places a high value on social justice, one might expect that person to view racial unrest

48  Andrew Rojecki sympathetically, as inevitable and justifiable. Similarly, if another item focuses on looting, rioting, and other criminal behavior and the reader places high value on public order, one would expect a less sympathetic view to emerge. The expectancy value model dovetails with the concept of framing on the mutually exclusive emphases that can be placed on how one might think about an issue such as the political protest that followed Gray’s death. While opinion pieces and editorials are usually organized by one frame, news accounts are likely to include competing frames, each suggesting a positive or negative disposition toward the actors involved in an event raising issues for public deliberation. From a broader perspective, an issue culture can be defined as the set of frames that comprise public discourse on an issue (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989; Entman and Rojecki, 2000). The shape of an issue culture in a given location can be conceptualized as a supply of resources for shaping or reinforcing public opinion. The analysis offered below discusses media frames on Baltimore, whether one or more frames is dominant in the press in a specific city, and whether the dominance of such can be predicted given the magnitude of racial threat hypothesized to be present in that city. Local newspaper coverage of the Baltimore unrest was selected on the basis of the relative numbers of African Americans in a city’s population and the degree of integration of its black residents. Cities that fell into the pool were those whose percentage of black residents were one or more standard deviations larger or smaller than the national average of 13% and those whose dissimilarity indices in the 2014 US Census were one or more standard deviations larger or smaller than the national average of 60. Using these criteria, two cities were selected from each of the four quartiles defined by the highest and lowest levels of black popu­ lation and segregation for a total of eight. To collect relevant news coverage and editorial content I used ­L exisNexis using a variety of search targets that included Baltimore, Freddie Gray, protest, riot, and unrest for the period beginning April 12, 2015 (the day of Gray’s arrest and injury in a police van) and ending May 31, 2015. The dataset included wire service articles and op-eds from other publications, because they, too, contribute to the available local issue culture. I regarded such selection by local editors as tacit evidence of perceived local interest in the topic and analyzed these texts in the same way. The period analyzed included the protests that began on April 25, the unrest that erupted on April 27 and the calling out of the National Guard to quell the riots and looting that followed. By early May the unrest had abated, but the press continued to use the unrest as a hook for analyzing issues thought to explain the incidents. These included police brutality, racism, and a culture of permissiveness and lawlessness that had led to the unrest. In short, these three major frames of analysis made

Racial Threat and Local Framing of Baltimore’s Unrest  49 up the larger fraction of the issue culture used by reporters, commentators, policy experts, politicians, and activists to account for the incident and its aftermath.

Data and Results Table 3.1 lists each of the eight cities, the diversity of its population and level of segregation, the name of the newspaper consulted, and the number of items—news stories and opinion—analyzed (N = 115). A cursory glance at the numbers reveals that cities with high levels of segregation, regardless of the relative numbers of black population, paid two to three times more attention (again, as measured by numbers of relevant items) to the issue than those with low levels of segregation. Note that such coverage is unrelated to geographic distance from Baltimore. For example, Richmond, 150 miles from Baltimore has one-third the coverage of Cleveland, 375 miles distant. For the frame analysis I initially created two categories of issue frames that broadly divided coverage into those that understood the problem as caused either by external forces (e.g. structural inequality, police brutality) or by black residents themselves. Using QDA Miner, a content ana­lysis program that allows rapid dynamic revision of categories, I refined a framing analysis protocol; only the first instance of each frame indicator was coded for a given text.1

Table 3.1  Sources analyzed City

Black Population Segregation

Newspaper

Cleveland, OH

High (20%) High (20%) Low (7%) Low (8%) High (20%) High (30%) Low (3%) Low (3%) 13%

Plain Dealer

21

Inquirer

15

Herald

22

Post-Gazette

26

Philadelphia, PA Boston, MA Pittsburgh, PA Raleigh, NC Richmond, VA Portland, OR Tucson, AZ Total *US average.

High (74%) High (68%) High (66%) High (66%) Low (42%) Low (53%) Low (51%) Low (44%) 60%*

N

News & Observer

7

Times-Dispatch

8

Oregonian

9

AZ Daily Star

7 115

50  Andrew Rojecki The frames were organized in two broad categories: (1) The causes of the unrest in Baltimore and (2) its consequences. Regarding causes of unrest, coders looked for: 1 Black lawlessness (rioting, looting, and lawlessness, including words depicting protestors as criminals who seized the opportunity to ransack their own neighborhoods). 2 Rogue cops (texts that focused exclusively on the six police officers who took Gray on a “rough ride”). 3 Structural inequality (mention of widespread patterns of institutionalized racism and inequality in Baltimore, or using Baltimore as example of racist practices or beliefs elsewhere). 4 Police racism (attributing unrest in Baltimore and elsewhere to general culture of police racism). 5 Poor political leadership (Baltimore Mayor’s permissive attitude gave leave to demonstrators to become lawless rioters and looters). 6 Gray’s fault (includes mention of his switchblade, lack of cooperation, criminal record, or faking his injury). 7 Escalation of legitimate protest (suggestion that no one is to blame and legitimate protests merely spun out of control, i.e. absence of agency). 8 Shared blame (officials and protestors are equally culpable). 9 Police get benefit of doubt (protests respond legitimately to unfair deference to police authority; police always get the benefit of the doubt in instances of brutality or use of excessive force). 10 Failure of the Democratic Party (its failed policies in cities; ghettos persist despite or because of poor policy of party officials). 11 Government overreach (cites libertarian position that government meddling restricts city residents). Regarding consequences of unrest coders looked for: 1 Rush to judgment of the cops (they were indicted too quickly, without sufficient evidence; indictments were based more on politics than legal evidence). 2 Reduced police, more crime (the indictment of the officers will lead to less proactive or aggressive policing, which will increase crime rates). 3 Protests effectively shine light on problems (unrest brought hidden injustices to light and this will lead to necessary improvement in policing, social justice, or conditions of life in black ghettos). 4 Technical fix (police brutality was exposed by mobile technologies such as citizens’ smart phones or surveillance of police themselves by the use of body cameras).

Racial Threat and Local Framing of Baltimore’s Unrest  51 Tables 3.2 and 3.3 list the frames in the two categories, together with a brief description of each and the percentage of items in which the frames occurred. The dominant frames regarding causes of unrest appeared in roughly one third each of the coverage and illustrate the unsettled quality of the debate in the aggregate on race. The black lawlessness frame (33%) depicted protestors as criminal entrepreneurs who seized the opportunity

Table 3.2  Causes of Unrest Frame

Description

Black criminality

Unrest illustrates essential lawlessness of Baltimore residents Bad individual cops Police brutality limited to rogue cops (bad apples) Structural inequality Societal barriers to equality limit black life chances (e.g. discrimination, mass incarceration); white racism in general Police racism A culture of racism among a majority of the police Poor leadership in Baltimore Mayor permitted demonstrations to escalate into riots Freddie Gray’s behavior Victim displayed a switchblade, threatened police; faked injury Legitimate protest got out of hand Escalation of legitimate protest Blacks and whites equally culpable Shared responsibility

Percent of Cases 33 32 30

16  9  6  3  2

Table 3.3  Consequences of unrest Frame

Description

Percent of Cases

Rush to judgment of police

Baltimore cops indicted without careful examination of evidence Unjust criticism of law enforcement will lead to more crime Unrest shines light on an ignored, long-standing social problems Police body cameras and citizens’ recordings of incidents will reduce police brutality

10

More crime Attention to inequality Technical fix

 7  6  3

52  Andrew Rojecki to ransack and pillage their own neighborhoods. A Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial is a characteristic example: The thugs showed up. The opportunists who seed discord and revel in chaos attacked the police and violently turned on their own community. A senior citizens home under construction was burned to the ground. That CVS was destroyed. Large numbers of automobiles were burned and stores were looted. At least 15 police officers were attacked and injured. The rogue cop frame (32%) focused exclusively on the six police officers who took Freddie Gray on a “rough ride” that severed his spine and limited culpability to those officers alone. This frame stopped short of indicting the broader police culture, instead focusing wholly on the ­Baltimore officers: “State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby on Friday charged the six officers with felonies ranging from assault to second-degree depraved heart murder. 2 By bringing charges less than two weeks after Gray’s death, Mosby, 35, said her decision showed ‘no one is above the law’” (“Case against Baltimore cops,” 2015, p. 5). The third most common (30%) causal frame—structural ­inequality— highlighted widespread patterns of institutionalized racism and inequality in Baltimore and elsewhere. For example, one account portrayed Baltimore as a case of embedded racist practices there and in other parts of the nation: “Yet the Baltimore riots are the latest warning sign of the need to address the stew of problems facing ­A frican-­A mericans in major urban centers that feed both alienation and anger from economic inequality and lack of opportunity to perceived racial bias on the part of government officials, especially police” (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 2015a). The remaining frames fell into a second tier where they functioned largely to provide a more detailed causal linkage to one of the primary frames cited above. This pattern emerges in the cluster analysis described below, with two frames being most common. One frame (10%) in this second tier pointed to a general culture of racism among police in B ­ altimore and elsewhere (e.g. Ferguson, MO) as a principal cause of the unrest: Mr. Simon traces the arrest and death of Freddie Gray to a police culture that long ago abandoned any pretense of probable cause when it comes to stopping and arresting young black men in the city. “The drug war—which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American city—was transforming in terms of police community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police department,” he says. “Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war.” (Ingraham, 2015)

Racial Threat and Local Framing of Baltimore’s Unrest  53 The second most common (9%) in this tier blamed Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlins-Blake for a permissive attitude that gave leave to demonstrators to become lawless rioters and looters. A small percentage blamed Freddie Gray himself (6%) or took an agnostic position on the escalation of protest, framing it either as an unforeseen consequence (3%) or blame-sharing (2%). The picture that emerges at this general level of analysis illustrates a spectrum of causes that range from the protestors themselves to society itself, the familiar individual-society continuum that also defines the conservative-liberal spectrum of American politics. Rogue cops appear closer to the protestor end of the spectrum because the bad apples frame ignores underlying structural causes as responsible for the unrest. Similarly, a culture of racism among the police represents a point on the spectrum closer to structural racism in general (see Figure 3.1). Because media attention to the incident was relatively short—about four weeks—there may have been insufficient opportunity to take a long view of potential consequences of the unrest. Here the most frequent frame focused on the negative implications of what some perceived as a rush to judgment of the Baltimore officers indicted for the murder of Freddie Gray (10%). Experts, mainly law professors and prosecutors, opined that the case had insufficient evidence for bringing a guilty verdict. 3 Sources said the consequence of such a rush to judgment would be increased crime—the second most frequent ­consequence frame (7%). According to this frame, police officers would now be reluctant to vigorously pursue criminal behavior given the risk of being prosecuted for their efforts. A roughly equal proportion of ­coverage (6%) judged that the Baltimore unrest would shine a light on l­ongstanding problems in the ghetto that would otherwise continue to fester. Finally, readily available surveillance techno­logy (body cameras and citizen smart phones) could be deployed to bring evidence of police brutality to public attention. Once again, the spectrum of frames ran from a sympathetic view of the police, who were regarded as victims, to increased surveillance of societal racial injustice and, through the use of body cameras, of the cops themselves. Because the numbers were so low for the consequence frames, only causal frames will be analyzed here. Figure 3.2 depicts the distribution of frames of the cases of racial unrest across the four permutations of demographic variation. Residents Criminality of protestors

Society Rogue Cops

Figure 3.1  Spectrum of culpability.

Police Racism

Structural Inequality

54  Andrew Rojecki Causes of Racial Unrest 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Hi Pop Hi Seg Black criminality

Lo Pop Hi Seg Bad cops

Hi Pop Lo Seg Structural inequality

Lo Pop Lo Seg Police racism

Figure 3.2  Attributed causes of racial unrest by city type. Table 3.4  Causes of unrest by city type

Black criminality Rogue cops Structural inequality Police racism

Hi Pop Hi Seg

Lo Pop Hi Seg

Hi Pop Lo Seg

Lo Pop Lo Seg

44% 36% 31% 17%

35% 23% 27% 13%

13% 40% 60% 35%

19% 44% 13% 6%

The data here offer strong support for the racial threat hypothesis conditioned by segregation: news organizations in cities with high dissimilar­ opulation—were ity indices—regardless of the relative size of the black p much more likely to focus on black criminality as a principal cause of racial unrest. The specific numbers appear in Table 3.4. Here we see that print journalists working in highly segregated cities in the East and Midwest were two to three times more likely to explain Baltimore’s racial unrest in terms of black criminality than journalists in cities with lower levels of segregation (though it’s worth noting that dissimilarity indices in the 40s and low 50s in cities such as Portland and Tucson with relatively small black populations are hardly trivial). In both sets of segregated environments black criminality was the leading causal frame. But contrary to Hypothesis 2a, newspapers in cities with small but highly segregated black populations such as Boston and Pittsburgh were no more likely to use this frame than cities with high numbers of black residents. In short, segregation trumps relative numbers of black residents in a given city.

Racial Threat and Local Framing of Baltimore’s Unrest  55 By contrast, news organizations in cities with high numbers of blacks but comparatively low levels of segregation (Raleigh, NC and Richmond, VA) were two times more likely to use a structural inequality frame than cities with high segregation. When combined with the police culture of racism frame, media in locations with large numbers of relatively integrated black residents were most likely to frame Baltimore unrest as caused by institutional racism. Commentary written by a Raleigh News and Observer columnist presents a vivid example: [M]ost of the people out there participating in the uprising probably feel no more sense of ownership of the community in which they live, or of America, than I feel ownership of that pretty red ­Ferrari that almost hit me several years ago when I didn’t look before trying to cross a street in Miami. That car kept going as though I weren’t even there, leaving me watching its dust in rage. That’s what ­America is doing to yet another generation of black men. It’s unwilling to spend money to educate them, but it’ll shell out millions to incarcerate them. (Saunders, 2015, p. 2A) That said, it is also true that these mid-South sources covered the ­ altimore unrest less extensively than those in the northern ghetto belt. B With respect to issue attention, cities in the West and Southwest with low levels of black population and segregation were similar to cities in the mid-South. Sources in these four cities devoted considerably less ­coverage to the issue, from one half to as little as one third that in the highly segregated cities of the Midwest and the East. In Portland and Tucson the most dominant frame (44%) was that the individual cops indicted for the murder of Freddie Gray were responsible for the unrest, more than twice as large as the next most common frame, black criminality (19%). Compared to coverage elsewhere, the items were in general brief, factual, and covered the barest details of the case against the police officers. The impression one gets from reading these items is of a distant event with vanishingly small consequences for the local population. If one tested the framing effects of this coverage, it probably would scarcely move the needle on existing attitudes. By contrast, the heavy attention to black criminality in highly segregated cities would reinforce existing hardened attitudes, as demonstrated in a broad range of research on local media attention to black crime (Gilliam et al., 1996; Gilliam and Iyengar, 2000; Gilliam, Valentino, and Beckman, 2002).

Co-Occurrence of Frames While an analysis of the distribution of single frames provides broad strokes cued to general patterns, expecting single frames to organize news and opinion on the issue is unrealistic. In fact, only 41% of the

56  Andrew Rojecki items had just one frame. The average for the entire dataset was 1.7, with some items including as many as four; variation in frame occurrences across the cities in the database was not significant. Studying the co-­ occurrences of the frames divided by specific locations provides a more nuanced picture of public discourse on the issue. A cluster analysis of the entire dataset reveals that certain frames tended to occur together in the same items. Thus a dendogram of the eight causal frames shows that black criminality, one of the three most common frames, appears most often with the poor leadership frame, which accuses the mayor of being too lax. Also at the aggregate level the structural inequality frame not unexpectedly appears most often with the police racism frame. By contrast, the rogue cop frame appears as a disconnected outlier. Examining the co-occurrence of frames divided by the segregation of place, therefore, produces a more revealing picture. Table 3.5 shows similarity coefficients,4 measures indicating how often frames occurred together in text, divided by city type. Interpretation of these numbers is provisional given the small numbers of items in the sub-samples, especially those cities with a proportionally high black popu­lation with low levels of segregation (Raleigh and Richmond, N=15). When we look at the black criminality frame, the most dominant in cities with high numbers of segregated black residents (44%), the coefficients reveal a somewhat unsettled issue culture. Black criminality is as likely to be paired with rogue cops, structural inequality, police racism, poor political leadership, and Freddie Gray’s possible blameworthiness. The rogue cop frame (36%), meanwhile, is as likely to be accompanied by either a structural inequality frame or one that raises Gray’s culpability, brandishing a knife or faking an injury. ­Finally, the structural inequality frame (31%) is most likely to be accompanied by the logically Table 3.5  Frame co-occurrence by city segregation Black Crime

Rogue Cops

Structural Inequality

Police Racism

Poor leadership

Gray

High Low High Low High Low High Low High Low High Low Black crime 1.0 Rogue cops .25 Structural ineq .25 Police racism .22 Poor .29 leadership Gray .21

1.0 0 1.0 .18 .12 0 .06 .29 0

1.0 .25 1.0 0 .44 .13 .12

1.0 .47 1.0 .15 .2

1.0 0

0

0

0

0

.13

.07

0

1.0 .14

1.0 0

1.0

1.0

Racial Threat and Local Framing of Baltimore’s Unrest  57 related frame of police racism. Here the mayor’s possible role in worsening the situation is also implicated, but much less frequently. In coverage in cities with low levels of segregation and high numbers of African Americans the most dominant frame highlighted the primary role of structural inequality in Baltimore’s unrest (60%). As in cities with high segregation, once again this frame most often accompanied the police racism frame The second most common frame, rogue cops as the cause, was most often paired with a structural inequality frame. The contrast with the highly segregated cities of the ghetto belt could not be starker. The issue culture here is settled and overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, focused on institutional racism as the cause of Baltimore’s strife. Finally, in Tucson and Portland, cities where the numbers of African Americans and dissimilarity indices are both low, the most common frame of rogue cops (44%) was most likely to include structural inequality and poor political leadership as co-contributing causes. In this respect, Tucson and Portland have more in common with cities in the mid-South than with any others in the sample; that all these cities have the lowest levels of segregation and thereby the lowest potential for racial threat provides a clear direction for follow-up research, as discussed in the conclusion. In summary, the most settled discourse on Baltimore’s unrest was in the press of the nation’s most integrated cities, those that had experienced the largest declines in racial segregation. There readers were exposed to news and opinion that most often characterized racial strife as the pro­duct of longstanding structural inequality. No matter the frame, whether rogue cops or poor political leadership, the causes were identified as external to the ghetto residents of Baltimore and those of other cities. In highly segregated cities, readers were exposed to the dominant frame of the blameworthiness of black residents. Here a panoply of s­ econdary frames included a wide range of aggravating contributing causes, from a sympathetic recognition of institutional racism to a “blame the victim” mentality that in some cases mentioned Freddie Gray’s switchblade, his criminal record, or his faking of an injury that some observers viewed as justifying his treatment by the arresting officers. In short, an assortment of frames was readily available to reinforce existing attitudes, including those hardened by local coverage of black crime.

Conclusion This chapter examined the impact of racial segregation on racial threat and its relationship to local coverage of racial unrest in other locations, given that considerable scholarship on news framing of black crime shows that its influence is felt most at the local level. As national crime levels have dropped over the last decade, so has national media attention

58  Andrew Rojecki (Dixon and Williams, 2015). As other research demonstrates, attention to local black crime is a primary driver of racial threat and influences white attitudes. The considerable research on racial threat points to racial segregation as both an indicator and a cause of white reaction. A feedback loop between local conditions and white unease has contri­ buted to the glacial pace of desegregation in the industrial cities of the East and Midwest, scenes of recent disturbances fueled by aggressive policing and the mobilization of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the ghetto belt the local press is highly attentive to racial strife elsewhere and presents a dominant frame of black criminality, the well-­ established driver of black stereotypes and support among whites for draconian punitive measures that undermine social stability in the poorest black neighborhoods (Goffman, 2014). The analysis reported here demonstrates some grounds for optimism, despite the seeming pessimistic results. As the analysis shows, the discourse on Baltimore was unsettled rather than coherently fused to a core of stereotype-reinforcing content. Although news articles and opinion did include an important thread of black criminality, news organizations also included a significant thread highlighting the structural inequalities that afflicted black residents in Baltimore’s ghetto. Coverage also wove in a thread that blamed local political leadership for mismanagement of a volatile crowd of protestors. In locations with both high and low levels of segregation, the most common secondary frame paired with black criminality was the ­Baltimore mayor’s poor leadership. The poor leadership frame joined other secondary frames that established a complex set of contributing conditions, including structural inequality. The latter was the most commonly understood cause of Baltimore’s racial unrest in such unlikely places as Raleigh and Richmond, once known for racial repression and Jim Crow. There a modicum of racial comity has led to desegregation and, apparently, lower levels of racial threat, also reflected in local coverage in the West and Southwest, where levels of racial dissimilarity have dropped the most. Among the many questions this research raises for further research is the representativeness and influence of mediated discourse in a new information environment. That environment includes a reduced role for newspapers—whose readership dropped from 62 million to 49 million between the late 1980s and the late 2000s (Ladd, 2012). It would follow that local publishers would be more attentive to existing opinion among its readers. Some research indicates this may be happening (Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2010). Combined with other research that points to an information ecology that invites selective reinforcement of existing public attitudes rather than resources for change (Bennett and Iyengar, 2008; Stroud, 2011), it is essential to establish whether local newspapers are becoming more attentive to the received opinion of their readers and whether such attention may also be influencing media reception to its

Racial Threat and Local Framing of Baltimore’s Unrest  59 news sources. Racial progress has depended in large part on the acti­ vities of black movements. Local framing of current movements such as Black Lives Matter will have a major impact on the resources available for reducing racial threat and its influence on mainstream white opinion.

Notes 1 A second coder coded 20 (18%) of the 115 items. Percentage agreement and Scott’s Pi coefficients (in parentheses) were as follows: black lawlessness, 94% (.88); rogue cops, 88% (.67); structural inequality, 88% (.71); police racism, 81% (.54); poor political leadership, 94% (.82); escalation of legiti­ mate protest, 100% (1.0); failure of Democratic party, 94% (.63); Gray’s fault, 94% (.63); police get benefit of doubt, 94% (.63); protests effective, 94% (.63); rush to judgment, 100% (1.0); Total, 93% (.77). 2 Also called second-degree murder, depraved heart murder combines indifference and unintentionality. It refers to a grossly reckless act that unintentionally caused the death of another. In causing the death the perpetrator acted with extreme indifference for the value of human life and the safety of others. 3 Prosecutions of the first four cases resulted in three acquittals and a hung jury. In 2016 Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby dropped the cases against the remaining two police officers. 4 I use Sorenson’s coefficient, a measure that weighs matches between frames doubling. I do this because I consider a co-occurrence empirically more signi­ ficant than the mere absence of one.

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4 The Sociological Eye in the News Covering West Baltimore in the Aftermath of the Death of Freddie Gray Silvio Waisbord, Eissa Saeed, and Tina Tucker A newspaper is neither a political pamphlet nor a sociological journal. —Bernard Roschco (1967)

Journalism and the Inner City A profound and extended sense of dissatisfaction exists with the way journalism covers social problems in urban settings, and its limited and fleeting attention to urban social problems. Critics have generally bemoaned journalism for the way it reports (and fails to cover) the inner city (Schoonmaker, 2008). News stories are embedded in long-standing racial stereotypes (Weiner, 2010), ignore local efforts to tackle problems and propose solutions (Dreier, 2005); and focus on isolated events rather than historical and structural factors and processes (Best, 2010; ­Campbell, et al., 2011; Entman and Rojecki, 2001; Jacobs, 2000; ­Kensecki, 2004; Kim, Carvalho, and Davis, 2010; Parisi, 1998). J­ ournalism presents incomplete, decontextualized and distorted news that fails to help the public gain a deeper understanding of the causes and solutions to inner-city problems disproportionately affecting African-Americans. Focused on personal narratives and particular events, public policies and collective decisions that continue to shape social exclusion in urban settings and the long-standing forces of structural racism remain notoriously undercovered (Maynard Institute on Journalism Education, 2008). One can interpret critics’ dissatisfaction in terms of the absence of a sociological approach to covering the inner city, that is, the lack of nuanced, granular and regular reporting of the social and historical contexts of social problems. What is missing is the kind of “sociological” journalism that Robert Park (1923) envisioned in his classic analysis of the press and the city—a journalism that helps citizens make sense of the dazzling complexity of the city (see Lindner, 1996). Without n ­ ews(papers), Park writes, city residents would have a hard time comprehending “the forces which tend to break up the tension, interests, and sentiments which give neighborhoods their individual character” (1984, p. 8).

The Sociological Eye in the News  63 The problem is not just the lack of (or limited) attention to specific social themes and problems affecting poor and minority citizens— chronic problems of public safety, high unemployment, discrimination, ­abysmal health and education conditions, entrenched racism. More fundamentally, it is the absence of a perspective inspired by the ­sociological imagination that, as C. Wright Mills (1959) memorably defined it, links character and social structure. Such journalism fails to offer fuller, deeper insights into how individual lives intersect with the structural, long-term factors responsible for systemic social inequalities. Only in passing does it attend to the problems besetting inner city residents; when it pays attention, it concentrates on events (especially crimes, most notably homicides) without offering a wide-angle perspective about broad historical and social forces underpinning everyday life. Focused on single incidents, it forgets to connect personal lives with major social processes responsible for the lack of opportunities and how they are buffeted by deep-seated social forces. Journalism falls short from offering a sociological vision that links individual and social life, and make sense of the nature and complexity of urban problems. It is a truism that journalism single-mindedly chases the now rather than the permanent. It is better at covering ephemeral events than longitudinal issues. As writer James Parker (2015) observes, journalism is the “miserable engine of contemporaneity.” Timeliness, the obvious and immediate connection to current happenings, is the litmus test for any social issue to become news. Topicality is a must. Lack of actuality or obvious newsy characteristics condemns a subject to news blackout. News stories can be about virtually anything as long as it is somehow linked to what is “current” in short-lived news cycles. So, the political events and social uprising in Baltimore in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death offer an opportunity to revisit conventional arguments about news coverage of the inner city. What happened in Baltimore between April and ­December 2015 captured unusual news attention. Suddenly, West ­Baltimore was the geographical center of local, national and international news in the aftermath of several high-profile incidents of police violence against African-American men in the United States. In this chapter we are concerned with understanding how journalism covered structural patterns and forces that shape life in Baltimore. How did journalism cover the inner city, particularly neighborhoods populated by poor, African-American residents? Did it offer the kind of sociological news so often demanded by critics yet so infrequently delivered? We understand “sociological news” as news that fosters the “sociological imagination” by linking private troubles and public issues in order to get a deeper understanding of social problems. “Sociological” is here understood in terms of thematic focus rather than methodological approach. Previous studies considered the influence of sociology in journalism, most notably in New Journalism, as reflected

64  Silvio Waisbord, Eissa Saeed, and Tina Tucker by the use of techniques such as fieldwork, ethnography and observation, and an inside perspective from particular groups (Meisenhelder, 1977). In contrast, we approach “sociological” news as reporting that addresses two issues at the center of sociological inquiry: social exclusion and community life. The analysis of social exclusion implies attention to contextual and social factors that shape structural inequalities in capitalism. It includes matters of power, class, race, work, gender and ethnicity, issues that have been central to original sociological examinations of the “social question” in the nineteenth century to contemporary studies in urban sociology and critical sociology. Community life refers to the state of social institutions and community organizations. It refers to Tocqueville’s “associational life,” social capital, and community ­organizing—social assets that bring people together and offer institutional and cultural resources for collective action. Therefore, journalism with a sociological eye puts the spotlight on one or both dimensions—social conditions and community associations. It presents news that cover causes and conditions of social problems as well as social organizations and associational resources to address problems (Ettema and Peer, 1996). It aims to provide an understanding of urban communities decimated by decades-old regressive policies, tenacious structural conditions and political neglect, and bring local mobilization into focus.

The Study To answer the aforementioned questions, we studied Baltimore Sun coverage of Winchester-Sandtown, Freddie Gray’s neighborhood in West Baltimore. We chose the Sun because it remains the dominant news­paper in Baltimore and the state of Maryland, notwithstanding the fact that it has suffered the same challenges that affect the newspaper industry in the US (Hanscomb, 2014). We examined the Sun coverage between June 2014 and December 2015. Notably, the Sun received unusual high levels of news traffic during the period, particularly in the weeks immediately after Gray’s death (Mullin, 2015). Amid the surge in public interest, the company eliminated the paywall of its online edition during several weeks at the height of the story. Several of the Sun stories ricocheted in the news landscape. National Public Radio, Bloomberg, and the Washington Post reported on Baltimore by referencing and crediting the Sun for its investigations about police misconduct and other issues. For its Gray-related reporting the Sun and members of its staff, such as investigative reporter Mark Puente, received various prestigious press accolades, including the Paul Tobenkin Award, the Online News Awards, and the Clark Mollenhoff Award for Excellence in Investigative Reporting. The Sun was a finalist for the Pulitzer in the breaking news category, but the Los Angeles

The Sociological Eye in the News  65 Times staff won that prize for its coverage of a mass shooting in San Bernardino. Why focus on news about Gray’s neighborhood and West Baltimore? Although city news organizations typically claim to cover the entire city and metropolitan areas, the relationship between journalism and the city is complex and uneven; and cities are not typically covered as a seamless whole. Metro desks do not necessarily cover various sections of a given city equally. Cities are not homogeneous settings that newsrooms consider similarly newsworthy (Macek, 2006). In fact, as Park (1984) observed, the city is a constellation of specific social worlds. News coverage of cities and urban problems get dissolved into different neighborhoods and subjects rather than being integrated into a macro, comprehensive view. Newsrooms report the city as a myriad of social spaces following conventional news routines and norms rather than as a single, unified entity within a certain geographical area (Gutsche, 2014; Rodgers, 2013). Sandtown-Winchester, the geographical epicenter of the events following Gray’s death while in police custody, is a seventy-two block neighborhood in West Baltimore. Ninety-eight percent of the residents are African-Americans. Sociological studies have documented grim ­social conditions in West Baltimore as well as East Baltimore, which has a similar socio-demographic profile (Fernandez-Kelly, 2015; Gómez, 2013; Levine, 2000). Fiction entertainment, too, has delved into similar issues, such as the widely praised, award-winning television show The Wire with its eloquent portrayal and denunciation of social exclusion and structural racism in West Baltimore. As with other black-majority neighborhoods in US inner cities, a combination of corrosive policies over the years were responsible for dire social conditions (Cohen, 2015; Rothstein, 2015). Laws and property-­ development regulations effective until the late 1950s stalled development and were responsible for the migration of blacks into more affluent areas. Business practices left a trail of negative consequences, too. Banks refused to give black applicants mortgages or charged them onerous interest rates. Real estate agents and developers encouraged “white flight.” The consequence of redlining policies was the weakening, depopulation, and segregation of neighborhoods (Boger, 2009). In this context, the neighborhood has been plagued by several social problems. Health indicators include high rates of illness and premature death. School performance indicators have been staggeringly low (Baum, 2010). Days after Gray’s death, a Baltimore Sun (2015a) editorial offered a somber picture of social conditions in Sandtown. Poverty, unemployment, and homicide rates more than double the city average. The neighborhood is the home to more inmates in the state correctional system than any other Maryland area. The number of liquor stores and tobacco outlets per capita is double that for the city. One quarter of the youth had been arrested between 2005 and 2009. It had the worst domestic

66  Silvio Waisbord, Eissa Saeed, and Tina Tucker violence rate of any of the neighborhoods the health department analyzed and among the worst rates for non-fatal shootings and homicides. A quarter of the buildings are vacant, and the lead paint violation rate is triple the city average. From a population of 11,000 in 1990, it is estimated that 8,500 people live in the neighborhood. In principle, massive news and public attention to Sandtown and West Baltimore after Gray’s arrest on April 12, 2015 offered a rare opportunity to put the spotlight on causes and patterns of social exclusion. Gray himself was at the cross-point of various social forces. His life patently embodied the intersection between “private troubles” and “public issues” that define the sociological imagination. The child of an illiterate heroin addict, Gray grew up in a house with elevated levels of lead. He failed in school and only occasionally held jobs. Early in his life, he became involved in petty drug trafficking for which he had been frequently arrested. As reporter Lawrence Lanahan (2014) perceptively concluded regarding the death of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer in ­Ferguson, Missouri, a pattern of structural racism lies under every story of police violence against young African-American men. Covering such stories, Lanahan observes, demands going beyond news images of violence in order to make visible the social consequences of government policies and institutional practices that shape the life trajectories of local residents. In principle, then, the Gray story offered multiple entry points to tell stories about the social conditions in West Baltimore.

Sandtown and West Baltimore in the News Our first step was to assess the number of stories in the digital edition of the Baltimore Sun between June 2014 and December 2015 by conducting a search using two keywords (“Sandtown-Winchester” and “West Baltimore”). The findings yielded a clear pattern: the overall number of stories on Sandtown-Winchester substantially increased after Gray’s death on April 19th. Whereas the Sun published only a smattering of stories per month in 2014, the number significantly increased between April and July 2015. The events catapulted Sandtown and surrounding neighborhoods to the center of the news. While numbers receded in subsequent months, news attention picked up in December 2015 with the beginning of the trial of police officers charged with a variety of charges, including misconduct in office, second-degree depraved-heart murder, and involuntary manslaughter. The surge in the number of news stories reflected not just the availability of various newsworthy events—large crowds gathered at Gray’s funeral, demonstrations under strong police vigilance, riots and the destruction of property in Sandtown, investigations into police brutality,

The Sociological Eye in the News  67 a flurry of legal actions, and daily pronouncements by government officials. The spike also resulted from the Sun’s decision to devote considerable resources to cover the events and the neighborhood. One Sun reporter says that the entire newsrooms went into “all hands on deck” mode to provide comprehensive coverage of breaking news events and also investigate issues related to Gray and his neighborhood (Mullin, 2015). More than 60 journalists, including reporters from various beats and all four reporters in the investigative unit, were assigned to cover the story (Wemple, 2015). This suggests that, even within the constraints of a newsroom with a relatively thin staff, resources can be increased when the circumstances demand. The majority of the stories were event-centered. Yet, the number of sociological stories a few weeks after Gray’s death noticeably spiked, suggesting that the Sun decided to cast a different net by examining social conditions and community life. The increase closely followed the upward trend in the number of stories about Sandtown between April and August 2015, and the decline of the overall number of stories. Before Gray’s death, the number of “sociological” stories was negligible as the vast majority of news was event-centered episodic and consisted mostly of brief reports of homicides.

What Were “Sociological” Stories About? The “sociological” stories published after Gray’s death focused on abysmal social conditions and inequalities in Sandtown and West ­Baltimore (Fenton and Broadwater, 2015; Kohn and Marton, 2015). Some reported on rampant environmental health hazards and life conditions (Morton and Harris, 2015). In fact, the Gray family successfully sued a landlord for the unhealthy conditions responsible for the children’s lead poisoning (Marbella, 2015). An investigation documented the extent of lead-paint poisoning in Gray’s neighborhood, extensive legal actions, and reported the involvement of community organizations in addressing the problem (Wheeler and Broadwater, 2015). The story emphasized that, although Baltimore banned the use of lead paint in 1950, several decades before the federal government’s prohibition, children who lived in older, dilapidated homes were still severely affected. Local residents demanded changes, but city officials continued to neglect the problem. The investi­gation blamed the lack of strong political will and limited resources to tackle a problem that disproportionately affected poor, African-­A merican children. The Sun reported longstanding use of heavy-handed police tactics against local residents. One story reported on police “rough rides,” a practice in which citizens in police custody suffered trauma because they were not being strapped to a seat and because of malicious driving of the vehicle in order to cause fear and injury. This issue was central to

68  Silvio Waisbord, Eissa Saeed, and Tina Tucker the investigation of the causes of Gray’s death: a “rough ride” was believed to explain why Gray arrived to the police station with broken neck vertebrae and voice box. Reporters Doug Donovan and Mark ­Puente (2015) documented that the police frequently used “rough rides” to intimidate suspects. The story echoed a pattern of police brutality previously examined by Puente in his 2014 award-winning investigation. This investigation revealed that the City of Baltimore paid about $5.7 ­million over lawsuits claiming police violence against alleged suspects since 2011. Another story documented that police officers were seldom prosecuted in cases involving deaths of citizens at the hands of police patrols ­(Donovan and Marbella, 2015). A March 2016 report by the West B ­ altimore Community Commission on Police Misconduct confirmed the Sun findings showing a pattern of police brutality and lack of accountability (No Boundaries Coalition, 2016). Other pieces called attention to various social problems. Sandtown painfully exemplifies the “food deserts” in sections of Baltimore with a majority of poor and African-American residents (Baltimore Sun, 2015b). Several stories exposed Sandtown’s chronic joblessness, drug trafficking, and long history of segregated public housing. The Sun revisited the impact of an ambitious $130 million plan to redevelop ­Sandtown in the 1990s. Observers concluded that while originally hailed as a model of urban revitalization, the program had limited positive effects (Wenger, 2015). Arguably, the initiative contributed to modest improvements, such as increased numbers in years of formal education and a higher level of home ownerships and building renovations. It failed, however, to tackle major problems. Chronic high level of joblessness did not change; most residents still did not have steady jobs, and those who did were mostly employed outside Sandtown. School performance was significantly below the city average. School buildings were still in poor condition. Commercial development was virtually unchanged. Drug trafficking remained widespread. In sum, the plan did not fundamentally reduce social inequality and exclusion (see Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, 2016; Rosenblatt and DeLuca, 2015). Meanwhile, another focus became community activism in connection to social problems. It reported on local “copwatching”—citizen monitoring of police behavior, a practice widely praised for helping to document potential cases of violence and illegal practices. The Sun also engaged with residents in reconstructing what happened to Gray after he was taken by the police (Rentz and Donovan, 2015). This was particularly important considering that many observers, including local residents and national commentators, challenged the original police version about what happened to Gray between the time he was put in police custody and his arrival at the station. Inconsistencies in police accounts about Gray’s terrible condition while in their custody as well as first-person testimonies from Sandtown residents were featured in the

The Sociological Eye in the News  69 award-winning story “The 45 Minute Mystery of Freddie Gray’s death” (Rector and Fenton, 2015). Not only did this story feature the voices of local residents who offered a counterpoint to the official version, it also presented evidence suggesting that Gray died from the violent impact suffered while riding the police van. In the aftermath of Gray’s death and the riots, the Sun reported on a range of local initiatives to support citizens and business through food drives, donations, volunteering and praying (Wells, 2015) as well as to restore community life and social support; local initiatives to beautify Sandtown through public art projects and gardens; and the state of public shelters and public services for the youth and homeless. It reported on town hall meetings to discuss problems and “listening” events for citizens to discuss common concerns; and meetings between local residents, activist and government officials. Editorials underscored the need for local activism to address multiple forms of social exclusion that resulted from specific policies that resulted in the lack of funding, jobs, and business. Op-ed pieces called attention to the significance of “anchor institutions” and their role in urban renewal to promote equity and justice. In sum, the Sun rendered a picture of Sandtown and West Baltimore as resilient communities concerned and equipped with institutional resources to address social ills. The neighborhoods are not portrayed as socially barren, bereft of community associations or uninterested in improving social conditions. Rather, they are presented as settings with a healthy number of local initiatives that bring people together to tackle a range of social problems including public safety, police violence, urban blight, and joblessness. A profile of street photographers motivated to document life in Sandtown in order to counter negative stereotypes about the neighborhood is symbolic of the Sun’s own intention to broaden the perspectives about the neighborhood and West Baltimore as brimming with activism and hope.

Why Sociological News Matters The sociological stories provide insights into the social fabric and the realities of the neighborhood at the center of news events. The stories suggest that Gray’s troubled life was not unique in his community, and that his fate should not be attributed to individual characteristics. They placed Gray in the context of chronic high levels of poverty, segregation, mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, and police brutality. In fact, several stories explained that throughout his life, Gray confronted difficult conditions shaped by a combination of social forces. Gray’s reaction to the police officers who approached him on April 14th was thus made understandable in the context of tense encounters and frayed relations between local residents and the police. Such stories were virtually absent before Gray’s death. But by focusing on various manifestations

70  Silvio Waisbord, Eissa Saeed, and Tina Tucker of social exclusion, the coverage provided necessary social context to understand citizen mobilization demanding justice and investigation of police violence. In fact, the sociological bend of many stories after Gray’s death bled into the coverage of homicides. Before Gray’s death, homicide, event-­ centered reporting was the staple of news about West Baltimore. Headlines such as “Man Was Shot On This Corner in West Baltimore” were common and were followed by a succinct description. In the aftermath of Grey’s death, homicide stories were more likely to raise questions about the continuous use of violent police methods and link particular cases to broader social issues in the area. The Sun was not alone in bringing attention to structural inequalities underlying events. Commentators for national news media—both mainstream news and liberal and progressive publications—also called attention to social conditions in Sandtown and West Baltimore. Opinion pieces pointed to long-standing social problems as the underlying causes of Gray’s death as well as public reaction: the failure of urban renewal projects across the country (Bierman and Tanfani, 2015; Cobb, 2015), chronic joblessness, segregation (Bouie, 2016) poverty (Ellison, 2015), environmental health hazards (McCoy, 2015), drug trafficking (Blow, 2015), housing discrimination, police violence (Alexandrov, 2015; ­Friedersdorf, 2015), and other social ills (Badger, 2015).

The Constraints of Professional Journalism Notwithstanding the considerable number of “sociological” stories on social inequalities and community activism, the coverage remained focused on news events such as protests, the funeral, the autopsy, the destruction of stores and later re-openings, the indictment of police officers involved, the trial, visits to West Baltimore by politicians and celebrities, and crime incidents. The Sun devoted significant attention to violence sparked by small numbers of demonstrators. No doubt, the decision to run a cover photo of rioters and a police car in flames was not the ­paper’s best moment. In one fell swoop, those images reinforced racialized stereotypical narratives of African-American youth as violent and mob-like, downplaying the fact that the crowded protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, a point actually made by several of its own stories. Such stories did not use interpret social inequalities and various problems affecting local residents—from environmental health hazards to police brutality to joblessness—in terms of structural racism, referring to systems, policies and norms that perpetuate social inequality among racial groups and the naturalization of white privilege and dominance. But the factual reporting illustrated no attempt to establish “structural racism” as the fil rouge running through the many stories on social exclusion. Focused on the description of specific problems, straight reporting

The Sociological Eye in the News  71 failed to offer a nuanced historical understanding of policies that came to shape patterns of social and racial inequality in large swaths of West and East Baltimore. References to history or past decisions responsible for poverty and social exclusion were limited. The stories were not woven into layered arguments about the impact of decades-old politi­ cal neglect and deliberate actions to perpetuate social exclusion. The only mention of structural racism came in a story about an advertising campaign launched by local organizations and individuals to nudge ­Baltimore residents to think about the events and inequalities in terms of “structural racism” with the hope of changing the terms of the debate (Wood, 2015). In contrast, editorials and letters to the editor consistently blamed entrenched racism for the many problems in West Baltimore revealed by Gray’s death and ensuing protests. A reader wrote, “Freddie Gray’s death is a tragedy for his family, a wound in Baltimore’s social fabric and another reminder of the systemic racism that has oppressed people of color in America for some 400 years (Taft-Morales, 2015). Numerous op-ed pieces used the language of “structural racism” to explain fundamental problems in the judicial system, policing practices, and residential segregation, praise community actions aimed at reversing discriminatory policies, and challenge ongoing urban development projects by the city and the state of Maryland. Not surprisingly, the forceful language and pointed analysis in these columns clashes with the neutral, dispassionate tone of descriptive reporting. The overall coverage of Sandtown and West Baltimore followed a template hewed by journalistic news values and the ideological bedrock principles of neutrality and political centrism. It offered disconnected snapshots about grim social realities. These limitations are hardly surprising for they reflect the weight of the conventions of reporting, namely the tyranny of event-centered news. This temporal bias of reporting tilts news attention in favor of quick, short-lived events event-­ focused coverage, away from slow, sedimented developments underlying patterns of social exclusion. The problem is self-evident: journalism’s fixation with time-bounded events does not fit with the time frame of social problems. The rapid rhythm of news is fundamentally at odds with the slow layering of social problems. Journalism’s short attention span leads to ignoring the reality of the social problems grounded in past policy decisions and other factors. None of the social problems in West Baltimore suddenly happened due to the irruption of particular events that are commonly at the center of the news. Rather, they result from the accumulation of policies—the drip-drip devastation caused by layers of exclusionary policies coupled with elites and/or public disinterest and the failure of solutions. The genealogy of social problems does not neatly fit news cycles. Nor is daily news work built to grapple adequately with the impact of efforts to solve problems. Unless obvious news events offer

72  Silvio Waisbord, Eissa Saeed, and Tina Tucker openings to review actions and effects, journalism is unlikely to devote considerable attention to assessing interventions. The event-focused bias of journalism boxes “sociological” news within temporal expectations. Without appropriate “news events,” the sociological dimensions of social problems are unlikely to get substantive coverage. Unless particular manifestations of socio-economic structures and community life show obvious newsworthy elements, sociological perspectives are rare. The reason is simple: Journalism’s news-centered logic is anathema to fostering the sociological imagination—presenting nuanced understandings of society, probing into the texture of social problems, or addressing socio-historical factors underpinning social problems that are not easily captured by the rhythm of “newsiness.” Journalism may occasionally deliver news that satisfies sociological minds, but the latter is not its defining mandate, not what regularly obsesses newsrooms on a basis. Editors and reporters scan the world in search of newsworthy events and stories. Trying to cover long-term socio­logical processes or exploring the intersection between private lives and public issues are not top priorities. Journalism’s own logic straitjackets the prospects for sociological news, mainly, the convention that puts time-bounded events at the center of reporting. As an “epistemic community” (Waisbord, 2013), constantly churning out bits of information and commentary, journalism is concerned with newsiness more than continuous and comprehensive coverage of complex social problems. Journalists are aware of these constraints. Sun reporters’ and editors’ conversations with the authors showed that they regarded the Gray events as an anomalous moment in news coverage that provided a narrow window of opportunity to take a relatively sustained, wide-angle perspective on Sandtown and West Baltimore. The prolonged, monthslong lifespan of the story provided plenty of news events and pegs to drill into social conditions. As the long as the story remained at the front of the news cycle, they could cover social, contextual, and structural questions beyond the frantic pace of events. Certainly, the fact that the Sun assigned additional resources helped to expand the thematic scope of the coverage. But once the story started losing momentum and the coverage shifted to other topics, the window of opportunity narrowed. This is why although journalism occasionally provides sociological glimpses into social problems, it is “sociology under deadline” at best. Investigative reporting and feature reporting can sporadically embrace sociological perspectives in their attempts to provide additional facts and context about specific issues. Sociological perspectives in the news suggest a form of “slow journalism” contingent on suitable newsroom conditions and editorial principle. But evaporating resources and constant pressures to produce fast news to feed endless news cycles are not conducive to any kind of sociologically–minded reporting. Explaining “why” has long been the “dark continent” of American journalism, as

The Sociological Eye in the News  73 James Carey (1986) put it. This weakness is partially the result of the fragmented, disconnected presentation of stories, even when they are, as in the case here analyzed, ostensibly about the same issue—social exclusion. Daily coverage of tidbits of information with individual vignettes does not make for a solid, continuous explanatory narrative about why something happens. The limitation is also grounded in the fact that journalism is fixated on standing neutral in partisan and ideological terms. Why are high rates of unemployment, poor school performance, terrible health conditions and other ills prevalent in West Baltimore and other inner cities? An explanation must address structural racism. Yet, finding explanations for what Sun reporters documented in West Baltimore quickly veers into a radioactive political zone for a journalism comfortable within the confines of mainstream politics. Wrestling with “why” things happen inevitably takes journalism into the contested territory of partisanship and ideo­ logy. Peeling the onion of exclusionary policies and racism is plausible and relatively conflict-free within the normative, “progressive” confines of journalism’s attachment to “altruistic democracy” and “responsible capitalism” (Gans, 1979). Delving into the causes, however, inevitably endangers journalism’s intention to stay at prudent distance from “ideo­ logy” and sticking to facts. A journalism of explanation undercuts claims to impartiality about politically sensitive and divisive issues in US society. This is also why journalism generally stays clear from reporting solutions to the problems it documents. Aversion to getting deep into politics and ideology blunts the potential critical edge of reporting to go beyond reporting social problems. And it might present a sociological take on news events, even when trying to offer a better grasp on the connection between individual lives and social forces or delivering a biting critique of capitalism and racism, mainstream journalism cannot be a purveyor of radical sociology. Hamstrung by the ethics of non-partisan reporting, journalism stands close to the ideological center of mainstream politics.

A Burst of Sociological News The Sun’s coverage of Sandtown and West Baltimore suggests that, under specific circumstances, journalism occasionally delivers news with a sociological eye. As long as particular issues and geographical urban areas remain at the center of the news cycle, journalism might shine a spotlight into the lives of the urban poor and provide the kind of indepth, contextual coverage to help readers make sense of social forces. Even if news companies invest in producing more comprehensive news and liberate reporters from the grind of daily news, news attention, however, is fragmented and ephemeral. News flashes are ill-equipped to cover the permanent, historically layered nature of social problems. The historical arc of public policies—the consequences on citizens’ lives and

74  Silvio Waisbord, Eissa Saeed, and Tina Tucker opportunities, cannot be detected and thoroughly reported within the limited time of daily newswork. The Sun’s “sociological” stories bring out a context of social discrimi­ nation in West Baltimore that implicitly challenges several components of the conservative trope about social problems, namely, the belief that equality is a fundamental condition of US society, and individuals should be held responsible for social troubles. Altogether, the stories contradict the view that life is determined by individual responsibility, hard work, enterprising spirit, and playing by the rules. They also challenge the conviction that views social problems are the result of the “wrong” culture, another shibboleth of American conservatism long prone to explain ­social ills as the consequence of individual attitudes and values. The Sun correctly portrayed Gray not as someone whose fate was self-determined but as someone who resorted to petty drug trade early on amid the lack of educational and job opportunities. Altogether, the stories about West Baltimore demonstrate that the deck is stacked against local residents. The stories document layers of social inequalities and the absence of hope amid chronic difficulties that make individual success extremely difficult. A grim portrayal of persistent social problems punctuates the cocksure, ubiquitous prediction that “a rising tide that lifts all boats” would magically solve problems. Cycles of local and national economic growth and downturns do not seem to have made any impact in changing life prospects in the area. Moreover, by showing a pattern and ongoing tense relations between citizens and the police, journalism shows the consequences of a systemic approach to violent policing. The stories suggest that police violence is not the product of single “bad apples”—maladjusted officers who committed excesses. Instead, they document a pattern of harsh policing that resulted from deliberate policies favored by politicians and implemented by police forces. By doing so, the stories provide context to understand long simmering rage expressed during the demonstrations during Gray’s funeral. Subterranean trends of social despair, impatience and frustration forcefully come out in citizens’ demands for justice and disbelief about promises by government and police officials. The Sun stories about current patterns of discrimination of ­A fricanAmerican citizens lays bare the fantasy of post-racialism, too. The persistent hardships of African-American neighborhoods are reflective of long-term social dysfunctionality. Social problem have not been tackled, let alone ameliorated, even if top members of city government and the US President are African-American. Political progress does not mean the transcendence of racial divisions and a legacy of exclusionary poli­ cies. The reality portrayed by sociological stories directly clash with rose-tinted visions of major social advancements or satisfaction about achievements in race relations in the past decades. The stories patently

The Sociological Eye in the News  75 demonstrate that race matters as long as social gaps grounded in a long history of discriminatory policies prevail. By giving visibility to grievances and challenges beyond individual lives, the stories also outline the importance of social action to address problems. Portraying problems as long-standing issues affecting generations of local residents brings into question that idea that society is merely the aggregation of individuals or that individual-level attributes and solutions are adequate. Positive stories on local mobilization tacitly endorse the need for collective mobilization to tackle social issues. They do not endorse personal self-improvement as the ticket to success. Mainstream reporting does not explicitly call readers to action or provide concrete actions to tackle structural forces responsible for social exclusion. To do so it would be tantamount to advocacy journalism. Yet the stories give visibility and positive treatment to community organizations, some working on ways to improve conditions, and others challenging long-standing causes of social problems. Understanding “why Baltimore burned,” as commentators (Diamond, 2015; Ellison, 2015; Kristof, 2015) pondered, is possible only if journalism foregrounds simmering tensions and long-standing social conditions. The case of Baltimore suggests that, when animated by reporters’ curiosity and commitment to public ideals and when news cycles are favorable, journalism may render visible dark corners of American society. Just as specific news events suddenly direct public attention to certain social issues, they also jolt journalism’s interest in specific stories and problems. What the Baltimore Sun did during those months was an exception. Its focus on West Baltimore was driven by exceptional conditions and unusual circumstances. Once the story lost steam, coverage reverted to typical patterns of limited, event-centered coverage of the inner city. Critics may reasonably argue that such attention is fleeting, insufficient, or belated, or that it largely rides on the popularity of news events rather than out of a durable commitment to social justice. While this line of criticism is basically correct, the burst of sociological stories published by the Sun in the aftermath of Gray’s death should not be dismissed. Bernard Roschco’s (1967, p. 9) assertion that “a newspaper is neither a political pamphlet nor a sociological journal” is a valuable cautionary note. Written during the heyday of the turbulent sixties when news about race and the inner city captured news headlines, it is reminder to temper expectations about journalism. Although news might exceptionally offer captivating, biting sociological vignettes of the inner city, to expect journalism to deliver systematic sociological close-ups of social problems is misplaced. It is bound to lead to constant disappointment and frustration. Journalism, the social institution in constant pursuit of the news, is not perfectly fitted to deliver socio­logical analysis. Journalism is not sociology—it is a completely different

76  Silvio Waisbord, Eissa Saeed, and Tina Tucker intellectual enterprise, primarily concerned with delivering quick snippets of breaking news on tight deadlines. Ingrained in journalism is the non-stop mission to deliver information according to conventional news values rather than to provide nuanced coverage of long-term ­social trends. Journalism should be expected to put the spotlight on the lives of citizens marginalized by society and rendered invisible by politics. The normative bar, however, needs to be adjusted by recognizing that journalism is organized around a set of principles and institutional pressures that are contrary to fostering the sociological imagination. Fidgety attention, commercial expectations, slimmer resources, and built-in bias to cover official institutions make daily journalism unsuitable to deliver in-depth sociological insights about the inner city. In fact, the case here was unusual. Sun reporters interested in probing social conditions and community life in Sandtown and West Baltimore raced against the tick-tocking clock of the news cycle. The timing for sociological reporting was set by the pace of fast-moving news. For a while, the news headwinds were favorable: the Gray story was packed with remarkable events—the video of his detention, the mystery of his whereabouts after he was put in police custody, his death, massive gatherings at the funeral, peaceful demonstrations, street violence, a flurry of official pronouncements, investigations into police actions, the trial of police officers and so on. Gray’s biography was the entry point for covering environmental hazards, housing conditions, segregation, juvenile justice, drug economy, joblessness. He was the “prism,” as the Sun’s former senior editor for investigations David Rosenthal (2015) puts it, to focus attention on various dimensions of social life in the city. As long as the story continued, there was a window for “socio­ logical” stories examining the intersection between individual lives and social forces. Once the story began to fade out, however, opportunities slipped away. A journalism consistently committed to sociological reporting demands reconceptualizing the epistemology and the nature of reporting away from event-centered, short time-bounded news. Insofar as domi­ nant conditions and expectations remain firmly entrenched in newsrooms, journalism is unlikely to deliver sociological news on a regular basis. Understanding the factors pushing news organizations to explore social contexts beyond event-centered reporting is necessary to recalibrate normative benchmarks and theorize possibilities for journalism’s meaningful contributions to social justice.

Acknowledgments We thank Baltimore Sun journalists Mark Puente, Catherine Rentz, ­David Rosenthal, and Yvonne Wenger for valuable conversations.

The Sociological Eye in the News  77

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The Sociological Eye in the News  79 Parisi, P. (1998). A sort of compassion: The Washington Post explains the “crisis in urban America.” Howard Journal of Communications, 9(3), ­187–203. http://bit.ly/2fNAFr3. Park, R. E. (1923). The natural history of the newspaper. American Journal of Sociology 29 (3), 273–289. Park, R. (1984). The city. In Park, R., Burgess, E., and McKenzie, R. (Eds.), The City (1st ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Parker, J. (2015). Should art be timeless or should it speak to something more current? The New York Times. http://nyti.ms/2eslx4z. Potter, T., and Marshall, C. (2009). The Wire: Urban Decay and American ­Television. New York: Continuum. Puente, M. (2014). Sun investigates: Undue force. The Baltimore Sun. http:// bsun.md/2eSVx0J. Rector, K., and Fenton, J. (2015). Per capita, Baltimore reaches its highest ever homicide rate. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/1l4Q1rN. Rentz, C., and Donovan, D. (2015). After Freddie Gray death, cop-­watchers film police to prevent misconduct. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/ 2frD7Th. Rodgers, S. (2013). The journalistic field and the city: Some practical and organizational tales about the Toronto Star’s new deal for cities. City and ­C ommunity, 12(1), 56–77. http://bit.ly/2esmXMu. Rosenblatt, P., and DeLuca, S. (2015). What happened in Sandtown-­Winchester? Understanding the impacts of a comprehensive community initiative. Urban ­Affairs Review. http://bit.ly/2fMrJUM. Roschco, B. (1967). What the black press said last summer. Columbia Journalism Review, Fall, 6–9. Rothstein, R. (2015). From Ferguson to Baltimore: The fruits of governmentsponsored segregation. Economic Policy Institute. http://bit.ly/1EDFg6o. Schoonmaker, M. (2008). Keeping poverty on the page. Columbia Journalism Review. http://bit.ly/25zqtp2. Sheehan, H., and Sweeney, S. (2009). “The Wire” and the world. Jump Cut: A ­Review of Contemporary Media. http://bit.ly/2fLKeVJ. Taft-Morales, H. (2015). Racism killed Freddie Gray. The Baltimore Sun. http:// bsun.md/2eSYM8B. The Baltimore Sun (2015a). Why Freddie Gray ran. The Baltimore Sun. April 25. http://bsun.md/1DN3OoP. The Baltimore Sun (2015b). Baltimore’s food deserts. baltimoresun.com, June 15. http://bsun.md/2fNBm3K. Waisbord, S. (2013). Reinventing Professionalism: Journalism and News in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Polity. Weiner, M. (2010). All the news that’s fit to print? Silence and voice in mainstream and ethnic press accounts of African American protest. In Coy, P. Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change (1st ed., pp. 297–324). Bingley, England: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Wells, C. (2015). Heaps of donations for first responders, residents affected by riots. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/1QPri6B. Wemple, E. (2015). Baltimore Sun has 60-plus journalists on Freddie Gray story. The Washington Post. http://wapo.st/2fHQMGe.

80  Silvio Waisbord, Eissa Saeed, and Tina Tucker Wenger, Y. (2015). Saving Sandtown-Winchester: Decade-long, multimilliondollar investment questioned. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/1F2dp2c. Wheeler, T., and Broadwater, L. (2015). Lead paint: Despite progress, ­hundreds of Maryland children still poisoned. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/ 2f3Qpo4. Wood, P. (2015). Ad campaign urges Baltimore to consider ‘structural racism’. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/2fMuk1f. Wright Mills, C. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford ­University Press.

5 Order in Baltimore? On Place-Frames in US Journalism Barbie Zelizer

Journalism’s inability to address the embedded structural problems that undergird contemporary social existence remains one of its fundamental weaknesses. That inability comes to the forefront of attention during crises, when unstable and unpredictable times force journalism into formulaic responses. The coverage of Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray is was one such circumstance. That coverage offers the opportunity to examine one of the many formulaic mechanisms by which US journalists skirt the structural dimensions of their targets of reporting. In covering Gray’s death and its aftermath, journalists’ invocation of place—the practice of situating current events in a particular physical location—reflected an incapacity to situate what had happened against larger national patterns of segregation, poverty, discrimination, racism, police violence and structural inequity. Even as journalists eventually broadened their invocations of place beyond the location where Freddie Gray had died, these issues were addressed only in part; their relevance to Gray’s death was unnecessarily muted. Lost, then, was the opportunity to contextualize Gray’s death in a way that went beyond the limited place-related frames in which it was placed. The embrace of small and overly contained places in the news is a peculiar practice that deserves consideration, for connecting current events to specific locations has long been heralded as making news issues more tangible and concrete (Epstein, 1973; Gans, 1979). This analysis will show, however, that this practice produces significant oversights in the coverage. By situating Freddie Gray’s death in particular places, journalists’ invocations of place helped them sidestep the aspects of Gray’s death that mattered most. Even as they accommodated broader place-related frames for situating Gray’s death, they still stopped short of embracing fundamental broad-based explanations for what had happened. This analysis considers the mechanics of invoking place—here termed place-frames—in the news, specifically their role in obscuring explanatory clarity. Because they are often unnecessarily narrowed at the point of breaking news, when publics often most need to understand what happened, the analysis queries the implications of such a practice in hindering public understandings of news.

82  Barbie Zelizer

On Place and Journalism For journalism, the reliance on place requires something of a retooling, because its temporal rather than spatial position has long been privileged as that which makes news distinct. Providing the record of here and now, attending to norms of topicality and novelty, and developing practices like deadlines and scoops, journalism prides itself on the temporal. Even that much touted “first draft of history,” by which journalists’ newly amassed evidence is assumed to require someone else for a final, more dispassionate record, is driven by claims to a distinct temporal position, used to justify news work internally and legitimate it externally to critics and supporters. And yet space—and its concrete correlate of place—is central to the news. Journalists regularly use specific places—the White House, Aleppo, the Vatican, the Global South—to concretize the often abstract nature of the events and issues populating news flow. Invocations of place serve as conceptual anchors, through which journalists organize newswork and facilitate public comprehension of the news. While broad normative notions of space—as in a repair to the public sphere—are central to journalism’s collective aspirations, a more specific spatial bias shapes newswork itself, where both the places of newsmaking (the newsroom or the beat) and the places of news presentation (the anchor desk or the news site) underscore spatiality on the way to news distribution, which has always been defined by spatial boundaries. Place’s positioning as ground in a rapidly changing world is particularly important as local news gives way to its global counterpart, suggesting that invoking place helps secure journalistic authority in multiple ways. Place’s relevance to journalism echoes what has been established more generally about the role of place invocations in stabilizing precarious conditions. To paraphrase Massey (2005, p. 166), when spatial conditions resist closure, the social relations among people and the power reflected by them facilitate a strategic reliance on place in response. Place “stabilizes and gives structure to social categories,” “embodies and secures otherwise intangible cultural norms, identities, memories and values,” affords stature and power (or the lack thereof), and most importantly “sustains difference and hierarchy” (Gieryn, 2000, pp. 473–4). All of this suggests that place-frames can play a role in controlling discursive responses to unstable circumstances. For journalists, then, place-frames keep journalism intact by vindicating newswork, validating a collective distinction between high and low ground, and concretizing journalists’ authority and links with audiences. Used to identify and keep locations distinct from each other while separating out the practices and issues that occur therein, place is instrumental to inscribing the cultural meanings that are relevant to the community as a whole. Kept intact through practices of repetition,

Order in Baltimore?  83 inclusion and exclusion, place-frames naturalize unarticulated meanings associated with the news over time. Often invoking place plays to unmarked locations, to places that need no articulation or explanation because they bring with them already intact meanings. Epstein (1973) long ago established how in earlier systems of news distribution, the coverage of then-distant ­locations— like China or California—was driven by clear, albeit unarticulated, expectations that were determined by technological possibility: China was seen as exotic because most visuals focused on ceremonies that did not require the kind of translations that were difficult to obtain quickly. Meanwhile California was presented as a place of quirky—and ­timeless—lifestyle choices because newsworthy visuals could not reach New York City in time for inclusion on the nightly TV news. Publics expect that TV anchorpersons relay the news from locations that do not need ­identification—Washington, DC or London, for example—and allow the authority attached to those hierarchically important locations to permeate the coverage of less central, more distant places, while notions of place in the news bring with them already-codified assumptions of what matters in the spatial organization of journalism (Zelizer, 1993a). Even in the digital age, notions of place have been given a new—albeit ­different—relevance with the ascent of locative media (Peters, 2012; Goggin, ­Martin and Dwyer, 2014). This means that as markers infused with culturally-inscribed degrees of authority, place-frames strategically drive what journalists think they ought to be doing. When something happens in locations like Baltimore, it has ramifications for journalism as a whole. Looking closely at how journalists spatially positioned Baltimore in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death thus sheds light on how certain places come to stand in for the practices associated with journalism and what that means. Place emerges as not merely a backdrop for journalists’ action and authority but also as an agent of their formation.

On Journalism, Baltimore and Place The association of Baltimore with a particular sense of place in the news is not novel. By and large, discussions of Baltimore have been driven by a simplified understanding of the urban environment as crime-ridden. From the mid-1990s onward, numerous studies pointed out that journalism’s emphasis on crime in Baltimore was out of proportion to its actual occurrence (Klite, Bardwell and Salzman, 1995; Yanich, 1998). Anchors and reporters, wrote Miller (1998, n.p.), “dwell obsessively on local crime and other telegenic instances of pain and suffering.” Although most studies from this period focused on local TV news in Baltimore rather than a mix of media platforms, when the Project for

84  Barbie Zelizer Excellence in Journalism studied Baltimore’s general media ecology for one week in 2009, it found a pronounced lack of original material in all of the news generated from and about the city (How News ­Happens, 2010). Over three-fourths of the news from and about Baltimore originated with press releases and official sources, suggesting a stunted ability to generate new frames for what was occurring. This helped make the longstanding emphasis on crime prevail as the prism through which the city tended to be seen. Two decades ago Massey (1999) referred to an “impoverished space/time imaginary” to denote how spatial differences are often subjugated to linear narratives that are driven by a simple, universal idea. Crime’s centrality in the news from and about Baltimore matched journalistic descriptions of urban settings elsewhere (Fitzgerald, 1997; Geisler, 2000; Tiegreen and ­Newman, 2009; Krajicek and Wenger, 2013), adding it to Americans’ mental landscape of urban crime centers. The Pew Research Center’s 1999 study of local news found less crime on local TV news than in 1998 (­ Rosenstiel, Gottleib and Brady, 2000. But, by 2004 crime was estimated to constitute between 20% and 50% of local TV news in multiple US cities (Wenger and Smith, 2004). Moreover, the coverage of murder was “about one hundred times more likely than its occurrence in reality” ­(Yanich, 1998, np). Consonant with scholarship on the cyclical reportage of crime (Fishman, 1980), on the powerful effect of crime news on audiences (Graber, 1980) and on the cultivation of fear in association with mediated crime (Gerbner and Gross, 1976; Romer, Jamieson and Aday, 2003), coverage of ­Baltimore thus helped position it among the cities seen as violent urban landscapes in the American spatial imaginary. Consistent with longstanding research on the news (Cohen and Young, 1973; Glasgow University Media Group, 1976), that coverage also forced attention to the restoration of order as the primary impulse motivating journalism’s response to urban unrest. As Gans (1979) argued in his discussion of US journalists’ news values and the ­para-ideology, maintaining stability—social and physical order—in the eye of unrest rests supreme in American journalism. A string of violent deaths of black individuals at the hands of the police force in 2015 across the United States provided an opportunity to reconsider journalism’s longstanding association of urban places with crime. The circumstances surrounding those deaths highlighted how simplified and unsatisfactory were longstanding notions of crime as a descriptor of what was happening in American cities. Missed by its emphasis, which oriented to the restoration of order as the obvious solution, was a more complicated intersection created by entrenched patterns of poverty, segregation, discrimination, police brutality, racism and persistent structural inequity. Although recognizing these patterns did not necessarily orient to order’s reinstatement in the way that an emphasis on crime could, they constituted more relevant and productive prisms for considering urban environments than crime ever had.

Order in Baltimore?  85 To be sure, 2015 was not the first time that journalism’s emphasis on urban crime had been reconsidered. Journalism’s shortcomings were ably and prominently documented in the 1968 Report of the National Commission on Civil Disorders. The Kerner Report, as it was known, tracked the systematic linkages between institutional racism, police brutality, poverty and political disenfranchisement. Most importantly, the report pointed out the “significant imbalance” between the occurrence and coverage of riots in Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit; journalism was in part held responsible for intensifying a schism between America’s “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal” (­ Report of the National Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968, p. 1). The report stated, “Coverage gives far more emphasis to control of rioters and to black-white confrontation than to the underlying causes of the disturbances.… The press has too long basked in a white man’s world, looking out of it, it at all, with white men’s eyes and a white perspective” (pp. 206, 389). And yet, as Media Matters pointed out in 2016, none of the Kerner Report’s 1968 recommendations was implemented: “Little has changed in the broken way the mainstream media talks about race, violence and systemic inequality” (Cherry, 2016). Instead, declared Politico, Otto Kerner had become “the man who foresaw Baltimore” rather than prevented it (Western, 2015). Scholars followed the report’s lead in documenting the kinds of circumstances that undercut the value of “crime” as a prism for understanding urban environments. In 2001, Entman and Rojecki traced journalism’s marginalization, distortion and hierarchization of black issues and experts in the news about multiple US locations. Edy (2006) examined the textured mnemonic influences brought to bear on coverage of the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles. Maurantonio (2012) detailed the institutional complicity of the police force, journalism and politicians that had helped shape coverage of the 1964 Philadelphia race riots. A 2014 two-part report by the nonprofit foundation Race Forward found that most mainstream news is not “systemically aware.” With two-thirds of news stories about race failing to include a “perspective with any insight on systemic-level racism,” there is little coverage of either “policies and/or practices that lead to racial disparities” or of the “root causes of disparities including the history and compounding effects of institutions” (Moving the Race Conversation Forward, 2014). For Baltimore, these issues have a particular relevance. One of the most highly segregated cities in the US (Baird-Remba and Lubin, 2013), it has endured what the Washington Post called a “long, painful and repetitive history” of 80 years of inequitable treatment—redlining and subprime mortgages, a crack epidemic, the rise of mass incarceration and loss of industrial jobs, urban renewal and disinvested neighborhoods (Badger, 2015). In one of the few US cities with black leadership, structural inequities prevail almost as if they emerged naturally.

86  Barbie Zelizer And yet, just a few weeks before Freddie Gray’s death, the Baltimore Sun published an article titled “Blatant Racism Is Easy to Confront. Try Tackling the Subtle, Systemic Kind” (Cohen, 2015). This detailed a ­Twitter exchange among white city residents who discussed shooting three unidentified black men walking around the community. In ­February of 2015, the Justice Policy Institute and Prison Policy Initiative published a detailed report on structural inequities in the same ­Baltimore communities that were overridden with violence two months later (The Right Investment, 2015). Addressing the lost opportunities associated with poverty and public assistance, poor physical health, addiction, lack of housing, public safety, diminished education, unemployment and high commute time, the report provided a definitive picture of Baltimore’s systemic problems. But there was very little connection between its findings and the events that followed. Indeed, discussions of such broad patterns tended to eclipse most journalistic attention. The intersection created by the association of the urban environment with poverty, segregation, discrimination, police brutality, racism and structural inequity brought Baltimore into a singular spotlight. Unlike the violence that occurred in 2015 in Ferguson, New York City or Tulsa, the unrest in Baltimore—involving the fatal injuries to Freddie Gray as he was driven around the city in police custody—ignited the replay of longstanding invocations of place for understanding this particular city, what one observer called its “tired stereotypes about black criminality” (Robinson, 2015). Their replay both displayed how insufficient such frames were for facilitating an understanding of what was happening and how they minimized the embedded structural issues that remained larger than any one location. Journalism’s inability to address the larger issues at the heart of the coverage of Freddie Gray’s death was reflected in a formulaic invocation of place-frames associated with Baltimore. That invocation concretized the abstract nature of the circumstances being described and simplified the circumstances by which it could be understood, narrowing the events surrounding Gray’s death to particular repeatedly-identified places. Three place-frames motivated the coverage and public understanding of Freddie Gray’s death: the neighborhood, the city and the nation. ­Existing as concentric circles that offered progressively broadened but not necessarily more enlightened spatial frames for understanding what had happened, these three place-frames positioned the story of Gray’s death in different spatial contexts across time: in the neighborhood in which it took place; in the city of Baltimore, which had both suffered and been complicit with the events surrounding his death; and in the United States writ large, where widespread disinterest in the intersection created by poverty, segregation, racism, police violence against the black community and persistent structural inequities exacerbated a problem of national scope. This expanded version of journalistic “double-time”—by

Order in Baltimore?  87 which journalists revisit issues and events multiple times and in so doing are able to correct earlier mistakes (Zelizer, 1993b)—could have allowed US journalists to complicate their initial versions of what had happened surrounding Gray’s death, but that opportunity was lost as journalists instead overplayed the concreteness of the places they invoked and the restoration of order therein.

The Place of the Neighborhood The neighborhood of West Baltimore where Freddie Gray’s detainment and death occurred provided the story’s most immediate and proximate spatial context. It began on April 12 when the 25 year-old man was willfully detained by the police in West Baltimore for unsubstantiated activity and taken on a “rough ride” across the neighborhood. Unarmed and shackled, he was put in the back of the police van without a seat belt and driven roughly, with the van intentionally and rapidly swerving, accelerating and decelerating. By the end of the ride, during which the police stopped multiple times to attend to other disturbances, Gray had sustained a fatal spinal cord injury. Hospitalized, he remained in a coma and died one week later. Peaceful protests began the day before Gray died and continued over five additional days. By that time, some of the demonstrations turned violent, spreading across the streets of West Baltimore and involving multiple adjacent communities—Clifton-Berea, Greater Rosemount, Southern Park Heights and Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park, where Gray had lived. Coverage, which had been largely nonexistent until the protests became violent, focused in detail on the violence that unfolded within these communities. Uppermost in concretizing the neighborhood frame were the efforts of WBAL-TV reporter Jayne Miller, who produced a half-hour TV program on April 15 that laid out the six stops of Gray’s police transport (Miller, 2015). West Baltimore’s topography was made clear, as the reporter traced the route the police transport had taken: the intersections of Mount and Baker, Fremont and Mosher, Druid Hill and Dolphin, North and Pennsylvania, Mount and Riggs, and Mount and North. ­Visually treated to the rough ride Gray had experienced in the back of a police van, viewers could experience the sequencing of his fatal police transport. Much of this coverage adhered closely to the neighborhood prism in explaining what had happened. Focusing on protestors as they set buildings ablaze, stripped store-shelves bare and volleyed rocks at policemen, coverage reflected the impact of the 150 fires set in widespread destruction, more than 200 arrests, and 15 police officers injured (Scharper and Marbella, 2015). The impression was that West Baltimore was completely overrun with violence—alternatively called, depending on

88  Barbie Zelizer whether the demonstrators or police were being held responsible, “the uprising,” “the riots,” or “the unrest.” The difference in the labeling what unfolded was significant, for it suggested dissonant interpretations of not only what had happened but also what expectations could be had of one’s neighborhood. As coverage gravitated to the immediate context of the neighborhood, as a notion it conjured up conflicting associations: Expectations of community pride and residential responsibility, prevalent in more affluent neighborhoods, were flatly unshared by many residents of West Baltimore, who often justified the decimation of community structures because residents had played no role in their patronage. As Dan Watkins, author of The Beast Side, later argued on MSNBC: “They’re not burning their neighborhood. They’re burning someone else’s neighborhood, burning things they never had access to anyways” (Hayes, 2015). Two contesting notions of the neighborhood permeated US news coverage: One was the view embraced largely—but not solely—from outside the community, which saw West Baltimore as a blight-ridden environment: The neighborhood’s few amenities, observed the B ­ altimore City Paper, were “liquor stores and funeral homes” (Woods, 2015). Here West Baltimore was seen as consonant with internal danger, crime and conflict, and in keeping with it, much of the initial news coverage ­focused on physical injury and property destruction, “looping footage of burning buildings, Humvees and reports of police brutality” (Scharper and Marbella, 2015) rather than sharing attempts to keep the peace. Specializing in what one Slate correspondent called “nearsighted news, favoring big, easily apprehensible images and storylines” (Peters, 2015), TV coverage played a significant role in framing the demonstrations as war zones. News headlines shouted out various aspects of the violence directed at reporters and photojournalists: “Journalists Attacked and Injured in Baltimore Riots” was the heading to a Poynter story ­(Tompkins, 2015). The second notion of the neighborhood resonated largely—but not solely—with its residents, who claimed that they were “all one big community. We all know each other. Everybody is together” (quoted in Woods, 2015). Buzzfeed’s “29 Moments That Show Another Side of the Baltimore Riots” resonated with this view, featuring peaceful protests and families engaged in neighborhood clean-up (Broderick, 2015). Scenes “were significantly calmer and less sensational than media watchers would likely have realized” (Cherry, 2016). Even the Baltimore Sun—which some observers (Johnson, 2015; Cherry, 2016) criticized for overplaying the negative side of coverage—ran an article titled “After Baltimore Riots, Fighting an Image That Paints a City ‘With No Control Over Itself.’” There, it detailed what residents claimed was Baltimore’s “true essence—diverse, creative, resilient” (Scharper and Marbella, 2015). Pictures showed older West Baltimore residents trying to stop the

Order in Baltimore?  89 rioting, while West Baltimore mother Toya Graham, seen on YouTube scolding her son for taking part in the unrest, was dubbed “Hero Mom” by the Washington Post and “Baltimore Mom of the Year” by CNN (McCoy, 2015). In this second view of the neighborhood, danger was largely perceived as coming not from within but from beyond—specifically from a police force that was seen as largely racist and prone to excessive brutality. As Media Matters noted, the police are ever present in West Baltimore, “just like cops are in most poor, black urban neighborhoods: engaging in the sort of zealous pre-emptive policing that can easily engender community resentment” (Peters, 2015). “We feel like we’re prisoners in our own neighborhood,” said one resident (quoted in Woods, 2015). “We can’t come out of our doors without being harassed … you can’t put your hands in your pocket,” another complained. “[Not] every single block is a high crime area” (quoted in Woods, 2015) How did journalists accommodate these opposite perspectives in playing to the frame of the neighborhood? The coexistence of two dichotomous frames, rarely brought into conversation with each other, undercut the value of the ensuing coverage. This had the most direct effect on the news platforms that were the most proximate—those associated with the local media. On the one hand, the local media, largely led by the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore City Paper and WBAL-TV, brought down paywalls, set up live blogs, curated social media posts and provided ongoing coverage that the American Journalism Review labeled “intense” and “wide ranging” (Eichensehr and Popper, 2015). On the other hand, these same efforts were often criticized for hyping the violence, following faulty sensationalistic leads and missing the larger point of the story (Cherry, 2016). Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), for instance, noted that the Baltimore Sun’s coverage “created a perception of actual danger that the proffered evidence doesn’t substantiate” (Johnson, 2015). National media were less encumbered by contradictory framing of the neighborhood. But they were criticized roundly for efforts that seemed to wholeheartedly embrace a negative view of West Baltimore. After six days of peaceful protests and little national media coverage, young protester Danielle Williams told MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts: When we were out here protesting all last week for six days straight peacefully, there were no news cameras … and nobody heard us. So now that we’ve burned down buildings and set businesses on fire and looted buildings … now all of a sudden everybody wants to hear us. Why does it take a catastrophe like this in order for America to hear our cry? (quoted in Wing, 2015)

90  Barbie Zelizer Many of the national media were critiqued for relying on “parachute reporting” and sending reporters “who had little prior experience of the city … [and whose] stories lacked depth and significance” (Craven, 2016). As local reporter Will Sands recalled, “There were lots of black kids rio­ting and breaking into CVS. The stereotypical images [were there] but there was no back-story” (quoted in Craven, 2016). When the Wall Street Journal and ABC were among those to use an Associated Press dispatch hyping violent activity, it was criticized due to presence of ­“otherwise non-violent protesting, including an ‘impromptu die-in’ and a small group [throwing] cans and plastic bottles in the direction of police officers” (Cherry, 2016). As Lawrence Grandpre, head of a ­Baltimore grassroots think-tank, noted: “We have this really threatbased framework for interpreting things like the Baltimore uprising. When you see Black folks as an irrational threat, all you need to do to assuage your fear is put them down” (quoted in Rankin, 2015). In other words, restoring order offered the seemingly only solution available. Receiving particular criticism was CNN, which Slate called “shallow, sensationalistic, reductive and statist,” noting that “when cities spasm with violence for complicated reasons, that’s the only question CNN wants to ask.” CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer heatedly described a burning CVS—saying, “they’re going in there, stealing whatever the hell they want to steal.… I don’t see any police there. Where are the police?” To this Slate observed: “If it sometimes seemed Monday as if CNN expected Baltimore to burn, that’s understandable: CNN mostly just sees the things that are already on fire” (Peters, 2015). Along with other questionable news calls from CNN—characterizing Gray as “the son of an illiterate heroin addict” or as the holder of a “lengthy rap sheet”—the cable network produced, in Slate’s view later that year, “a sad low in Freddie Gray coverage” (Norton, 2015). Journalists concretized the neighborhood by focusing at length on ­localized scenes of violence. The intersection of North and ­Pennsylvania Avenues was featured prominently, where, in one local reporter’s view, “the scene was entirely out of police control” (Giordano, 2015). A CVS, soon-to-become one of the main visual symbols of the unrest, burnt to the ground under the unforgiving glare of TV cameras as scores of people ran from it carrying looted goods. A Maryland police car and a van were shown in flames at the side of the intersection. Images of vacant buildings, busted windows, charred infrastructure and unused transportation facilities overran news coverage across media platforms. Such concrete scenes had immediate effect: As the Baltimore Sun reported a “purge” about to happen at Mondawmin Mall, the police blocked buses from leaving and ended up stranding students unable to get home at the entrance to the mall (Johnson, 2015). Noted one eyewitness, “Those kids were set up, they were treated like criminals before the first brick was thrown” (quoted in Scocca, 2015). “Police actions

Order in Baltimore?  91 inflamed a tense-but-stable situation,” wrote Mother Jones (Brody and ­ cClaughlin, 2015). M The neighborhood thus served as the primary initial place-frame for situating the events of April 2015. The contained environment it offered allowed journalists to concretize what had happened, but that technique itself pushed for the restoration of order as a solution. Moreover, the dissonant expectations that the neighborhood raised, which rested on divided notions of what a neighborhood was supposed to be, suggested that much unarticulated information was driving the unrest. This meant that West Baltimore could not be sustained as a place-frame for explaining what had happened. Though it served to justify journalists’ focus on a reinstatement of stability, it did little to encourage a look beyond to larger issues behind the unrest.

The Place of the City A second place-frame for situating the unrest positioned it against the larger environment of the city of Baltimore. For much of the attending public, particularly those distanced from the city, the unrest that followed Gray’s death had seemed to come out of nowhere. Thus, this larger place-frame by definition was key to broadening the physical environment on which the demonstrations had taken place. As MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes noted six months later, “Baltimore exploded into unrest and the cameras came. And it was like there was no prehistory” (Hayes, 2015). Or, as Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton tweeted on April 27, “Out of town reporters will try to survey the damage tomorrow not realizing how many burned/damaged bldgs already existed in these n’hoods” (Fenton, 2015). For Hayes, Baltimore revealed itself as “a city in chaos … a city in the crossroads … a city in the midst of an ongoing crisis” (Hayes, 2015). What did it mean, though, to think of Baltimore as a city in crisis? Whose crisis was it? What had caused it? Who could resolve it? And how? Key here was letting go of the neighborhood place-frame enough to emphasize the centrality of the city of Baltimore in its stead. Baltimore’s capacity to support all of its neighborhoods, rather than just some, was central in this regard. However, here too, as with coverage of the neighbor­hood of West Baltimore, polar negative and positive evaluations haunted journalism’s discussion of the city. In the first view, Baltimore was seen as emblematic of an urban environment in strife. “Gray’s death,” wrote the Washington Post, “represents yet another terrible incident of alleged police misconduct.… But it also raises questions about the state of Baltimore, Maryland’s largest city” (Dvorak, 2015). Because many local residents saw Gray’s death as consonant with a longstanding process of hobbling the black community, dating to the late 19th century, they regarded what had happened

92  Barbie Zelizer as another offshoot of the city’s “original sin” (Blake, 2016). Seeing West Baltimore and the rest of the city in mutually accommodating terms made comparison difficult because West Baltimore came up lacking: As the Baltimore Sun observed, “experts worry that Baltimore could be synonymous with violence, lawlessness and fury for years to come” (Scharper and Marbella, 2015). With the community of ­Sandtown exhibiting “crushing poverty and decay,” the rest of the city stood apart. Sandtown resided “in stark contrast to the tourist attractions of the ­I nner Harbor.… It feels like a world away from the Inner Harbor instead of just a few miles” (Dvorak, 2015). Comparison, however, also had value, for implicit in this negative discussion of the city were some of the structural inequities that had eclipsed much discussion of the neighborhood. The uneven spread of resources across the city, for instance, had naturalized inequities deep in its imaginary. As one long-term resident of West Baltimore noted, “this community has been raped of resources by our black politicians. We live in a city where all the highest offices are held by blacks who look down on the working and the poor” (quoted in Giordano, 2015). Or as ­A nthony Batts, the city’s police commissioner at the time, later said: “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. You gotta talk about the racial issues in that city.… You got ‘separate but equal’ taking place” (quoted in Marbella, Green and Prudente, 2016). Thus, what became increasingly visible in the aftermath of Gray’s death was the strained relationship between the underserved communities of West Baltimore and the city responsible for their maltreatment. In one view, what happened in April 2015 “was about a system that left a large chunk of Baltimore politically abandoned in terms of people who genuinely represented their interests and structurally in the line-of-fire for systemic poverty, hyper policing and structural racism” (Grandpre, quoted in Maza and Lowndes, 2016). As reports of blighted neighborhoods highlighted the fact of nearly 20,000 vacant houses in Baltimore, many individuals went on record arguing that without a full-bodied examination of the city, not just the neighborhood, the city’s systemic problems would not change. Such comments oriented toward a second, more positive view of the city, which held that embracing Baltimore’s multiple neighborhoods as one entity raised the opportunity of its possible renewal. The Baltimore Sun quoted a marketing firm executive who noted: “No one from the outside is going to believe what you say unless the people inside are ­behind it.… Addressing systemic problems in poorer neighborhoods— the concerns raised by many protestors—is critical to repairing the city’s neighborhoods” (Scharper and Marbella, 2015). Community leader Meg Ward insisted that Baltimore had long been “the city of neighborhoods” and urged Baltimore residents to “be part of a whole city, not just be in our own little neighborhoods” (quoted in Dvorak, 2015).

Order in Baltimore?  93 Social media were prominent in this regard. Baltimore Mayor S­ tephanie Rawlings-Blake urged residents to share positive images of the city on social media. And immediately after Gray’s death postings of brass bands, gospel singers and prayer circles flooded social media sites bearing tags like #ThisIsBaltimore or #OneBaltimore (Scharper and Marbella, 2015). Social media publicized news of free concerts, local healing sessions, peace rallies, collective clean-up activities, free meals for school-age children and alternative activities for children out of school (Zelaya, 2015). The frame of the city thus broadened the issues surrounding Gray’s death beyond the confines of West Baltimore. That, in itself, was of value, for it forced degrees of attention to the larger structural inequities separating communities with less from communities with more. But the negative and positive views of the city did not engage fruitfully with each other. This disconnect undercut the goal of embracing West Baltimore within a fuller citywide environment. Instead, the place-frame of the city offered an opportunity to either spar over the question of who was to blame for what had happened or a vague sense of hopefulness about the future, without generating productive discourse about what precisely needed to be done next. Though such attention might have diverted news platforms from their too-easy slide toward the restoration of order, the lack of useful solutions meant that restoring order still remained the central concrete achievement suggested by the coverage. “The City Is Stable,” proclaimed Baltimore’s police commissioner in a statement widely circulated by USA Today, CNN and Fox News, among others. “We restored order to Baltimore,” tweeted the office of State Attorney Marilyn Mosby. Restoring order thus resonated as a goal for the city in its entirety as well as for the neighborhood of West Baltimore. In this case, however, it had more to do with reinstating Baltimore’s good image than with correcting systemic deficiencies and inequities. This was unfortunate, for in much the same way that moving beyond the neighborhood frame was central to embracing the city frame, so too the capacity to move beyond the city frame was instrumental to accommodating a national frame for understanding what had happened. In other words, journalism’s address to the events of April 2015 required a broader spatial context than the contours of reportage provided, at both the levels of the neighborhood and the city. The emphasis on restoring order in each of these place-frames cut short the capacity to move beyond them.

The Place of the Nation What came through with the death of Freddie Gray was a somber recog­ nition that what had happened in Baltimore had happened and was ­happening—in various permutations—in multiple cities across the United States. As a Newsweek opinion piece titled “Baltimore Goes Beyond

94  Barbie Zelizer Freddie Gray” proclaimed, Baltimore was “reminiscent of D ­ etroit and Newark in 1967” (Joseph, 2015). Baltimore Councilman Nick Mosby was quoted as observing that the destruction following Gray’s detention and death laid bare the “truth about urban life in America” (quoted in Scharper and Marbella, 2015). And yet, although both the neighborhood and the city place-frames unwittingly oriented toward this third invocation of place—the nation and its lack of response to the embedded problems undergirding the events of 2015—it was not fully adopted. In Slate’s view: I can’t fault the media for emphasizing the riots. Like it or not, “if it bleeds, it leads” is how journalism works, and that’s not necessarily a flaw. If it bleeds, it’s generally important, too. But good journalism also tries to understand why a city is bleeding instead of just frowning at the wound. (Peters, 2015) Despite embracing this larger place-frame for contextualizing and understanding what had happened, most US journalists failed to address what should have come with it—a consideration of the widely-embraced practices across the nation that were partly responsible. Rather, most coverage reflected widespread national indifference over what happens to those caught in an intersection bounded by racism, segregation, discrimination, police brutality, poverty and structural inequities. Though multiple news stories did track its effect on the ensuing coverage, few of them were central in the flow of news. In an article in The Root titled “Media’s Biased and Dehumanizing Coverage of ­Baltimore Fails to Tell the City’s Real Story,” Rashad Robinson, the executive director of the nonprofit organization Color of Change, lamented that “our news media has done nothing but smear and condemn protesters, rather than ask important questions about the systemic conditions that created this conflict” (Robinson, 2015). Slate—under the title “The Deep Troubling Roots of Baltimore’s Decline”—noted that any effort to save Baltimore needed to begin by reversing 100 years of segregation (Bouie, 2015). And two Huffington Post columnists argued: While many television stations covered the turmoil breathlessly on Monday night with wall-to-wall images of raging fires, ransacked stores and other destruction, they dedicated much less time to the underlying causes of the unrest. Instead of discussing the crushing poverty, lack of opportunity and patterns of controversial police behavior in the neighborhoods hit most heavily by the rioting, news anchors collectively clutched their pearls, wondering aloud how such bad things could happen in Charm City. (Wing and Ferguson, 2015)

Order in Baltimore?  95 Because, like other cities, Baltimore was seen as an environment perpetually in crisis—as NAACP Legal Defense Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill noted on MSNBC, “what erupted was a crisis that arose to the consciousness of other people” (Hayes, 2015)—productively addressing its issues was a larger challenge than most US journalists were willing to take on. What did not emerge was a wide attempt to seriously consider the embedded circumstances nationwide that were in large part responsible. Instead, the need to reestablish security in the face of instability remained uppermost, even at the national level. What rarely became clear, however, was that the “reestablishment of security” was little more than “reestablishing the status quo which was never really secure where you’re talking about black people in places like Baltimore” (Grandpre, quoted in Maza and Lowndes, 2016). Why was there such indifference to understanding what had happened and such uncritical support for reflecting the goal of reinstating order? To some people, the resistance to understanding and empathizing with violence in the black community rests deep in the national imagi­ nary. Think-tank head Lawrence Grandpre blamed deep “psychological tropes that relate to blackness” across the US—such as slave revolts from the 19th century (quoted in Maza and Lowndes, 2016). The “idea of black people having these types of uprising,” he observed, “produces this deep fear within the collective psyche of many in America” (quoted in Maza and Lowndes, 2016). Because images of violent protests became the problem, the solution became “ending the violence, not addressing the conditions that had caused unrest in the first place” (quoted in Maza and Lowndes, 2016). The persistence of “negative, inaccurate and racially biased narratives about the situation” (Rankin, 2016) that ignored causal socioeconomic factors—what Newsweek characterized as “decades of policies and ­political decisions that are depressingly familiar to close observers of our nation’s tortured racial history” (Joseph, 2015)—left the public to assume that “protestors were acting irrationally. And that made it easier for [journalists] to dismiss them as ‘thugs’ and ‘criminals’” (Maza and Lowndes, 2016). That, in turn, made it easier to rid the environment of its sources of disruption, rendering order’s restoration the ultimate goal. The repercussions of US journalism’s inattention to the embedded problems at hand are enormous. The “state of national denial” over mass incarceration, unemployment, segregation and criminalization meant, in one observer’s view, that “we will continue to face more Baltimores and Fergusons, even as we ask ourselves why people who have so little would destroy their own communities” (Joseph, 2015) It is, then, no surprise that so little changed. In June of 2015, news media widely reported that Baltimore prosecutors took “credit for restoring order in Baltimore” (Duncan, 2015). In September, when the Freddie Gray hearings were held, coverage was slight (Zurawik, 2015).

96  Barbie Zelizer That same month, the Baltimore Sun proclaimed that “Baltimore Needs Stability in Police Ranks” (Rodricks, 2015). Crime spiked in the months after Gray’s death, hitting the highest rate per capita in the city’s history by that December (Blake, 2016). Even a year after Gray’s death, West Baltimore still lacks a supermarket that sells fresh produce (Blake, 2016). And according to Slate, “Baltimore’s Next Mayor Doesn’t Want To Talk About Racism” (Cohen, 2016). As Rashad Robinson noted in his call for structural changes, “we need real progress, change and healing, or we’ll never get beyond the violence and injustice of this moment to realize the promise of our democracy.” He went on to add that similarly needed was a media landscape that presents fair, humanizing coverage of black people.… Oppressed communities of color from Ferguson, Mo. to Baltimore are demanding that their voices be heard. The real question: Is America finally listening? (Robinson, 2015) The national context given Freddie Gray’s death by most US journalists was a far cry from what it might have been. It suggests that protecting against crime and maintaining order remained the main prism for understanding urban environments in the news, even when strong evidence suggested more complicated circumstances. The place-frames enable journalists to craft stories about order by offering the physical contours through which order can be imagined.

Order in Baltimore? US journalists focused on restoring order in Baltimore. The reestablishment of order—itself a short-term objective—remained the trope regardless of the place-frame in which it had been invoked. While place-frames do not cause the embedded inequities discussed here, they are a naturalized part of news discourse that exacerbate in­equity, making it more pronounced and less obvious than it might otherwise be. These place-frames fulfill journalism’s more general need for concreteness in news stories at the same time as they serve as relays for maintaining the status quo. This is as problematic as the inequity—segregation, discrimination, racism, poverty, police brutality—at issue. By failing to offer it fuller address, journalists inadvertently end up as its enablers.

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98  Barbie Zelizer How News Happens: A Study of the News Ecosystem of One American City. (2010, January 11). New York: Project for Excellence in Journalism. Johnson, A. (2015, April 29). Media’s Baltimore ‘teen purge’ narrative falling apart. Fair.org. http://bit.ly/1bYBSZc. Joseph. P. (2015, April 28). Baltimore goes beyond Freddie Gray. Newsweek. http://bit.ly/2ePGXHz. Klite, P., Bardwell, R., and Salzman, J. (1995, September 20). Pavlov’s TV dog: A  snapshot of local TV news. Rocky Mountain Media Watch. Denver Colorado. Krajicek, D., and Wenger, D. (2013, March 5). Crime coverage now requires constantly ‘feeding the beast.’ Poynter.org. http://bit.ly/2fE2Iso. Marbella, J., Green, E., and Prudente, T. (2016, April 30). One year after unrest, Baltimore takes stock. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/2eozLU7. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: Sage. Massey, D. (1999). Imagining globalization: Power-geometries of time-space. In Brah A. et al. (Eds.), Global Futures: Migration, Environment and Globalization (pp. 27–44). New York: St. Martins Press. Maurantonio, N. (2012). Standing by: Police paralysis, race and the 1964 Philadelphia riots. Journalism History, 38(2), 110–121. Maza, C., and Lowndes, C. (2016, April 18). How the media turns black rage into the enemy. Media Matters. http://mm4a.org/2ePBVus. McCoy, T. (2015, October 23). What happened to the ‘hero mom’ of Baltimore’s riots? The Washington Post. http://wapo.st/1OWaCtD. Miller, M. C. (1998). It’s A Crime: The Economic Impact of Local TV News in Baltimore. Technical Report. New York: New York University. Miller, J. (2015, April 15). Freddie Gray investigation. WBAL-TV. Moving the Race Conversation Forward. (2014, January and September). New York, Oakland, and Chicago: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation. Norton, B. (2015, December 1). CNN’s ugly, racial victim blaming: A sad low in Freddie Gray’s coverage. Salon.com. http://bit.ly/1NG9kVn. Peters, C. (2012). Journalism to go. Journalism Studies, 13(5–6), 695–705. Peters, J. (2015, April 28). “Where are the police?” Slate. http://slate.me/1Jylzjv. Rankin, K. (2016, April 19). A year after Freddie Gray’s death, a look at media’s coverage of the Baltimore uprising. Colorlines.com. http://bit.ly/2fXivX7. Report of the National Commission on Civil Disorders (1968). Washington, DC. Robinson, R. (2015, May 1). Media’s biased and dehumanizing coverage of ­Baltimore fails to tell the city’s real story. The Root.com. http://bit.ly/2d9G75m. Romer, D., Jamieson, K., and Aday, S. (2000). Television news and the cultivation of fear of crime. Journal of Communication, 53, 88–104. Rosenstiel, T., Gottlieb, C., and Brady, L.A. (2000, March 1). Local TV news project 1999. Pew Research Center. Scharper, J., and Marbella, J. (2015, April 29). After Marbella riots, fighting an image that paints a city ‘with no control over itself.’ The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/2eoFN7f. Scocca, T. (2015, April 28). ‘Those kids were set up.’ Gawker Media. http://bit. ly/1HOAS5w. The Right Investment? Corrections Spending in Baltimore City. (2015, ­February). Baltimore, MD: The Justice Policy Institute and the Prison Policy Initiative.

Order in Baltimore?  99 Tiegreen, S., and Newman, E. (2009, February 18). Violence: Comparing reporting and reality. Dart Center. http://bit.ly/2fXbohy. Tompkins, A. (2015, April 27). Journalists attacked and injured in Baltimore riots. Poynter.org. http://bit.ly/2foyU2p. Yanich, D. (1998). Crime, Community and Local TV News: Covering Crime in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Newark: Center for Community Development and Family Policy, University of Delaware. Wenger, D., and Smith, J. (2004). Scene of the crime: The study and practice of local TV crime news coverage from the mid 1990s to the present. Virginia Commonwealth University. http://bit.ly/2fE4fPe. Western, B. (2015, April 30). The man who foresaw Baltimore. Politico. http:// politi.co/232Xauu. Wing, N. (2015, April 29). Protestor schools MSNBC anchor about media coverage of Baltimore riots. Huffington Post. http://huff.to/1GHyqiy. Wing, N., and Ferguson, A. (2015, April 30). The best commentary out of ­B altimore is coming straight from the mouths of its residents. Huffington Post. http://huff.to/2frvmwj. Woods, B. (2015, April 28). The battle of Sandtown-Winchester: The police occupation of a West Baltimore neighborhood. Baltimore City Paper. http:// bit.ly/2frvjkm. Zelaya, I. (2015, April 28). Not our riot. Baltimore Style. http://bit.ly/2fjKePY. Zelizer, B. (1993a). Pioneers and plain folks: Cultural constructions of “place” in radio news. Semiotica, 93(3–4), 269–285. Zelizer, B. (1993b). Journalists as interpretive communities. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 10, 219–237.

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Part II

Voices, Visibility and the Public Sphere

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6 “It’s not a pretty picture” Visualizing the Baltimore Crisis on Social Media Stuart Allan and Lina Dencik

“Let’s don’t kid ourselves. We wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for video cameras,” William H. “Billy” Murphy declared at the funeral for Freddie Gray at Baltimore’s New Shiloh Baptist Church. “Instead of one cover-up behind that blue wall, after another cover-up behind that blue wall, and one lie after another lie, now we see the truth as never before. It’s not a pretty picture.”1 Murphy, the Gray family’s attorney, was directing his remarks to the estimated 3,000 mourners present at the service. “Most of us are not here because we knew Freddie Gray, but we are all here because we know lots of Freddie Grays—too many,” he surmised. “We’re here to grieve for a nation.” The video recordings Murphy was referring to were generated by ordinary citizens using their smartphones, including one documenting Gray being apprehended and dragged by officers into a police van as he was taken into custody. Another, taken during one of the van’s stops in transit to the West District police station, showed Gray in leg shackles, not moving. The emergence of this type of visible evidence proved sufficiently newsworthy to raise the profile of murder allegations made against the police, helping to situate the case within a wider narrative revolving around previous instances of unarmed black people being killed by police in US cities. Nevertheless, it would take the subsequent outbreak of violent clashes between the police and protestors, the latter outraged over yet another example of deadly force, to ignite a controversy of national significance. This chapter assesses news imagery of the Baltimore crisis by examining multiple reportorial inflections across a diverse journalistic ecology, particularly social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. We turn first to the circumstances whereby the impromptu “amateur video” that Kevin Moore shot of his friend Freddie Gray’s arrest on April 12, 2015 garnered intense media scrutiny. Moore’s video was one of several which, taken together, offered partial, contingent viewpoints regarding a fiercely contested chain of events culminating in Gray’s fatal injuries. Our attention then turns to photojournalists, both professionals (such as the Baltimore City Paper’s J.M. Giordano, who was beaten by police officers while covering a protest march) and their citizen counterparts.

104  Stuart Allan and Lina Dencik Most notably among the latter was Devin Allen, whose street photo­ graphy relayed across the mediascape first-hand insights into the consequences of structural racism. For example, Time magazine chose for its cover one image Allen had taken during the protests and posted to Instagram. In developing a conceptual argument regarding the visual politics of “othering” at stake, we situate the impulse to capture, upload and distribute imagery on social media in the context of “sousveillance.” In contrast with “surveillance” (watching over), the term “sousveillance” (watching from below) helps to illuminate alternative, strategic dimensions of these processes. Steve Mann coined the term “sousveillance” to highlight the reverse tactics employed to monitor those in positions of authority, especially those enabling people to access and collect data about their surveillance in order to effectively neutralize it. It involves “informal networks of regular people, equipped with little more than cellphone cameras, video blogs and the desire to remain vigilant against the excesses of the powers that be” (Hoffman, 2006; see also Bakir, 2010; Mann, 2002). The events in Baltimore show the effectiveness of lens-reversal practices, not least to mobilize imagery to confront institutions of authority by affording counter-narratives of racial discourse, and in so doing disrupting ostensibly hegemonic politics of visibility. “Raw video has thoroughly shaken American policing,” observed two New York Times editors (Cave and Oliver, 2015). “Grainy images of questionable police behavior, spread through social media, have led to nationwide protests, federal investigations and changes in policy and attitudes on race.” At the same time, however, those engaging in sousveillance to document instances of alleged police brutality, misconduct or shootings will likely also find themselves rendered visible, quite possibly at risk of abuse or intimidation. Our examination of the imagery of the Baltimore crisis strives to identify and critique several key factors shaping this discursive struggle for interpretive hegemony, recognizing from the outset that the lethality of racial prejudice and discrimination has been long hidden in plain sight. “The gasoline was already all poured out and you drop that one match,” Devin Allen maintained at the time. “Freddie Gray was that match” (cited in Loftus, 2015).

“The World is Watching Baltimore Now” “That morning, I was in bed. I was sleeping,” Kevin Moore recalled, “and somebody came hollering. They were yelling, ‘They’re tasing him! They’re tasing him!’ And so, I hopped up out the bed, and I grabbed my hoodie and my pants and my phone, and I was out the door” (in  Goodman, 2015). At first Moore did not recognize the person being “pinned to the ground” by police officers. He only knew “it looked like it hurt.” Then Moore moved to the other side and, to his astonishment, recognized the

“It’s not a pretty picture”  105 person as his friend Freddie Gray, a fellow resident in the Gilmor housing projects. “I’m like, ‘Wow! Oh, my god! It’s happening here right now in front of me.’” Moore began videoing the scene with his smartphone, “the first time I ever picked up a camera and actually pushed it this far” (cited in Goodman, 2015). Told by officers to stop what he was doing and get off the street, he stepped back onto the sidewalk. “I sure will,” he apparently responded, “but that ain’t gonna stop me from using this phone” (cited in Rentz and Donovan, 2015). Afterwards, Moore went straight to Baltimore Police’s Internal Affairs division, where he handed over his phone for them to copy the recording as evidence. After a long wait, which he later estimated to be about seven or eight hours, he returned home, determined to sound the alarm. In his words: I called every news media outlet I could imagine. Me and a couple of people around the community and a friend of mine, Kiona Mack, she filmed the second half of the video. And we pushed it. We got together, and we called like everybody. And we YouTubed it and tried to just do what I thought Internal Affairs was taking too long to. (cited in Goodman, 2015) Moore and his friends recognized the risks they were taking. He told one television interviewer he was initially afraid to come forward with the video for fear of retaliation: “Because the police, man, they have their ways of handling things, you know what I mean, quote/unquote. These guys, they don’t care what it is,” he said. “If it’s going to bring negativity to their image, they will do whatever it takes to sweep it under the rug” (cited in Ellis, 2015). Having spoken out publicly about Gray’s arrest, Moore’s fears were realized when days later he was arrested. He was then released without explanation; in his mind, it was intended as a deliberate act of intimidation. On the other hand, he told Amy Goodman (2015) that he could now keep the police “at bay, … keep them on a leash with just a video camera. It’s almost like live ammunition, almost with like live rounds, live bullets from a gun.” According to Moore, unlike with closed circuit television, the police now had a different mindset when they see a civilian recording raw footage. Introduced in a CNN interview as “the man who helped spread the word of Gray’s arrest nationwide with his amateur video,” Moore gave his reaction to the state attorney’s announcement that charges would be filed against the six police officers involved: “My natural instinct was to cry. I couldn’t believe it. It was surreal. I cried because I feel like I finally may have made a change in the world” (CNN, 2015a). Media commentators from across the spectrum certainly agreed that Moore’s video had a decisive impact on how Gray’s arrest was reported, parti­ cularly when it called into question official accounts regarding what had actually transpired. Still, the arrest and ensuing peaceful protests

106  Stuart Allan and Lina Dencik attracted limited coverage in the country’s major news organizations, in part because such incidents were increasingly perceived to be almost commonplace by US journalists that year. Everything changed, however, when violence broke out. The day after Gray’s funeral, Nicole Crowder (2015) of the Washington Post’s photography blog ‘In Sight’ observed that the visual narrative shaped by media outlets “has largely been domi­ nated by photos of burning police cars, teenagers throwing rocks at law enforcement, and shattered glass from looted stores.” All too aware that such imagery was failing to “capture the entire context of a city besieged,” however, Crowder pointed out the existence of “other images to witness, and they have been bubbling up in large part through social media accounts on Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr—through the work of amateur photographers already living in the midst of the community’s simmering tensions.” One such photographer—widely described in news reports as a self-taught “citizen journalist” aspiring to professional status—was Devin Allen, a 26-year-old West Baltimore resident. Having discovered a love of photography three years earlier when printing images on T-shirts for sale, he drew inspiration from the noted documentary photojournalist Gordon Parks (who came to prominence in the 1950s working for Life magazine); meanwhile, he acquired new skills and improved technique by watching YouTube tutorials (Frazier, 2015). Striving to further enhance his growing reputation for street photo­ graphy, Allen found himself posting images via his Instagram account to share alternative perspectives on the protests underway in the city. In his words: So when they started protesting, my first instinct was like “I gotta document this”—but I knew it was going to be the good with the bad. I knew that was gonna happen—we saw what happened in ­Ferguson and in other places. I knew something was going to happen. I have a nice-sized following, I’m not famous, but I know my work is good. I knew if I could get the right shot, to show some positivity and show what’s really going on. I mean, The Baltimore Sun here? I knew they wasn’t going to cover it right. So what I tried to do was be ahead of The Baltimore Sun—I’ve got a camera with wifi. (cited in Peterson, 2015) In contrast with the professional photojournalist’s proclaimed commitment to codified strictures of dispassionate, impartial relay, Allen aligned himself with a particular side. “I’m for the protesters but against the rioters,” he explained. Nonetheless, he tried to be scrupulously fair in capturing multiple angles. “I went in thinking I would show the good, the bad and the ugly,” he told Time. “Of course, since I’m a black man, I understand the frustration, but at the same time, I’m a photographer.

“It’s not a pretty picture”  107 I’m not going to lie to you. I’m going to tell you exactly what happened. That was the goal” (cited in Laurent, 2015). Insistent that his motivation to reveal “both sides of the truth” arose “from the heart,” rather than fame or financial reward, Allen’s “hometown” visual style as an “on-the-ground insider” was widely recognized as a distinguishing feature of his work (Richardson, 2015). “I don’t like zoom lenses. I don’t want to sit back across the street,” Allen maintained. “I want to be in the mix. I want to feel that energy, that rush” (cited in Boyette, 2016). In the early evening of April 25, when he heard baseball fans shouting racial slurs at the protestors, he braced for violence, which erupted into near-chaos shortly thereafter. In an interview with The Washington Post, he remembered: I knew what the media was going to do before they were going to do it. I saw them setting up cameras waiting just for the riots to start. I have wi-fi on my camera, so to combat the images that I knew would be projected, I wanted to beat the media and capture everything in real time and upload it to my social accounts the ­second after it happened, using specific hashtags like #Baltimore and # ­ FreddieGray. The media cannot capture the energy the way someone who has ties to this community can. They don’t feel the same emotions, so it cannot translate. Meanwhile, I’m snapping photos while protesting. I’m snapping with one hand and raising my fist in the air with the other. But I grew up here. (cited in Crowder, 2015) Nearly trampled in the confusion—he recalled a police officer helping him back to his feet—he worked quickly to “beat media to the punch” by uploading his Fuji X-T1 camera’s images onto his iPhone as quickly as he could manage. “The next thing I know, the pictures just went viral, within an hour. I saw like a thousand retweets; everyone was reposting it” he said. “I was going to capture every moment” (cited in Boyette, 2016). One of Allen’s most-shared images, taken near Camden Yards, the baseball park, depicts a young black man running away from a police line forming behind him, with officers wearing riot helmets and clenching nightsticks. Rendered in black and white, the image in question promptly went viral online, where social media editors were vying to secure the most newsworthy material. “That was the moment when the situation went from being a peaceful protest to riots breaking out, and Devin captured it perfectly,” Paul Moakley, Time magazine’s deputy director of photography, later recalled when explaining how it was chosen for the magazine’s May 11 cover (cited in Kaltenbach, 2015). One of Allen’s images had been published by Time on its Lightbox blog the day before; editor Olivier Laurent had discovered his work when searching Instagram using the hashtag #ripfreddiegray. Laurent

108  Stuart Allan and Lina Dencik interviewed Allen before sharing his feed’s images with Moakley, the latter suitably impressed with their depth and quality. “He was being really thoughtful and was capturing both sides of what was happening,” Moakley stated. “He was showing people rioting and he was showing people who were protesting.… He was even criticizing the media at certain points” (cited in Risch, 2015). In marked contrast with the ­outside-in emphases of mainstream journalists arriving on the scene, Allen was offering alternative insights as an insider from the community looking out. “That image means a lot to me,” Allen told CNN. “I was trying to tell the story as a native, take it from the inside out” (cited in CNN, 2015b). His local knowledge was a distinct advantage, helping him to craft imagery with the potential to resonate beyond mainstream journalism’s familiar priorities. “You know they were just sticking to the script,” Allen said of the news media. “If it bleeds it leads and that’s all they were worried about. They wasn’t talking about how … we took our community back” (cited in Sara, 2015). Several professional photojournalists similarly struggled to document what the Baltimore City Paper’s J. M. Giordano termed “the human element” in the protests, not least because “every media in the world is here and they’re all kind of sending the same photos back to their respective bureaus” (cited in CTV, 2015). Later on the same day Allen took the photograph that Time used on its cover, Giordano was caught-up in a sudden outburst of violence. He was knocked to the ground and beaten by police officers, recalling: “They just swarmed over me. I got hit. My head hit the ground. They were hitting me, then someone pulled me out.” Despite the pain, he persevered: “I kept shooting it. As soon as I got up I started taking pictures” (cited in Serpick, 2015). 2 Other professionals on the scene captured on video the attack on Giordano. One colleague, Baynard Woods, shouted: “He’s a photo­ grapher! He’s press!’ with no apparent effect. Also recording the scene was Sait Serkan Gurbuz, a freelance photographer then working with Reuters, who was arrested and taken away in a police van. Prior to being released, he was cited for disorderly conduct for failure to obey orders. A Reuters statement proclaimed: “[Gurbuz] was wearing his press credentials, was on a public sidewalk, and the events were happening in plain view. We hope the Department will dismiss the citation and, in the future, respect the First Amendment right of the press to lawfully take images in the public interest” (cited in Rector, 2015). Other journalists found themselves under attack from protestors, a signi­ficant departure from demonstrations earlier in the week ­(Tompkins, 2015). Chip Deale, executive director of the National Press Photo­graphers Association, surmised that city officials’ announcement that photographs would be used to identify and arrest suspects heightened the danger for journalists, particularly photojournalists: “You can call for reason and ask people to act appropriately, but I don’t know

“It’s not a pretty picture”  109 if they’re going to listen to any logic and take the time to say, ‘Hey, you’re right, that guy is exercising his First Amendment right to report on what’s going on.’” Much more likely, he added, they say, “Get that blankety-blank camera out of my face” or “Don’t take a picture of me looting this CVS store” (cited in Nelson, 2015). Tensions between the outsider-in versus insider-out protocols of ­image-making invited further reflection in the days to follow as the rioting continued. Increasingly it was the so-called amateurs, hobbyists or photo enthusiasts who were credited in the press with capturing “raw,” “gritty” insights into black inner-city community life. Amateurs could get at experiences that apparently eluded professional journalists, who seemed preoccupied with portraying the protests as ones emanating from a war zone. Many of those involved were angered by the way their neighborhoods were being depicted, thereby consciously setting out to document other dimensions to community experience. For Allen, access to the protests unfolding became easier to negotiate, not least due to improved co-operation with police officers, several of whom recognized his newfound celebrity status. (His list of Instagram followers increased dramatically during the crisis, even including ­famous actors and musicians; Rihanna, for example, shared one of ­A llen’s images along with a crying emoji.) Several remained on the scene after the violence ended, recording vigils among other signs of normality returning, such as individuals cleaning up their neighborhoods. “They was doing cookouts on some blocks since a lot of stores were closed,” Allen stated. “Kids playing basketball, dancing and singing, the day ­after Freddie Gray’s funeral. No news reporters” (cited in Loftus, 2015). Encouraged to assess the significance of his contribution, the importance of imagery for advancing the cause of civil rights—the very issue highlighted by the cover of Time magazine, which captioned Allen’s image with “America, 1968” crossed-out to make “America, 2015”—was evidently at the fore of his thinking. “I just thought I was just taking good pictures and I just was like, well, I hope these pictures get into the right hands or the right people see it,” he told CNN. Time and again, sites such as Instagram were lauded for empowering self-described citizen photographers with a platform to making this happen, a point Allen underscored in a personal video on Flickr’s blog. “We have social media now that allows the unheard to be heard, and I was one of those people that was once unheard. But they hear me now” (cited in Fritzsche, 2015).

“We will no longer let them use their clubs on us in the dark corners” The still and video imagery emanating on social media from such a diverse array of Baltimore’s citizens provided alternative vantage points from which to understand the nature of the city’s crisis. Short clips and

110  Stuart Allan and Lina Dencik images of video footage of Freddie Gray in handcuffs, a pocket-knife on the ground, carried to the back of the police van seemingly unable to walk and crying in agony, were widely shared on platforms such as T ­ witter and Instagram and helped form the basis for counter-narratives to those provided by local officials, both in terms of the treatment of Gray as well as the reasons given for his arrest. Gathering visible evidence of police brutality during the ensuing protests was heralded by commentators for shedding light on what have proven to be fiercely contested accounts of what actually transpired over this fateful period. It allowed viewers to assess the situation for themselves, as Bock (2016) has argued with respect to other instances, “converting an officer’s version of events from ‘the’ narrative to one narrative; a perspective, not the final word” (2016, p.17). Bock references “cop-watching,” a long-standing concept dating back to the 1960s that has garnered increased public attention in recent years due to video sharing via online social networks. Although she understands cop-watching as a more deliberate activist practice than contributing the “accidental citizen witness” (Allan, 2013), the motivation to record, upload and share visual imagery of police brutality adheres to the monitorial citizenship that underpins the form of “sousveillance” she outlines. Here the gaze of the camera is turned towards those who are accustomed to being in the disciplinary position of authority, rather than the other way around, subverting power relations and giving voice to heretofore marginalized concerns (Bock, 2016, p. 15). Stemming from the French words ‘sous’ (below) and ‘veiller’ (to watch) ‘sousveillance’ contrasts with ‘surveillance,’ which refers to watching from above or watching over. In Steve Mann’s (2002) words, sousveillance entails “watchful vigilance from underneath” with the aim of promoting personal empowerment in human technology interactions so as to restore control to individuals. Sousveillance is a specific form of “reflectionism,” using technology to mirror and confront bureaucratic organizations, and “detournement,” a tactic of appropriating tools of social controllers and resituating these tools in a disorienting manner (Mann, Nolan and Wellman, 2003). More than just about exposing wrong-doings on the part of those in power, sousveillance also acts to halt or to evoke reactions from those carrying out the wrong-doing. Its techniques, for Mann (2002), enable people to take a stance against the surveillant state, through both specifically politically motivated recording of surveillance systems and authority figures (“hierarchical sousveillance”) and the creation of data from a first-person perspective without necessarily involving a political agenda (“personal sousveillance”). As Bakir (2010) argues, with the development of social media the concept of sousveillance has taken on particular significance as the emergence of these technologies represent a moment of challenge to those accustomed to possessing control over information (2010, p. 21). Moreover, wearable and mobile technology, such as the smartphone, has mainstreamed

“It’s not a pretty picture”  111 sousveillance not just as a tool of documentation but also as a tool of action in the context of social conflict. The proliferation of digital technologies therefore offers today’s acti­ vists a repertoire of communication practices that are able to build on and advance media strategies of the past. As New Republic associate editor Bijan Stephen (2015) outlines in his reportage of social media use by the Black Lives Matters movement, the civil rights movement of the 1960s relied on (although not always explicitly) the mass media to advance their cause. This was evidenced when, following the 1965 altercation between voting-rights marchers and police in Selma, AL, Martin Luther King Jr. said: “We will no longer let them use their clubs on us in the dark corners. We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.” According to Stephen, Black Lives Matter has made this practice explicit in a digital age: If you’re a civil rights activist in 2015 and you need to get some news out, your first move is to choose a platform. If you want to post a video of a protest or a violent arrest, you put it up on Vine, Instagram, or Periscope. If you want to avoid trolls or snooping authorities and you need to coordinate some kind of action, you might chat privately with other activists on GroupMe. If you want to rapidly mobilize a bunch of people you know and you don’t want the whole world clued in, you use SMS or WhatsApp. If you want to mobilize a ton of people you might not know and you do want the whole world to talk about it: Twitter. Assigning functionalities to discrete platforms in this way has become increasingly familiar in understandings of social movement practices, with social media seen to afford several dimensions of activism (see also Mason, 2013). The instinct to record and capture events is particularly prominent in moments of street protests and rioting, not least to document events from the protestors’ perspective rather than having to adhere to police or media accounts. As noted above, when civil unrest erupted in Baltimore in late April 2015, the camera continued to act as a means to monitor authority “from below” as amateur photographers or “hobbyists” intermingled with protestors themselves, equally intent on documenting events around them from their own perspective. Social media, and Twitter and Instagram especially, became a space for circulating images emerging from the protests, whether to illustrate the presence of ‘peaceful protesters’ or to document police (mis)conduct during moments of tension. This blurring of distinctions between observing and participating speaks to what Elmer (2015) sees as an emerging subject described as “protester as witness.” Such protestors “now also observe, routinely holding their arms up in the air, not with raised fist, but with the hope

112  Stuart Allan and Lina Dencik of a better point of view for their media devices” (Elmer, 2015, p. 145). The “hands up don’t shoot” ritual of two hands in the air that has become synonymous with the Black Lives Matter-related protests is often situated in its digital context by the ubiquity of smartphones firmly placed in the raised palms of participants. Pointing their cameras towards police during the unrest, protesters provided a different narrative of events through their images of heavily armed police, solidarity-chains among civilians, and protesters being treated with homemade remedies (milk) for teargas. The familiar sight at protests of the raised hand with the smartphone goes beyond sousveillance. The impulse to monitor abuse of power and to capture and record protest activity and to then post, share and repost videos and images is said to help connect various groups and maintain community—a function beyond documenting and providing evidence (Bock, 2016). DeRay Mckesson, who emerged a key figure in Baltimore based partly on his social media activity and ran for mayor of Baltimore in 2016—has described how the process of documenting police brutality served to build a movement around a common cause: “All of a sudden you see that there’s a community of people who share the same symptoms” (cited in Stephen, 2015). Using pertinent hashtags, these videos and images served to connect and build commonalities across time and space. This form of “hashtag public” develops through the potential of hashtags to organize new structures of discussion, new ambient affili­ ations and new “potential discourse communities,” drawing together discourse across technologies and entwining otherwise disparate experiences (Zappavigna, 2011). Race-activist hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter and #FreddieGray are legacies of earlier critical discussions. As Rambukkana (2015) argues, they are intertwined with “technosocial events” around racial relations that collectively form an activist critical objection leveled at unjust abuses of power. These “hashtag publics” move across both online and offline spaces and transverse media forms, evidenced, for example, by the use of hashtags in street protest placards and on major news broadcasts. The hashtag in this sense becomes more than an organizational technical feature and becomes a symbol or a visual expression, in itself, of membership, participation and/or solidarity. Posted and shared imagery on social media following Freddie Gray’s death became a way to connect grievances, to situate Baltimore in a US-wide struggle against an unjust system, and to advance moral capital and movement credibility through pertinent historical references. Images on social media of solidarity protests held across the US, from Boston and New York City to Indianapolis and Washington D.C., amplified the movement and created networks of virtual cohesion that speak to the “connective action” that has been said to mark contemporary social movements (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012). In the context of portable always-on devices, imagery

“It’s not a pretty picture”  113 on social media has “multiplied the opportunities for experiencing the collective dimension of social action beyond sporadic events” (Milan, 2015, p. 56). Yet amid the possibilities for hearing those people who were once unheard, voices, experiences and meanings are also continuously disputed. Images come to serve competing narratives that all play out within the same hashtag publics. The visualization of the Baltimore crisis on social media also reminds us of the continuous struggles embedded in the visual politics of othering, in whatever guises, as they move across digital and non-digital terrains. Images of so-called looters walking away with products taken from stores, often with the damaged and burnt down CVS pharmacy in the background, served as backdrops for easily shared memes discrediting the events as lacking political content (e.g. the claims circulated on internet sites that “Justice for Freddie Gray” was merely a cover for looters). The frequent images circulating showing black men damaging police cars or throwing rocks came to further “irrationalize” the protests. People on the streets were thus “othered” by robbing them of their political cause, depicting them instead as groups riled for destruction and violence, often accompanied by racist commentary. Historical references to the civil rights movement of the 1960s became subverted in the context of these narratives, such as a widely shared graphic image with the text “Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus. She didn’t trash the bus. Understand the difference??” These references sought to highlight discontinuity and distinction over continuity and similarity as a way to discredit contemporary events. A conscious shift in hashtag by active citizens in the immediate aftermath of Freddie Gray’s funeral from #Baltimoreriots to #Baltimoreuprising explicitly demonstrates the discursive struggle that has played out on social media. Ironically, professional news organizations became directly implicated in this struggle through their own choice of which hashtag to use for related content to attract traffic. Their hashtag participation thus came to have overt political significance. In this competition for ownership over visual narrative, embodied experiences of events can become side-lined: participation, meaning and struggle play out in the continuous production of highly templated content on social media platforms. This risks confining the focus on racial politics to the symbolic realm (Morozov, 2011), ignoring how broader structures and power relations shape and enforce the possibilities and lived experiences of challenging and subverting injustices. The politics of visibility on social media has implications beyond the techno-social event. We see this, not least, in the arrests and intimidation tactics used against photographers during the events in Baltimore, and in the use of their photographs to identify protestors, as outlined above. Reports from The Intercept based on Freedom of Information requests revealed that the Department of Homeland Security had been monitoring the

114  Stuart Allan and Lina Dencik Black Lives Matter movement since protests erupted in Ferguson in the summer of 2014 (Joseph, 2015). This has included continuous social media surveillance on activities and key groups and individuals. For example, in November 2015 the Urban League of Portland accused the Oregon Department of Justice of conducting digital surveillance on all users using #BlackLivesMatter on Twitter; the state’s attorney said she had no prior knowledge that an employee was monitoring that hashtag (Wilson and Sepulvado, 2015). Baltimore activist DeRay Mckesson, a  co-founder of Campaign Zero, a policy platform to end police violence, outlined the predicament of the Black Lives Matter movement in what is now a frequently referenced exchange with Edward Snowden on ­Twitter in October 2015. Mckesson tweeted Snowden: “I, & many other protestors, have been targets of state surveillance. What do we do?” Snowden replied: “Organize. Compartmentalize to limit compromise. Encrypt everything, from calls to texts (use Signal as a first step).” The vocal engagement by Black Lives Matter activists in the recent FBI vs. Apple case over access to a locked iPhone in support of Apple speaks to this increased consciousness within the movement of the interplay between technology and surveillance (Peterson, 2016). The end to mass surveillance has now become a key policy demand in The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL, 2016). In Baltimore, a widely noted image circulated on social media in the lead up to Freddie Gray’s funeral called for all high school students to meet to “purge” (referencing the 2013 film The Purge about a dystopian American future in which for one night each year laws are not enforced). This announcement served to inform the preemptive strategies adopted by Baltimore police. Monitoring social media for intelligence gathering around events and tension as a way to enhance situational awareness has become standard practice in policing as officials increasingly move towards a “proactive” logic of practice (Dencik et al., 2015). Some of these strategies of preemption, which included stopping traffic and forcing teenagers off their buses to get home from school, have been said to have aggravated and further in­ cLaughlin, 2015). Other media reflamed the situation (Brodey and M ports have gathered evidence through statements and observation that counter-terrorism units within FBI and the National Guard have been used to monitor, disrupt and spy on events relating to the Black Lives Matter movement making even peaceful protests a national security threat conducted by “enemy forces” (Johnson, 2015). Such state practices build on a long(er) history of suppressing black social movements and spying on groups like the Black Panthers through programs such as the now infamous COINTELPRO program established by the FBI in the 1950s (Weiner, 2012). Monitoring power from below, exposing misconduct, and mobilizing a counter-discourse to institutions of authority therefore often carry

“It’s not a pretty picture”  115 elements of risk. Sousveillance relies on civil society actors such as acti­ vists to render abuse visible. This, in turn, makes such activists visi­ ble to institutions of authority (Uldam, 2016). The very technologies that are used to turn the lens onto “the disciplinarian” are deeply embedded in a broader structure of what Mann (2013) has referred to as “goo-­veillance” or “uber-veillance,” processes that speak to the state-­ corporate take-over of everyday technologies. This problematizes the possibilities for reaching what Mann has described as the ‘equiveillance’ that can be achieved when surveillance (gazing from position of power) is equalized through sousveillance (gazing back at power). Social media do not exist in a vacuum abstracted from wider structures and power relations. Rather, they have become a central part of a system of governance increasingly based on the ability to monitor, track and seemingly predict people’s behavior. These platforms are built on a business model that valorizes surveillance (Cohen, 2008), in which our participation in social and political life is carried out through datafied emotions and relations in which our communication with each other can be turned into data-points and profiles that are simultaneously monetized and governed by a multitude of actors (Kennedy, 2016). The visualization of the Baltimore crisis plays out within this context, problematizing the quest to use (commercial) social media to shed light on the dark corners of police brutality and institutional racism in contemporary times.

“Truth is: We’re all 1 bullet away from being a #hashtag” [placard at a Black Lives Matter protest] In the months since the Baltimore crisis, further instances of police violence in US cities have sparked public protests with alarming regularity, consistently underscoring the sousveillant power of citizen witnessing shared across social media. Former prosecutor Paul D. Butler told the New York Times: “A lot of white people are truly shocked by what these videos depict; I know very few African-Americans who are surprised.” He added: “The videos are smoking-gun evidence, both literally because they are very graphic, which generates outrage, and figuratively, because people believe their own eyes” (cited in Cave and Oliver, 2015). The presumed correlation between seeing and believing was certainly challenged in the trials of the six Baltimore police officers. Nonetheless, thinking about the acquittals brings to mind earlier instances, including the trial of the LAPD officers accused of violating the civil rights of Rodney King, when presumed self-evident truths of citizen footage were decisively re-inflected by interpretive frames embedded in incipient racism (see also Allan, 2013). Visual reportage of Freddie Gray’s arrest and the subsequent unrest, as shown here, was integral to efforts to render visible the everydayness

116  Stuart Allan and Lina Dencik of endemic prejudice in the legal system. “Cover-ups behind that blue wall,” to borrow Billy Murphy’s turn of phrase cited at the outset, rely on certain preferred judicial frames regarding the appropriate use of force being reaffirmed as consistent with law and order. It was precisely these frames’ putative claim to fact that unraveled when the ordinary citi­zens of Baltimore brought to bear technologies of truth-telling always at their side, in their hands, and on their bodies. Social media has provided a platform for engaged and active citizens to tell their own story of their own city, using their own devices to provide an insider perspective on their own community, documenting evidence to create their own interpretive frames in the face of institutional authority. Devin Allen’s citizen photojournalism, like Kevin Moore’s impromptu smartphone imagery captured at the scene of Gray’s arrest, speaks to the impulse to proffer an alternative mediation of the lived realities of policing on the city’s streets. In Allen’s (2016) words: When you see my pictures, and people say my pictures are passionate, it’s because this is my city, this is my home. My camera and my phone are my weapons. Social media is like a nuclear bomb if you use it right. Unless you wanna like delete every Instagram account, every Twitter account, every Facebook account, and take down ­every blog there is, you have a voice. You can make something go viral with a push of a button. (Allen, 2016) Citizen imagery, we show, can sometimes help previously marginalized voices to come to the fore, expanding—and potentially reversing—the stratified calculus underpinning law and order discourses. The uneven, contradictory narratives that emerge in such contexts disrupt familiar assumptions, opening up strategic possibilities to challenge the capacity of judicial framings—and here perceptible tensions between legal and media discourses prove vital—to be the privileged conveyers of meaning capable of defining how the story is told. The proliferation of social media spaces have facilitated and enriched ad hoc practices of “sousveillance,” extending new possibilities for self-­ conscious tactics of resistance amongst ordinary citizens confronting the bitter realities of systemic prejudice and discrimination. At the same time, as they turn to these technologies to visualize and share their lived experiences, they have never been more visible to the monitorial scrutiny of those trying to manage and control their dissent. The visualization on social media of the Baltimore crisis alerts us to this communicative paradox, while the racial inequalities that continue to simmer both inside and outside the virtual bubbles of the hashtag still press the need for social change.

“It’s not a pretty picture”  117

Notes 1 Video recordings of key events, from Freddie Gray’s initial arrest to his funeral, and the ensuing protests, remain available via social media sites. For Murphy’s speech, cited here, see “Freddie Gray Funeral in Baltimore”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nplG_XNgZrU. 2 A status update Giordano posted on his Instagram account read, in part: “First, thanks everyone for their concern. I‘m OK. It’s an occupational ­hazard. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, stay focused on #FreddieGray. […] The police swarmed over us. After getting up, I kept shooting, again, it’s my job […] Also, the looters, who I stuck with, were local kids that had ­NOTHING to do with the protests of the day. All the protests up until now have been peaceful on both sides. NONE were family members that I could see. PLEASE share this statement. I have to get back out there today.” https://www.instagram.com/p/18JxRyog7R/.

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7 Linked Fates Social Media as a Framing, Tactical and Witnessing Tool in the Black Lives Matter Movement Ashley Howard Introduction The deaths of numerous black Americans at the hands of law ­enforcement officers have thrust the issue of police brutality against minorities onto the world’s stage. Social media have publicized spectacles of police violence to this global audience. The images of protestors chanting familiar slogans and of groups of disaffected youths engaging in counter-violence against police property recall other times in recent American history. But unlike past protests, the raised hands are not making a closed fist Black Power salute, but are holding cell phones high to capture the moment. Previous protests opened up the possibility of using social media to advance social movements. The use of social media in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death, however, laid the groundwork for movements against police brutality in America and the uprisings that followed in Ferguson and Baltimore. Media have always been crucial in disseminating black American acti­ vists’ objectives. In the antebellum period, widely distributed narratives by newly freedmen and women about life under enslavement swayed Northerners to support the abolitionist cause. Ida B. Wells-­Barnett (1892/2013) famously dismantled the myth of the black rapist brute, exposing the actual causes of lynching in her 1892 Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. In the 1960s, Black Freedom Movement organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party wrote and distributed their own printed newsletters framing their freedom agendas for a broader audience (Hilliard, 2007). In so doing, activists replaced pervasive narratives of black victimization with ones of black agency. While white supremacist power structures employed mainstream media to buttress their power, activists utilized alternative outlets as a canvas for radical imagination contesting mainstream narratives. Today, citizen-driven journalism and social media are similarly powerful protest tools. Black Lives Matter activists and allies employ social media as framing, tactical, and witnessing tools. In so doing they disseminate movement

Linked Fates  121 vocabularies that create a collective consciousness, both locally and globally. This chapter first addresses the limits of mainstream media as evidenced by coverage of the 1960s urban uprisings. Next, it describes how activists use social media for framing, tactical, and witnessing in the aftermath of the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray. I end by discussing the limits of social media as a protest tool.

Mainstream Media and the 1960s Uprisings On July 27, 1967 President Lyndon Johnson established the National ­Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the root causes of the urban uprisings the nation had endured that summer. Named for its chair, Illinois governor Otto Kerner, the Kerner Commission addressed three related questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What could be done to prevent it from happening again?” (p. 2). In searching for answers, Commission investigators investigated a host of issues including ghetto life, unemployment, police-community relations, and mass media. They concluded that racial discrimination, p ­ overty, and lack of educational opportunities contributed to the uprisings, ­famously declaring that “our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, once white” (Kerner, 1968, p. 1). The Commission discovered what many blacks already knew, that race overdetermined the outcome in ­every single aspect of American life. Mainstream media overwhelmingly shaped the understanding and memory of the 1960s revolts. These interpretations were severely flawed, according to the Kerner Commission. While the Commission commended news media attempts to provide a “balanced, factual account,” investigators concluded that “an exaggeration of both mood and event” and a failure to report the “causes and consequences of civil disorder” led to skewed perceptions of the uprisings (Simulmatics, 1967, pp. 2–3). The Commission, aware that such an indictment of news media needed extensive documentation, embarked on rigorous research. It gathered its own data; its researchers interviewed 700 individuals to ascertain public opinion of the media’s portrayal of the revolts. The Commission paid Simulmatics ­Corporation $221,000 to analyze television, radio, and print coverage of the uprising (Hrach, 2008). The Pentagon had previously contracted Simulmatics to determine best practices for indoctrinating Vietnamese citizens with pro-American ideology to reduce the insurgency (Hrach, 2008, p. 146). The resulting forty-eight page report, “News ­Media ­Coverage of the 1967 Urban Riots,” highlighted many ­African ­A mericans’ dissatisfaction with mainstream media (Hrach, 2008). Kerner Commission researchers criticized the news media for failing to analyze and report on race relations in America on a consistent, representative basis (Simulmatics, 1967). Local broadcasters had focused on how effectively state and national agencies managed the chaos and had

122  Ashley Howard allowed moderate black leaders, not the rebels in the streets, to frame the events; receiving the least attention were expressions of black grievances (Simulmatics, 1967). Newspaper coverage, in particular, delegitimized these events by not acknowledging them as actual protests. Editors por­ trayed racial tension as a problem that occurred in other cities, not their own. The study noted that print coverage “tended to characterize and portray last summer’s riots as national rather than local phenomenon … especially when rioting was taking place in the newspaper’s hometown” (Simulmatics, 1967, p. 18). The study showed that a significant number of articles that appeared in local newspapers in cities that experienced an uprising did not originate locally: over 40% came from wire services (Simulmatics, 1967, p. 18). The Kerner Commission found two racially separated Americas. The most compelling testimony of this division came from the nearly 700 interviewees. Black citizens believed that mainstream news media contained and distributed negative opinions about them, and “were not telling the true story of life in poor black neighborhoods” (Hrach, 2008, p. 156). African Americans had three interrelated complaints. First, the mainstream media represented “instruments of the white power structure” (Kerner, 1968, p. 207). Second, journalists tended to rely on officials, particularly police officers, as their main source of information. When journalists covered stories in uprising areas, they tended to rely on the police for their protection. While understandable, this created an impression of media bias in favor of the police, with many black residents indicating that the “police and press work together and towards the same ends” (Kerner, 1968, p. 207). Third, black residents claimed that many of the events they witnessed during the uprising were ignored in the mainstream media’s coverage or analysis. That is, African Americans complained that the media obscured or ignored stories of blacks giving aid to the wounded and assisting the police; of instances of police brutality and false arrest; and of the presence of white vigilante groups who were inciting violence in areas where uprising were occurring (Kerner, 1968). While the Kerner Commission’s criticism contributed to the diversification of mainstream media, some fifty years later many black ­A mericans still distrust the media. In 2014, 38% of African Americans said that the news did not portray their community accurately. Although in the 20th century black Americans could turn to black-owned newspapers, magazines, and radio stations, with the decline in black-centered media, African Americans must seek new alternative places for news (Media Insight Project, 2014). Social media provide not only alternative sources for black news, but also effective tools in mobilizing social movements. Ranging from the Arab Spring to the Umbrella Movement abroad to Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party domestically, activists have employed social media in ways that demonstrate both continuity with

Linked Fates  123 and rupture from traditional media as movement tools. Social theorist ­William Gamson noted that mass media remain “the major site of contests over meaning” because a “a change in the media arena both signals and spreads the change” (2007, p. 243). Social media help expedite this process. The limits of traditional media in the mid-20th century—given that these were instruments of the power structure that relied on officials and selective reporting—highlight the possibilities of social media in the 21st century as framing, mobilizing, and witnessing tools.

Social Media as Framing Tool Social movement theorists David Snow and Scott Byrd distinguish among three types of frames: diagnostic—defining the problem and whom to blame; prognostic—offering solutions and strategies; and motivational—calling people to action (Snow and Bryd, 2007). Acti­ vists use social media in all three ways to frame ongoing events, thereby decentralizing dominant narratives that serve the interests of those in power. As with the 1960s uprisings, cognitive liberation, or increased feelings of political efficacy, remains a central element to fomenting revolt. Through social media activists can formulate and quickly disseminate these frames. In July 2012 activists Alicia Garza and Patrisse Marie Cullors, through their Facebook posts, created the motivational frame to launch a social movement. Following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of Trayvon Martin, Alicia Garza posted: “black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter” (Garza, 2013). Her friend Cullors responded: “declaration: black bodies will no longer be sacrificed for the rest of the world’s enlightenment. i am done. i am so done. trayvon, you are loved infinitely. #blacklivesmatter” (Cullors-Brignac, 2013). The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has been tweeted over 30 million times in the subsequent four years (Wortham, 2016, p. 21). The phrase captured the deep disillusionment many blacks and their allies felt, but could not articulate. It helped solidify disparate feelings of hopelessness into an assertion that mainstream media did not—or could not—convey with such potent directness: Black American life had value. The employment of that hashtag which “[roars] to life with every police killing of a black citizen,” reasserts African Americans’ right to live and thrive, pushing against dominant narratives and practices that devalue black life in America (Choksi, 2016). Two days later Garza, Cullors, and Opal Tometi put forth a vision, saying, “#blacklivesmatter is a movement attempting to visiblize [sic] what it means to be black in this country. Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation. Rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards visions and dreams” (Brown, 2015). In employing this hashtag, Garza and

124  Ashley Howard Cullors-Brignac diagnosed the problem and offered a solution, tying once isolated incidents, unknown except to those in the local community, together into a larger, national tragedy. In the 21st century, social media expedite this process of unifying people who otherwise are, or feel, isolated. They enable marginalized ­A mericans to understand their oppression not as individual, isolated personal failings, but as part of a larger unjust system. In so doing they identify perpetrators and assist in remedying the threat they pose. Victims are humanized, and as these conversations now take place in the public sphere, the broader audience can personally identify with the deceased. African Americans and the public at large begin to move away from blaming the victim and tie this violence to a larger hier­archy of racial oppression in America. “For the nation as a whole, we have come to learn the names of the victims—Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Tony ­Robinson, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray—because the [Black Lives ­Matters] activists have linked their fates together in our minds, despite their separation by many weeks and thousands of miles” (King, 2016). Diagnostically framing each of these disparate events with # ­ BlackLivesMatter, and linking each individual name to his or her own hashtag, connects these incidents. In so doing, activist social media disrupt the mainstream media pattern of portraying police shootings as a local one-time event because bodily harm was imminent. By supplanting this narrative of justified police killings, black-oriented social media interrupt the perceived relationship between mainstream media and hierarchical power structures. Social media also challenge mainstream media as instruments of the power structure. After the death of unarmed teenager Mike Brown, NBC News posted a photograph of him taken from his personal F ­ acebook page. Dressed in a red tank top with his hand in front of his torso, some interpreted his hand gesture as a gang sign. Others saw a peace sign. Social media users immediately responded to the hypocrisy, posting dual images of themselves captioned #iftheygunnedmedown. In these posts users uploaded side-by-side pictures of themselves dressed as they saw themselves, in their armed services uniform or graduation gown, next to the picture they feared would be used if killed, showing them in a negative light. This prognostic framing specifically came from what has come to be known as “Black Twitter.” Brittney Gault, a student at DePaul ­University, referred to the informal collective as “a media response team” (Vega, 2014). The users of Black Twitter employ signifying, memes, and hashtags to discuss a range of relevant issues ranging from television shows to humorous responses to oppression (#PaulasBestDishes) to calling attention to police brutality. Yet Black Twitter is not a homogenous mass: “What does exist are millions of black users on Twitter networking, connecting, and engaging with others who have similar concerns, experiences, tastes, and cultural practices” (Florini, 2014, p. 225). Using

Linked Fates  125 the language of Nancy Fraser, Graham and Smith (2016) emphasize that Black Twitter reflects the multivalent perspectives of black Americans but cumulatively constitutes a counterpublic space providing “a training ground for agitational activities” as well as a “parallel discursive arena” (pp. 13–14). Through this venue racially-conscious social media users employ this medium to challenge mainstream norms and narratives. In 2014, Black Twitter helped to popularize the # ­ iftheygunnedmedown hashtag. Users tweeted this phrase over 168,000 times in just two days; two years later it is still in use (Vega, 2014). The hashtag forced mainstream journalists to choose different images to depict Mike Brown, put media organizations “on notice” that the broader public was monitoring their depictions, and transformed the conversation from Mike Brown’s peccadillos to racial disparities in the United States (Watkins, 2014). This diagnostic and prognostic frame criticized media representations of black men, while simultaneously asserting that one’s physical depiction is never cause for a death sentence. Social media are particularly effective in using both form and content for  diagnostic framing. By its very nature social media transcend borders to connect anyone with internet access. Hashtags like ­#FergusonIsEverywhere and #Palestine2Ferguson “connected the violent erasure of Palestinian lives in Gaza to the mistreatment of black people in Ferguson and the US at large” (Khan, 2015). Activists employed the hashtag when Israeli police assaulted a uniformed Israeli-Ethiopian soldier, drawing attention to more widespread racial profiling in the country (Khan, 2015). Black Lives Matter activists also shut-down London’s City Airport to protest environmental racism in the United Kingdom (Al ­Jazeera, 2016). Social media connect global resistance to state oppression.

Social Media as Tactical Tool Social media’s efficacy as a tactical tool reached its highest point of development thus far in its deployment during protest actions in F ­ erguson and Baltimore. In 2007, it took bloggers almost a year to make the plight of the Jena 6 widespread in mainstream media. By 2012, the use of social media made Trayvon Martin’s death headline news in three weeks; Mike Brown’s one day (McBride, 2012). Freddie Gray’s death became international news overnight. Political scientist Doug McAdam argued that when traditional mechanisms for change are shut off, “ordinary insurgents must bypass routine decision making channels” utilizing noninstitutional tactics (1983, pp. 735–736). The creativity of insurgents in devising new tactical forms is central to challenges to the power structure (p. 736). Conversely, those in favor of the status quo utilize “tactical adaptation” which is the ability of “opponents to neutralize these movements through effective tactical counters” (p. 736). The resulting interplay is known as tactical interaction. Social media have been

126  Ashley Howard instrumental in creating a new social movement through Black Lives Matter, by bringing attention to instances of police brutality and coordinating protest. The first use of social media as a tactical tool is that it alerts the broader public to a newsworthy event that may have otherwise gone unreported. Rashad Robinson, director of Color of Change, noted “in some ways, the media was not driving the [Trayvon Martin] story, the public was, through social media, and the media was following public cues” (Wolfson, 2014). Howard Law School alumnus Kevin ­Cunningham, outraged over the murder of Martin, began an online petition at change. org calling for charges to be brought against George Zimmerman. In a few days more than 10,000 people signed the online petition and control of the petition was given over to Martin’s parents (Mennot, 2012). The online petition circulated on social media, making what was initially only a 213-word article in the local newspaper an international news story (Trotta, 2012). As one South Florida blogger wrote, “Social media and the Internet … make it less likely that people like Trayvon Martin will live and die and vanish away without leaving an imprint” ­(McBride, 2012). In the end the attention brought by the petition resulted in ­Florida State Attorney Angela Corey charging George Zimmerman with ­second-degree murder. Social media allowed concerned citizens to innovate, bypassing traditional media gate keepers. While certainly each subsequent case of a police murder of an unarmed African American garnered more cumulative interest, the real tactical innovation of social media lay with how activists use this medium to mobilize their outrage. Social media has proven a very useful tactical tool on the ground. Jon Belmar, St. Louis County police chief noted the difficulty in policing demonstrations: “[Protestors] have the ability to understand where they’re all going to be, and they can basically plan where they want to go next. So it’s a really efficient way to communicate” (Wolfson, 2014). ­Ferguson activists DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie utilized their Twitter accounts to help coordinate direct actions in Ferguson. In the days prior to a decision of whether or not Darren Wilson would be indicted, on-the-ground activists increased their base by providing real time information regarding the case and protest actions. One Ferguson resident, @TefPoe, tweeted his concern: “Basically martial law is taking place in Ferguson all perimeters blocked coming and going.… National and international friends Help!!” (Taylor, et al., 2015). Mckesson posted on his Twitter three locations where people could demonstrate the day of the announcement regarding the state’s decision about Wilson. When prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch announced that Wilson would not be indicted for the death of Michael Brown, “a network of hundreds of organizers was already in place, ready to bring thousands of people into the streets with a tweet” (King, 2016). Some of the most visible social media activists in the movement, DeRay Mckesson, Johnetta Elzie,

Linked Fates  127 and Shaun King, each have over 150,000 followers (Mckesson, 2016; Elzie, 2016; King, 2016). The Black Lives Matter movement benefits from social media as an organizing tool through “the swift, morally blunt consensus that can be created by hashtags; the personal connection that a charismatic online persona can make with followers; [and] the broad networks that allow for the easy distribution of documentary photos and videos” (King, 2016). As such activists can rapidly mobilize supporters on the ground and online. Before the internet and social media, protest organizers would rely on word of mouth, paper flyers, and face-to-face meetings to coordinate actions, but such outreach taxed time and personnel resources. The ­Council of Federated Organizations, for example, held a week-long training at Western College for their 1964 Mississippi Freedom ­Summer volunteers (Carson, 1995, p. 113). In 2014 Ferguson organizers disseminated extensive rules of engagement via Google doc. In addition to the aforementioned preemptive mobilization, Ferguson activists used a ­Google map to tally their resources and targets including 43 potential action locations and five sanctuary spaces. Utilizing internet resources, they could potentially mobilize thousands more than could previous acti­vists, as evidenced in the 150,443 views of the map (Fillion, 2014). Organizers used social media to coordinate rides and places to stay for out-of-town activists; advertise nationwide actions; and encourage individuals to purchase or bring items listed for a protestor action supply kit (Fillion, 2014). These innovations expanded the reach and capacity of activists. One of the most controversial aspects of social media as a mobilizing tool occurred in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death, centering around the rumored “Purge” flyer. The flyer, referencing the 2013 film about a night of consequence-less crime, seemed to warn of an action planned to occur at Mondawmin Mall at 3 p.m. The mall, a bus hub, counts 5,000 Baltimore students as passengers daily (Green, 2015). Baltimore Sun reporter Carrie Wells shared an image of a flyer allegedly circulated by rebels to recruit others to join in violent protest. Journalists have uncovered no evidence that Baltimore students used social media to coordinate an uprising at the mall. They only found tweets of the flyer as either warning or news (Johnson, 2015). Freelance journalist Adam Johnson tweeted Wells to gather more information “@cwellssun got word from who? I’m just trying to divorce hype from reality. Can u provide a link to any SM [social media] actually sharing it to promote?” (Johnson, 2015). Other tweets employed vague references such as “Downtown Baltimore is like a real life version of the Purge right now” (Vega, 2015). Or “Let the #purge begin in #Baltimore” (Griggs, 2015). Meg Gibson, a Baltimore teacher, described the scene to Gawker: “The riot police were already at the bus stop on the other side of the mall, turning buses that transport the students away, not allowing students to

128  Ashley Howard board. They were waiting for the kids.… Those kids were set up, they were treated like criminals before the first brick was thrown” (Brodey and McLaughlin, 2015). As Gibson described it, police were responding to “Purge” rumors by shutting down the train station and forcing youth from their buses, essentially stranding the students. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, streets were shut down, making it extremely difficult to leave the mall area. Trapped, frustrated, and scared, the juveniles began throwing bottles and bricks at the police. That is, by circulating a hoax flyer, social media mobilized fear and provoked a police response, not an actual uprising. In Baltimore, both corporate and municipal entities carefully watched social media to gain on-the-ground intel. The department for Corporate and Information Security Services (CISS) of Exelon, a power company that operates in Baltimore, “monitor[ed] protest activity that has the potential to impact Exelon employees or other company assets” and shared this information with the city of Baltimore. Law enforcement watched several social media users’ accounts, flagging 71 tweets. None of these included specific tactical information regarding the uprisings. The most incriminating of these contained vague threats to police without mentioning any specific planned actions (Gosztola, 2015). Other posts flagged by the police debunked police rumors that the Black Guerilla Family, the Bloods, and the Crips had entered into a truce to work together to kill as many police as they could. All of the social media posts collected were, as police described them, “threats” or “chatter” and did not represent credible threat (Broadwater, Wagner, and Duncan, 2016). Despite the concerns of Exelon and the police department, social media users most frequently used the medium to coordinate nonviolent protest and clean-up efforts (Vega, 2015). Police and celebrities also used social media as a mobilization tool. In addition to the aforementioned monitoring of citizen’s social media accounts, the Baltimore Police Department issued curfews and updates on their own account. Patrisse Cullors noted that police used social media to disseminate both information and propaganda (Vega, 2015). Tweets from police used words that framed the protestors as agitators engaging in criminality. The tweets described the protestors as “people w/ no regard for life” (BaltimorePolice, 2015c) and “aggressive and violent” (BaltimorePolice, 2015a). Meanwhile, police portrayed themselves in opposition to these people such as when they tweeted, “Despite having rocks, bricks, and other items thrown at us, officers are using fire extinguishers to put out small fires in the area” (BaltimorePolice, 2015b). Ray Lewis and Carmelo Anthony, professional athletes with Baltimore ties, took to social media to share similar thoughts on the Baltimore uprising. Lewis posted a video tirade on Facebook demanding that protestors “go home” and stop the violence. His video had 30 million views (Rios, 2015). Anthony posted a picture on his Instagram account of a

Linked Fates  129 child shouting into a megaphone at a rally. Taking a more measured approach, Anthony captioned the photo, “We need to protect our city, not destroy it. What happens when we get the answers that we want, and the media attention is not there anymore?” The post received 78,000 likes (Calmont, 2015). In each of these instances, other invested parties utilized social media to share their experiences and frame the events as they saw them, in hopes of mobilizing the public to their view of the uprisings. In the wake of the Baltimore uprising, social movement organizations continue to use social media to mobilize people, supplies, and legal services. In 2016 Baltimore United organizers mobilized people for their #BaltimoreStillRising protests in Baltimore and Annapolis ­(KineticsLive, 2016). Tawanda Jones, sister of Tyrone West, who died in 2013 while in Baltimore Police custody, uses the hashtag #WestWednesday to organize weekly protests (BmoreBloc, 2016).1 Jones continues to coordinate these protests, which have occurred for over 160 consecutive ­Wednesdays at different locations, to bring attention to her brother’s death and call for justice (Expandyourfocus, 2016). In 2016 under the hashtag ­#AFROMATION activists demonstrated at the Baltimore ­Hyatt to protest a Fraternal Order of Police conference (Smdadamo, 2016). ­Organizers used social media to advertise their civil disobedience training (BaltUprising, 2016a), request supplies (BaltUprising, 2016b), mobilize a campaign to demand the release of sixty arrested demonstrators (BaltUprising, 2016c) and tweeted the picture and name of a police officer that activists thought was unnecessarily rough (BmoreBloc, 2016). A #StopFOP activist live streamed on Periscope his departure from the hotel in the event the police harassed him (Bmore2Palestine, 2016). A ­ ctivists also created a Fundly.com page to crowdsource for the B ­ altimore Bloc Support Fund. Those within the Baltimore activist collective retweeted the call, mobilizing their own networks. “Please donate to help us and @BALTLegal bailout #Afromation protestors!” ­(LBSBaltimore, 2016). Through the networking capabilities of social media, distinct yet aligned groups of activists extended social movement networks, tying together disparate people working towards a common goal.

Social Media as Witnessing Tool In the twenty-first century, everyone with a cell phone can document and disseminate what is happening nearby in real time. Video of Johannes Mehserle shooting Oscar Grant, a young man killed January 1, 2009 at the Bay Area Rapid Transit’s Fruitvale Station, shocked people, as it was one of the first times many Americans witnessed with their own eyes an unarmed and prone man shot. Previously, claims of unjustified police shootings were very difficult to prove and rarely played out in the court of popular opinion. The ubiquity of camera phones and social media,

130  Ashley Howard however, makes them vital witnessing tools, because these technologies frame these events as the people themselves see it, unfiltered. Michael Brown’s death first began to be reported on social m ­ edia. @TheePharoah tweeted “I JUST SAW SOMEONE DIE OMFG” [all  caps original] He then wrote to @allovevie “the police just shot someone dead in front of my crib yo” (Taylor, et al., 2016). This was followed by a picture of a police officer standing over Mike Brown’s dead body “Fuckfuck fuck” At 2:14p @TheePharoah posted a picture of a law enforcement personnel carrying an assault rifle. “Homie still on the ground tho” (Taylor, et al., 2016). This last point, that Brown’s body lay in the street for nearly four hours, caused significant outrage on social media. Almost immediately @TheePharoah and those in his network began witnessing something that previously would have only been discussed through word of mouth and whose credibility would have been limited. What began as peaceful protests evolved for some into violent uprisings as news of Brown’s death spread. The first reports began to trickle through social media. New York Times reporter David Carr (2014) wrote: “Twitter has become an early warning service for news organizations, a way to see into stories even when they don’t have significant reporting  assets on the ground.” Both citizen and professional journalists noted that the police escalated the situation. St. Louis City Alderman Antonio French posted a Vine of a tense scene in Ferguson. The crowd chanting “No justice, no peace” is heard on audio. French captioned his video “Ferguson Police have dogs and shotguns. The unarmed crowds is raising their hands” (Taylor, et al., 2016). International journalist ­A nastasia Churkina posted on her Twitter “saw #riot #police use tear gas in ­#missouri while local stood out on the street, outside their homes, no violent protesting. #MichaelBrown” (Taylor, et al., 2016). Photojournalist David Carson posted images of protestors with their hands up captioning “tear gas flash bangs deployed #ferguson” (Taylor, et al., 2016). These accounts offer a very important perspective, allowing those who are not on the ground and who are unlikely to experience what is going on, to witness these events practically first hand. They cast doubt on the dominant narratives from both police and legacy journalists, directly countering one of the main issues many African Americans had with the 1960s coverage of the rebellions. Baltimore activists using social media offered unprecedented access to the uprising. They showed multiple sides of the uprising, including scenes of police mobilization as well as property destruction. DeRay Mckesson uploaded a Vine with the caption “So. Many. Officers. North/ Fulton.” In the foreground others are also seen filming the scene on their phones (Mckesson, 2015). In addition to offering on the ground, real time reporting, citizen journalists offered counterevidence to who instigated violence. Mckesson included a Vine video of a photographer being

Linked Fates  131 harassed by police, tweeted the video writing: “Yesterday, the police assaulted a photographer. Now, this is violence. Baltimore. #FreddieGray” (Deray, 2015). A year later a fellow marcher captured on Periscope ­Mckesson’s arrest in Baton Rouge (Deray, 2016). Social media, particularly live streaming programs, document the uprisings and also act as witness in the event something goes wrong. To this end more and more citizens are filming their own and others’ interactions with police. The ACLU argues that citizen journalists recording police is “a critical check and balance … [creating] an independent record of what took place in a particular incident free from accusations of bias, lying, or faulty memory” (ACLU, 2011). Several apps including the ­ACLU’s ­Mobile Justice app, Hands Up 4 Justice, and CopWatch are all available for download. In particular Hands Up 4 Justice integrates multiple aspects of social media by allowing captured videos to be auto­ matically uploaded to YouTube or Dropbox and interfaces with emergency ­contacts and GPS. Other programs like “The Swat App,” “Five-O” and “Stop and Frisk Watch” allow users to report police misconduct and share their experiences with other users. This type of witnessing acti­ vism is not without consequence to the witnesses. A transgender woman filming the Baltimore protest after Freddie Gray’s death was arrested and placed in a men’s holding cell. Ramsey Orta, the man who filmed Eric Garner’s death by police chokehold, has claimed that police have targeted him and close family members since that day (Ram, 2015). The images and video social media users post drastically challenge mass media depictions of police. Instagram users circulated an image showing protestor Devante Hill, eyes closed tight after being hit with pepper spray, making a heart with his hands. Another social media user, Gaiabirch, records in her short Vimeo documentary activists hugging one another and a megaphoned protestor shouting to the crowd “this is a love movement.” In another scene she films a dashiki-wearing man admonishing the milling crowd not to provoke the police because “we’ve seen what they do” (Gaiabirch, 2015). Each of these disrupts the narratives of thuggery put forth by Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (Fang, 2015). Devin Allen, the amateur photo­g rapher who gained notoriety through his Instagram photographs of the B ­ altimore uprising, said in a Time magazine interview: “Of course, since I’m a black man, I understand the frustration, but at the same time, I’m a photographer. I’m not going to lie to you. I’m going to tell you exactly what happened” (Laurent, 2015). Social media provide the public with an opportunity to narrate the story from many perspectives. Each witness tells his or her truth. In so doing major public events, such as the protests and uprisings that occurred across the nation, are told from multiple perspectives. Top-down or triumphalist depictions are now challenged, offering a more complex interpretation of a complicated situation.

132  Ashley Howard Social media provide an opportunity for the masses to collect and disseminate multiple accounts of a singular event. The preservation of these images is vital as they will serve as the base for future scholarship on this time. Both Washington University in St. Louis and University of Maryland have created digital archives of these events drawing primarily from social media. The Documenting Ferguson and Preserve the Baltimore Uprising 2015 projects mark valuable endeavors to continue to utilize social media in innovative ways. This, too, marks a distinct shift from the 1960s rebellions where, apart from oral history and a few photographs taken by citizen journalists, very few extant documents explicitly frame these events from the perspectives of the people, coloring how we remember the uprisings today.

Conclusion: The Limits of Social Media In the summer of 2016, the videotaped deaths at the hands of police of Philando Castile in suburban Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge made the rounds on mainstream media. The despair and outrage from these images were compounded by the acquittals of the police officers in Eric Garner and Freddie Gray’s cases, both of which had video evidence. So the utility of social media as a framing, mobilizing, and witnessing tool for social protest and unrest does not ensure long-term efficacy and change. Baltimore activist Duane “Shorty” Davis, who regu­larly records his interactions with police, notes this contradiction: “[the police] control the narrative but in controlling the narrative they have to control social media, because it’s our narrative.… To keep our message from getting out, they’re going to take [social media] out” (Woods, 2016). Just as protestors tactically innovate, the state tactically adapts. Recently it came to light that the Baltimore Police Department currently uses an aerial surveillance program to monitor citizens (Rector, 2016). The Persistent Surveillance System company was hired to fly a Cessna plane over the city collecting 300 hours of real-time video. More devastatingly, Baltimore police also obtained stingray devices, tools that surveil calls and track cell phones by impersonating cell towers. This gave Baltimore police access to the very tools that Black Lives ­Matter activists employed to grow their movement. As an article in Wired put it, “Baltimore checks off all the requirements to build  a modern American  urban  panopticon: High crime rates, racially biased poli­ cing, strained community-police relations, and lack of police oversight have turned Baltimore into a laboratory of emerging surveillance techniques” (Newman, 2016). In their Federal Communications Commission complaint, the Center for Media Justice, Color of Change.org, and New America’s Open Technology Institute noted: “Worse, the harms that stem from the Baltimore Police Department’s use of CS simulator

Linked Fates  133 equipment fall disproportionately on Baltimore’s black residents” (Newman, 2016). By tactically adapting, the Baltimore Police now can neutralize social media as organizing tools. The Baltimore Police Department also contracts with the private firm Geofeedia, which “allows users to map out people’s posts from Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and other social m ­ edia outlets” (Knezevich, 2016a). Police can then analyze the social media chatter in areas as large as city to as small as a single building. A  B ­ altimore ­Police spokesman was quoted describing social media as “a regular investigative tool that many police officers should use because people talk, and people talk publicly.… If you can glean information from something that’s already public, you absolutely should take the opportunity to do so” (Knezevich, 2016a). According to Geofeedia’s contract Baltimore police can use the service to continuously monitor and record social media, and set up notifications “triggered by specific keywords, phrases or users” (Knezevich, 2016a). Some of the very people and hashtags discussed here may already be flagged. Perhaps one of the most frightening tactical adaptations by police involves shutting down individuals’ social media accounts. Korryn Gaines was a Baltimore mother who had previously filmed her encounter with police at a traffic stop, instructing her child to “make sure you record everything” (Woods, 2016). In August 2016, when Baltimore County Police came to serve her a warrant for failure to appear in court, Gaines refused to leave; she remained in the house with her five-year-old son and using the live stream function on her Facebook. The Baltimore County police chief James Johnson asked Facebook to suspended her account during the five-hour standoff “in order to preserve the integrity of the negotiation process” (Woods, 2016). Facebook agreed to shut down her page, thereby eliminating Gaines’ ability to capture her own experience and leave video evidence, especially as none of the officers was wearing body cameras as they stormed her apartment. The police killed her and wounded her child. As one tweeter noted “what #facebook did in ­#KorrynGaines case is almost (not exactly) like a #police thug strong-arming a bystander and stealing his/her camera” ­(Schestowitz, 2016). The police department currently has a warrant for access to all of Gaines’ social media accounts (Knezevich, 2016b). To achieve meaningful change, activists must continue to innovate. These opportunities are limited only by activists’ imaginations. Social media can continue to alert the public, mobilize the masses, and facilitate difficult conversations in new and meaningful ways. Pew research found that between January and March of 2016 over 995 million tweets were deemed “race related.” Only 35% of white social media users, however, see race-related posts compared to 68% of black social media users (Anderson and Hitlin, 2016). Pew concluded that people are having “significant conservations but they are talking past each other.” An

134  Ashley Howard additional 67% of white social media users say nothing they share is race related (Anderson and Hitlin, 2016). In developing new techniques to discuss race-related issues across the color line, activists can continue to innovate. Ultimately though, those who benefit from white privilege must likewise be instrumental in dismantling it, and social media provide a powerful opportunity for them as well. Social media provide essential tools for activists to tactically adapt, creating frames, mobilizing people, and witnessing these events as they unfold. As with the 1960s rebellions, police killings of black men trigger violent responses to ongoing widespread social, economic, and political woes. While local conditions and events are still the principal catalysts for uprising, social media allow these to be broadcast and tied to national conversations on race and inequality. Social media are effective tools in modern uprisings: they rapidly mobilize people and resources. Finally, social media allow those on the ground to counter dominant narratives provided by mainstream media to show the complexities and nuances present in uprisings. Despite many differences between the 1960s rebellions and the most recent uprisings, the most significant change has been the role of social media. Especially in the wake of tactical adaptations by police, social activists must continually challenge tactical and creative boundaries in their efforts to influence change. As black Americans find themselves in the dawn of a growing social movement, imaginative employment of media again represents African Americans’ best chance to combat oppression in solidarity with oppressed people throughout the world.

Note 1 West died while handcuffed, having been arrested for a traffic violation. The official autopsy cites “Cardiac Arrhythmia due to Cardiac Conduction System Abnormality complicated by Dehydration during Police Restraint.” An independent forensic pathologist said the way that police restrained West caused “positional asphyxia” (Linderman, 2016).

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Linked Fates  135 BaltimorePolice (2015a, April 27). The group continues to be violent and aggressive. They are disobeying dispersal orders. We are working to evacuate our injured officers. https://twitter.com/BaltimorePolice/status/592784191 764484096. BaltimorePolice (2015b, April 27). Despite having rocks, bricks, and other items thrown at us- officers are using fire extinguishers to put out small fires in the area. https://twitter.com/baltimorepolice/status/592786921832751107. BaltimorePolice (2015c, April 27). We are deploying officers with the fire department to ensure fire fighting operations are not disrupted by people w/ no regard for life. https://twitter.com/baltimorepolice/status/592919745013383168. BaltUprising (2016a, August 11). BmoreBloc: Today #Baltimore Uprising #BaltimoreBloc https://twitter.com/BaltUprising/status/763739541844926464. BaltUprising (2016b, August 14). BmoreBloc: Anyone who’s coming to the rally today: please bring coolers (and ice!) if you have them. ­#BaltimoreUprising ­#BaltimoreBloc https://twitter.com/BaltUprising/status/764845550592266240. BaltUprising (2016c, August 14). BmoreBloc: PLEASE CALL 410.545.8122 to demand the release of BYP_100 & BmoreBloc #StopFOP Protesters-SHARE! #Baltimore12 https://twitter.com/BmoreBloc/status/764995376457871360. Bmore2Palestine (2016, August 14). LIVE on #Periscope: #STOPFOP. https:// twitter.com/Bmore2Palestine/status/764931560105705472. BmoreBloc (2016, September 7). Tawanda Jones, sister of Tyrone West, speaking … #WestWednesday. https://twitter.com/BmoreBloc/status/7736543647 79151360. Broadwater, K., Wagner Y., and Duncan, I. (2016, August 24). Chaos detailed in 7,000 riot-related emails turned over to Baltimore Sun. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/2fIQbmn. Brock, A. (2012). From the blackhand side: Twitter as a cultural conversation. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56, 529–549. Brodey, S., and McLaughlin, J. (2015, April 28). Eyewitnesses: The ­Baltimore riots didn’t start the way you think. Mother Jones. http://bit.ly/1IkHE3v. Brown, J. (2015, August 7). One year after Michael Brown: How a hashtag changed social protest. Vocativ. http://voc.tv/2fJWtnl. Calmont, L. (2015, April 28). Carmelo Anthony pleads with Baltimore Protesters in moving Instagram post. Huffington Post. http://huff.to/1JOA3se. Carr, D. (2014, August 7). View of #Ferguson thrust Michael Brown shooting to national attention. New York Times. http://nyti.ms/1maBlBM. Carson, C. (1995). In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Choksi, N. (2016, August 22). How #BlackLivesMatter came to define a movement. New York Times. http://nyti.ms/2cTfeW1. Cuteipi (2016, April). These images from last year are bringing up so much anxi­ ety. I will never forget, I can’t forget. #FreddieGray #BaltimoreUprising #BaltimoreRiots Pic from @valleyz.of.neptune https://www.instagram. com/p/BEw6esOurMh/?taken-by=cuteipi. Deray (2015, April 26). Yesterday, the police assaulted a photographer. Now, this is violence. Baltimore. #FreddieGray https://twitter.com/deray/status/ 592301041250672640. Deray (2016, August 8). Deray Mckesson, an American civil rights acti­ vist, prominently in the Black Lives Matter movement, is pulled by a

136  Ashley Howard police officer and arrested at 4:45 for walking on the highway during a ­#BlackLivesMatter protest in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. https://www.periscope. tv/deray/1DXxyZjvrWVKM. [DSouza film]. (2015, April 26). Baltimore Maryland Freddie Gray Riot (FULL) 2015. [Video File]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSBiLjnrP78. Expandyourfocus (2016, September 7). LIVE on #Periscope: #WestWednesday week 163. https://twitter.com/expandyourfocus/status/77365185964711 1169. Fang, M. (2015, April 29). Baltimore Mayor apologizes for calling protesters ‘thugs.’ Huffington Post. http://huff.to/2f0lCIK. Fillion, R. M. (2014, November 24). How Ferguson protestors use social media to organize. Wall Street Journal. http://on.wsj.com/2fIIZKK. Florini, S. (2014). Tweets, tweeps, and signifyin’: Communication and cultural performance on Black Twitter. Television & New Media, 15(3), 223–237. Gaiabirch. (2015, June 10). Just to live. https://vimeo.com/130382653. Gosztola, K. (2015, July 31). During Baltimore uprising, city officials crimi­ nalized hashtags & labeled social media postings as “threats.” The Dissenter. http://bit.ly/2f0oMMX. Gamson, W. A. (2004). Bystanders, public opinion, and media. In Snow, D. A., Soule, S. A., and Kriesi, H. (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (pp. 242–262). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Garza, A. (2013, July 13). Black people I love you. I love us. Our lives matter. [Facebook update]. http://bit.ly/2g3ePm3. Graham, R., and Smith, S. (2016). The content of our #characters: Black Twitter as counterpublic. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 1–17, doi: 10.1177/ 2332649216639067. Green, E. L. (2015, July 20). How Baltimore schools because aware of ‘purge’ threat on day on unrest. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/2fEyK7F. Griggs, B. (2015, April 29). Baltimore’s riots and “The Purge.” http://cnn. it/2fIGic7. Hilliard, D. ed. (2007). The Black Panther: Intercommunal News Service, 1967–1980. New York: Atria Books. Hrach, T. (2008). The News Media and the Disorders: The Kerner Commission’s Examination of Race Riots and Civil Disturbances, 1967–1968. Unpublished Dissertation completed at Ohio University. Retrieved from https:// etd.ohiolink.edu/. Johnetta, E. (2016, September 6). Twitter homepage. Retrieved from https:// twitter.com/Nettaaaaaaaa. Johnson, A. (2015, April 29). Media’s Baltimore “teen purge” narrative falling apart. http://bit.ly/1bYBSZc. Kerner, O. et al. (1968). Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. New York: Bantam Books. Khan, J. (2015, August 7). Black Lives Matter has become a global movement. The Root.com. http://bit.ly/2d4Qirr. Knezevich, A. (2016a, September 5). Police in Baltimore, surrounding communities using Geofeedia to monitor social media posts. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/2cuU9BA. Knezevich, A. (2016b, September 8). Baltimore County police, prosecutors seek access to Gaines’ private Facebook. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/2f0qbmE.

Linked Fates  137 KineticsLive (2016, March 28). From Baltimore to Annapolis #StillWeRise #BaltimoreStillRising #BaltimoreUprising #BmoreUnited. http://bit.ly/2g 3hhIZ. King, J. C. (2016, May 4). Our demand is simple: Stop killing us. New York Times Magazine. http://nyti.ms/1bWlxDH. Laurent, O. (2015, April 28). Meet the amateur photographer covering Baltimore’s protests. Time. http://ti.me/1EO7c9E. LBSBaltimore (2016, July 16). Please donate to help us and @BALTLegal bail out #Afromation protestors! #BmoreUnited. http://bit.ly/2fIJTH7. Linderman, J. (2016, April 30). Report: Heart condition didn’t cause T ­ yrone West’s death in custody. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/1Z0uw9J. McAdam, D. (1983). Tactical innovation and the pace of insurgency. ­A merican Sociological Review, 48(6), 735–754. McBride, K. (2012, March 23). Trayvon Martin story reveals new tools of media power, justice. Poynter.org. http://bit.ly/2fEztWo. Mckesson, D. (2015, April 28). So. Many. Officers. North/Fulton. https://vine. co/v/eWPALlZjBi9. Mckesson, D. (2016, September 6). Twitter homepage. http://bit.ly/1JwI9Zg. Media Insight Project. (2014, September 16). The personal news cycle: African American and Hispanic news consumers. American Press Institute. http://bit. ly/1UjnsBh. Mennot, M. (2012, March 29). Three key moments as Trayvon Martin’s story went viral. National Public Radio. http://n.pr/2fXKkyD. Newman, L. H. (2016, September 4). How Baltimore became America’s laboratory for spy tech. Wired. http://bit.ly/2cqdJPh. Patrisse, M. C-B. (2013, July 13). Declaration: Black bodies will no longer be sacrificed for the rest of the world’s enlightenment. I am done. I am so done. Trayvon, you are loved infinitely. #blacklivesmatter. [Facebook update]. http://bit.ly/2g3ePm3. Ram, A. (2015, May 3). It’s your right to film the police. These apps can help. Wired. http://bit.ly/2eQ13Bq. Rector, K. (2016, September 23). A month later, Baltimore police surveillance program still shrouded in secrecy. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun. md/2ep5AvZ. Rios, E. (2015, April 24). Violence is not the answer: Baltimore icon Ray Lewis calls for peace.” Mother Jones. http://bit.ly/2f0rCBo. Schestowitz, A. (2016, August 25). What #facebook did in #KorrynGaines case is almost (not exactly) like a #police thug strong-arming a bystander and stealing his/her camera. https://joindiaspora.com/posts/fd3754a04cdd01 3411ba0242ac110007. Shaun, K. (2016, September 6). Twitter homepage. https://twitter.com/ShaunKing. Shahedbaz (2016, August 14). @BaltimorePolice needs to fire this pig who brutalized many activists today. His name is Lieutenant Clayton badge63. https://twitter.com/shahedbaz/status/765023799599177728. Shaivaughn, C. (2016, August 14). Here’s our list of demands: DEMAND 1 #StopFOP #Afromation https://twitter.com/ShaivaughnC/status/7648874751 31219968. Simulmatics Corporation (1967). “Special Preliminary Report of Findings for Selected Cities.” New York: Sol Chaneles.

138  Ashley Howard Smdadamo. (2016, August 14). Happening now to protest the start of the FOP Annual Conference in Baltimore #stopFOP #Afromation. http://bit. ly/2fXMaj2. Snow, D., and Byrd, S.C. (2007). Ideology, framing processes and Islamic terrorist movements. Mobilization, 12(2), 119–136. TammieHolland. (2014, August 9). “The police presence in Ferguson right now is unreal! This is horrific! A young man’s life was taken by force for no good reason. WE NEED ANSWERS! #Ferguson.” https://www.instagram.com/p/ rfyd1hlP87/. Taylor, D., Ramos, M., Pan, Y., Morales Gomes, D., and Kerr, J. (2015, August 9) Watch the Ferguson protests unfold on social media. Huffington Post. http:// huff.to/2frYNhK. Trotta, D. (2012, April 3). Trayvon Martin: Before the world heard the cries. Reuters. http://reut.rs/2frXqQq. Vega, T. (2015, April 28). How police, protestors battle on Twitter. CNN. http:// cnn.it/1zmoUyS. Vega, T. (2014, August 2). Shooting spurs hashtag effort on stereotypes. New York Times. http://nyti.ms/ViX7vu. Watkins, C. S. (2014, September 23). The evolution of #Black Twitter [Web log post]. http://bit.ly/1teZMkM. Wells-Barnett, Ida B. (1892/2013). Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Wolfson, E. (2014, August 15). How lessons from Trayvon helped make Ferguson news. Newsweek. http://bit.ly/2fJ4Gqm. Woods, B. (2016, August 3). Facebook deactivated Korryn Gaines’ ­account during standoff, police say. The Guardian. http://bit.ly/2ayitTT. Wortham, J. (2016, September). Black tweets matter. Smithsonian Magazine, 47(5), 21–24.

8 The Black Press and Baltimore The Continuing Importance of African American Journalism During Urban Uprisings Sarah J. Jackson Abstract In this chapter I consider how members of the black press covered, ­debated, and made sense of the events in Baltimore following the 2015 arrest and death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray. I illustrate how coverage from black-run and -targeted media outlets extends the work of the historical black press while responding to contemporary challenges and evolutions in journalism. The traditional work of the black public sphere, which has long existed to legitimize the experiences of African Americans and to challenge mainstream narratives about race, violence, and national belonging, continues despite concerns from scholars about the decline of black newspapers after the 1970s. In particular, members of the black public sphere play a crucial role in offering Americans of all backgrounds counternormative ways of interpreting news. By highlighting how the black press reported on and contributed to narratives about Baltimore, I suggest that increased (but certainly not representative) mainstream integration, technology, and the decentering of journalism from elite forms and spaces has brought about a resurgence in the reach and diversity of African American narratives and news.

Introduction There was a time when African-American stories simply did not appear in the news. Occasionally a story was told in which a black person’s presumably deviant body or behavior was made relevant, but these stories did not reflect black experiences or black forms of collective knowledge. Rather, journalism was dictated, like other American institutions, by the social and cultural hierarchies of white supremacy. When, in 1827, editors Samuel Cornish and John Russworm launched the first black newspaper, they argued for the necessity of Freedom’s Journal as follows: We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the public been deceived by misrepresentation of things which concern us dearly.… The civil rights of a people being

140  Sarah J. Jackson of the greatest value, it shall ever be our daily duty to vindicate our brethren, when oppressed, and to lay the cause before the public.… From the press and the pulpit we have suffered much by being incorrectly represented. (Cornish and Russwurm, 1827) Freedom’s Journal and the African-American publications that followed it were crucial in shaping the black public sphere. These publications made two very specific claims: 1) that black American stories could and should be told with the same care, nuance, and rigor as stories of white Americans, and 2) that the mainstream (white) press had failed in its ethical responsibility to include these stories and lacked the voices able to tell them. The black press, then, began with the hope that social progress would eventually lead to its irrelevancy at a time when black and white knowledge and audiences mattered equally in the production of news. This chapter highlights the historical role of black publications and black journalists in covering national crises about race. I then connect this history to recent evolutions in journalism and technology with a focus on the role of old and new forms of African-American journalism in covering the death of Freddie Gray and the resulting protests of April 2015.

African American Journalism and American Racial Crises Several ideas about the black public sphere and black journalists’ role in it are key to this discussion. First, the black press is widely regarded as a paragon of the alternative media arising from counterpublics (Dawson, 1994; Squires, 2002; Vogel, 2001). Counterpublics are the physical and mediated spaces created by oppressed and otherwise marginalized social groups for in-group debate, exchange of ideas, and sharing of collective knowledge and experiences (Asen and Brouwer, 2001; Fraser, 1990). Counterpublics become necessary when marginalized groups are prevented from engaging in larger civil society. The communication arising from these spaces intentionally decenters dominant ways of understanding and of telling human stories based in exclusionary practices; they center the experiences of those long rendered invisible or demonic by such practices. Counterpublics serve to nurture the culture of marginalized groups while simultaneously seeking to influence and interrogate dominant culture. Even before black newspapers were launched, a black counterpublic existed in the United States, as evident in oral traditions such as ­Negro spirituals that, for example, might encode instructions for escape from slavery. That early counterpublic, however, was severely limited ­because of both geographical distances between black communities and lack

The Black Press and Baltimore  141 of access to the cultural and technological tools for creating public know­ledge. It was the black press—putting into print cultural know­ ledge and relevant stories for Black American audiences—that allowed the black public sphere to flourish. The black press created a record of the ­A frican-American experience and offered African ­A mericans across  the  country membership in a civil society with a shared set of know­ledge and political goals. Black newspapers like the Chicago ­Defender, Cleveland Advocate, and Pittsburgh Courier, for example, are widely credited as a major force behind the Great Migration that led millions of Southern blacks to Northern cities where they could, in theory, live without fear of lynching and with greater economic opportunities (DeSantis, 1998; Ross, 1994; Simmons, 1998). As with much of black press advocacy work, its encouragement of black Southerners seeking a better life resulted in state and individual attempts to stymie the influx of Northern black newspapers into the South; black railway porters performed the often risky work of smuggling these papers below the Mason-Dixon line (Michaeli, 2016). Second, the black press has been particularly important in times  of national racial crises, upheaval, and evolution. For example, the black press was crucial during Reconstruction, particularly as a space for literate ­A frican Americans to discuss the needs and future of the formerly enslaved (Haskins, 1981). The black press pushed for equal rights legis­lation and black political representation alongside discussions on the moral, spiritual, and ethical logics of human equality. African ­A mericans faced an increasingly violent white backlash at the turn of the twentieth century, with white mobs attacking black neighborhoods, destroying property, and very often taking lives; so black newspapers also were critical in correcting propaganda spread by mainstream news outlets that justified the “race riots” (Daniel and Huber, 1990). This work made the black press a constant target for white mob vio­ lence. Through the late 19th and early 20th centuries the black press tirelessly drew attention to the injustice and violence of lynching; it campaigned for federal anti-lynching laws and reframed the way lynching was covered in the mainstream press (Teel, 1991). Frisken (2012) and Davis (2008) show how black newspapers engaged in a kind of ­“visual activism” by sharing images of lynched African Americans while (re)framing these images as grotesque subversions of American values of justice and order. This frame offered an intentional contrast to the dehumanizing victim blaming and speculative entertainment frames that the mainstream press used to report on lynching. Black journalists took real risks to cover these stories. Both Ida B. Wells and her editor, J.L. ­Fleming, faced constant threats by reporting about white mob vio­lence; in 1892 her newspaper offices were burned by an angry mob (Silkey, 2015; Simmons, 1998). During WWI and WWII the black press was also subjected to intense government surveillance and censorship

142  Sarah J. Jackson because it pointed out the hypocrisy of the country fighting for demo­ cracy abroad but depriving African American veterans of their rights ­(Michaeli, 2016; Simmons, 1998; Squires, 2009). As a result, the federal government sometimes accused both individual journalists and entire black newspapers of sedition (Washburn, 1986). The Baltimore Afro-American typifies these various impulses of the black press. Founded in 1892 by a former slave, John Henry Murphy, Sr. and passed down to his decendents ever since, the Afro-American ­focused on highlighting news related to black Americans and advocating racial justice (Farrar, 1998). In the early 20th century, the ­Afro-­American critiqued films like Birth of a Nation, serialized short stories about issues like interracial romance, carried the literary war journalism of famed writers like Langston Hughes, editorially advocated anti-lynching laws, and criticized local and national politicans who failed to take action on racial violence (Roiland, 2013; Gallon, 2013, Glick, 2011). During WWII, like other black papers, the Afro-American reported on the every­day experiences of black soldiers serving abroad and critiqued ­racial inequalities at home; it extensively covered the story of Dorie Miller, the black Navy messman who helped bring down Japanese aircraft at Pearl Harbor (Pietila and Spaulding, 2013; Farrer, 1998). In the 1950s and 1960s, the Afro-American covered the civil rights movement from the perspective of black citizens and activists while encouraging critique of protest styles and politics (Thornton and Cassidy, 2008). In the 1980s the paper offered nuance and context to local and national debates about racial representation (Spaulding, 2012). This history might seem to characterize the black press as “advocacy journalism.” But I caution against suggesting that journalism that seeks to better understand and represent groups historically excluded from public life is any more “advocacy” than the mainstream logics that do this excluding. Certainly black newspapers often took particular editorial stances, as do all papers. Yet, covering stories that were otherwise largely ignored or misreported, as the black press did, is simply good journalism. Black journalists have always worked to incorporate the values and professionalism of American journalism so as not to recreate the biases the black press was founded to address. In fact, black publications and publishers often took on a conservative, or at the very least cautious, tone when covering racial politics and controversies in the US for fear of being censored, accused of sedition, and/or losing the support of white benefactors and advertisers (Stange, 2001). During the civil rights movement, for example, many black newspapers enabled debate over the use of particular tactics and definitions of racial progress—from accomodationist to militant. Further, the idea that the American mainstream press was or is more “objective” in its coverage of issues of race and racism ignores how its origins are tied to projects of colonialism and white supremacy. Legacies of exclusion have

The Black Press and Baltimore  143 always influenced who gets to tell the news, how the news is told, and who the news is told about (Stabile, 2006). Long-standing ideological assumptions of mainstream journalism dictate decisions about whose stories, and thus whose lives, do and do not matter. In the early days of the civil rights movement, Northern white journalists helped to expose the violence experienced by black citizens in the South. But black journalists remained few and far between at mainstream papers (Jacobs, 2000). Rather than altruism, the mainstream inclusion of black journalists in the later years of the civil rights movement often resulted from white editors’ and publishers’ assumptions that black journalists would experience greater safety around, and forthrightness from, African Americans (Drummond, 1968; Jacobs, 2000). Black reporters were, indeed, often allowed greater access to African American communities, largely because of justifiable fear of mischaracterization by white reporters. Yet this access, and its logics, were oversimplified in mainstream newsrooms; and stereotyping of black neighborhoods, black politics, and black journalists continues (Newkirk, 2000). Mainstream news outlets continue to ignore racism and anti-black violence in the United States, constructing episodic and fatalistic narratives of a natural and unchangeable divide between white and black Americans. The black press has covered national racial flashpoints such as the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers and the uprising that followed their acquittal, as well as controversies over unrepentant critiques of American racism by black celebrities like Sister Souljah and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, with thematic framing that focused less on the sensationalism of the individual instances and figures and more on how such instances illustrated ongoing injustice in the criminal justice system and continued racial double standards (Shipp, 1994; Squires, 2009). Today, mainstream newsroom diversity remains a goal rather than a reality. The number of black or other non-white journalists in US newsrooms has been stagnant for decades (Guskin, 2013). Non-white journalists are more likely to be included as part-time or volunteer contributors than enjoy full-time employment. Very few mainstream newspaper edi­ tors and supervisors are black. Meanwhile, mainstream newsrooms still pigeonhole black journalists as “race writers” or ask them to ignore their communities altogether in order to find more “universal” relevance (Maynard, 2003). Black stories continue to be told with limited frames while contemporary neoliberal politics in the journalism industry tout colorblind ideals. Further, the mainstream press continues to rely on racially coded language, anti-black stereotypes, and a de-emphasis of white people’s roles in racial violence (Squires, 2009). Finally, while subscriptions to the traditional black press have ­decreased significantly, flagship newspapers like the New York ­Amsterdam News and Philadephia Tribune continue to reach tens of thousands of A ­ mericans a year, and the magazines Ebony and Essence boast circulation numbers

144  Sarah J. Jackson in the millions (Vogt, 2015). In combination with its Washington edition, the Baltimore Afro-American reaches over 10,000 readers through paid circulation, not accounting for those who accesses the free online edition (Vogt, 2016). Today, many black press outlets run content both online and in print; some historical publications, like Ebony, are enjoying a resurgence thanks to a new generation of editors committed to online content. Further, additional online spaces have arisen, from the blogosphere to Twitter, that citizens use to participate in the black public sphere (Florini, 2015; Jackson and Welles, 2015; White, 2011). Many black journalists now working in mainstream newsrooms got their start in these spaces and with organizations like the National Association of Black Journalists and National Newspaper Publishers Association, firmly rooted in the tradition of centering African American lives. For example, the African American, millennial-founded blog PostBourgie served as a springboard for at least a dozen black journalists who now report for and manage content for mainstream outlets like The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and NPR (Rosenberg, 2015). Thus, the black press, and its contemporary iterations, certainly continue to matter both in training black journalists and in shaping national debates about race and racism from a still too often ignored perspective. Studies of the role of journalists and journalism in America’s ever evolving racial politics must therefore consider the black public sphere. With this in mind, I consider the methods and frames used by the black press to cover the death of Freddie Gray and the resulting Baltimore protests, showing how the extensive coverage illustrates both historical and contemporary characteristics of black journalism, and the signi­ ficance of these stories to mainstream/national conversations that otherwise would largely continue myopic representations of blackness. This illustrates how African-American journalistic traditions, and the public sphere they reflect, are not only alive and well, but evolving to work with new technologies and new voices.

“To Plead Our Cause”: The Black Press, Baltimore, and 21st Century Newsmaking I collected a month’s worth of stories on these topics from the New York Amsterdam News, Baltimore Afro-American, Bay State ­Banner, ­Chicago Defender, Los Angeles Sentinel, Pittsburgh Courier, The ­Crisis, Ebony, Essence, and Jet. Not surprisingly, of these ten, B ­ altimore’s local black newspaper, the Afro-American, covered the story most ­extensively, running seventy-one stories in that month. Other sources also dedicated a large amount of content—207 stories among them, making a total of 278 stories from mid-April to mid-May, 2015. An identical search of mainstream press coverage of the Gray/Baltimore story yielded less than half this number—only 120 stories—illustrating the quantity of coverage made

The Black Press and Baltimore  145 available in the black press and the clear importance with which black press sources treated the story.1 Below I discuss trends in black press coverage of Baltimore including the significance of the publication medium (print, digital, or both), the visibility of citizen journalism and activism in this coverage, interactions with mainstream press sources, and the frames black press journalists used to cover the story as it unfolded. Together these details paint a vivid picture of the synergies of 21st century black newsmaking and the production of counterpublic frames, illustrating how the contemporary black press upholds its founding goals while adapting to new techno­ logies and contemporary racial politics. Synergies of 21st century black newsmaking Of the black press stories on Freddie Gray/Baltimore, only 3% were published as print only, 40% appeared in print and digital forms, and 76% appeared solely online. Black newsmakers understand the necessity of a digital presence and in fact exploit this by offering online content that would be nearly impossible to include in print editions. 2 This includes links to their own stories (stories hosted on the same website), links to outside sources of information (discussed in detail below), and timely updates on breaking news. Breaking news articles illustrate, in particular, the power of multi-media journalism; like the mainstream press, the black press has adapted to values of immediacy that allow multiple updates on developing stories throughout the day. As the circumstances around Freddie Gray’s death became increasingly suspect and Baltimore became increasingly tense, the Baltimore Afro-American increased its coverage of the story. The day he died the paper ran only one story on Gray; by a week later the Afro-American posted six to seven stories a day to its website. Each story built upon the last as new developments arose. Some of the timeliest reporting on the developing situation in Baltimore was thus only available online. Afro-American and other black press sources’ stories typically began with “Latest on,” “Livestream,” and “Breaking,” following the convention of electronic media, rather than print. For example, ­Afro-American staff started many online reports with “Latest on Freddie Gray Death.” The Defender carried a livestream video of Gray’s funeral, and Essence reported online within minutes the news that Gray’s death had been ruled a homicide. These adaptations allow the black press to function successfully in the context of digital news curation while still producing more in-depth print content. In fact, content that appeared in print (much of which also appeared online) was more likely to include in-depth analyses of the policy contexts and implications of the Gray story and its aftermath than time-sensitive online-only reporting.

146  Sarah J. Jackson Notably, black press stories on Gray and Baltimore frequently included mainstream press sources alongside other black press publications and African American-centered content aggregators like NewsOne. Over 30% of the black press stories cited, quoted, or shared content from mainstream sources like CNN, The Baltimore Sun, and the ­Associated Press. Most often this involved official accounts of what police and govern­ment officials said about Gray’s death, or details on the local and federal investigations into the police officers who arrested him. Black news outlets also included extensive interviews, quotes, and other details about the life and death of Freddie Gray, and the events that unfolded in Baltimore, from everyday citizens whose authority derived from their closeness to Gray and his local community rather than any kind of formal journalistic training or elite social location. For example, the Amsterdam News interviewed a “life-long friend” of Gray’s who had only loving things to say about the 25-year-old. The Bay State Banner, Los Angeles Sentinel, and Pittsburgh Courier directly quoted community representatives and activists, often giving these figures primacy in their stories via longer and earlier quotes than more “official” sources. This use of sourcing contextualized official accounts within counterpublic narratives that drew attention to the one-dimensionality of official sourcing and treated it with frequent cynicism. The Defender, for example, mentioned a cell phone video taken by a community member that revealed Gray “screaming in pain” with “legs dragging” during his arrest before reporting on police officers who “insisted that force was never used” (Thompson, 2015). This example illustrates not only the values of the black press, with a continued focus on citizens’ voices and perspectives in an effort to tell more inclusive, multi-dimensional stories about injustice, but also why participatory journalism represents a more natural logic than the mainstream press which often clings to elite constructs of “professionalism” in judging the value of sources and perspectives. Ultimately, the black press often seamlessly moved between citizen reports and official reports in coverage of Baltimore. The black press also used information from “new” online sources practicing a less formal type of journalism, but that still are “mainstream” given their ownership, audience and majority white employees (Squires, 2007). For example, Ebony ran stories on arrests at a New York City protest and a profile of Maryland State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby that out-linked to original reports at Gawker and Vox respectively. The Vox profile was authored by Jenée Desmond-Harris, a black journalist who writes about race and politics; Vox brands itself as “a general interest news site for the 21st century with a mission to explain the news.”3 Other black outlets cited stories from independent outlets The Daily Beast and TruthOut. Demonstrating how the black press integrates mainstream sourcing with new media sources that reflect the black public sphere, the Chicago

The Black Press and Baltimore  147 Defender sourced the wire service Reuters, The Baltimore Sun, and the website HelloBeautiful. The latter, which describes itself as “the premier online destination for breaking news, political commentary, social issues, entertainment, beauty and lifestyle for millennial women of color,” compared the unequal bail treatment of Allen Bullock, the Baltimore teen caught smashing car windows, to the police officers connected to Freddie Gray’s death. In combining these sources, the Defender reported both “official” accounts regarding the two cases and accounts that centered the concerns of black millennials regarding hypocrisies in the justice system. Another notable synergy in black press coverage of Gray/­Baltimore, one also connected to digital curation and the extension of citizen journalism and advocacy, is the visibility of hashtags and other forms of online activism. For example, 32 black press stories included hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter, #FreddieGray, #BaltimoreUprising, ­#JusticeforFreddieGray, and others in title or text; over twice that number used popularly hashtagged slogans like “Black lives matter.” For example, an Amsterdam News profile of Freddie Gray and his community reported, “At a moment when #BlackLivesMatter has become something of a national refrain, Gray’s friends expressed pain at the callous fact that the media had not even managed to learn and report basic facts about Gray …” (Alejandro, 2015). Five black newspapers ran at least one story with a hashtag in the headline: The Defender and Courier both used #BlackLivesMatter and #FreddieGray and the A ­ msterdam News and Sentinel used #March2Justice. The Bay State Banner titled an editorial on the story with the popular activist slogan “No Justice, No Peace” (Miller, 2015). Moreover, Jet magazine ended a rather technical report on the civil rights investigation spurred by events in Baltimore with the single line: #BlackLivesMatter (Jamison, 2015a). And in her scathing editorial on the systemic context of the Gray story, Ebony’s Jamilah Lemieux ended one paragraph this way: “Hashtag Baltimore Uprising” (Lemieux, 2015). These nods to hashtag activism and other forms of contemporary black activism illustrate first, the ongoing role of the black press in centering narratives of urgency to the African-American community, and second, the adoption of new forms of counterpublic discourse by more traditional counterpublic sources. Further, many of the stories published by the black press included images culled from social media sites like ­Twitter and Instagram and the social media accounts of ­A frican ­A merican citizen journalists, activists, or celebrities. The Defender, Courier, Afro-American, and Essence each included screen shots from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook that helped to tell the story as they reported it. For example, Essence reported on the pushback against, and subsequent apology of, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake by including a tweet she posted attempting to backtrack her use of the word

148  Sarah J. Jackson “thugs” to describe protest participants (Lewis, 2015). Essence also highlighted the racial justice advocacy of actor Jesse Williams through a series of screenshots of his tweets critiquing mainstream coverage of the unrest (Sangweni, 2015). Together these various synergies, from sharing and spreading content from within the African American counterpublic, centering citizen accounts in relation to Gray and police violence, drawing on mainstream and digital sources that offered important content for piecing together the evolving story, and creating content both for print and online spaces that acknowledged new forms of counterpublic discourse, reflect the contemporary black press’ connections to both its historical impulses and the media culture of the present. “An uprising is not a riot”: Framing Baltimore in the counterpublic In covering #FreddieGray and the #BaltimoreUprising black press writers used three primary frames: 1) the unfolding story was symptomatic of systemic inequalities far from being solved and thus worthy of anger; 2) mainstream narratives were sensationalized and excluded black experiences; and 3) African-American public figures play an important role in solving issues but cannot, with their mere presence, solve racism. These frames are clear progressions of the counterpublic frames of the historical black press which centered the legitimacy and severity of black experiences with oppression, posed a direct intervention to mainstream discourses about race, and debated the possibilities, and limits, of black community empowerment. The most ubiquitous frame in coverage of Gray’s arrest, death, and the resulting protests and violence in Baltimore was one that contextualized these events within legacies of racial inequality and systemic effects on African American individuals and communities. In particular, both event-focused reporting and editorializing described in detail police surveillance, profiling, and violence against African Americans, the failures of the larger justice system to address these inequalities, and the relationship of these to other systemic issues such as underfunded schools, housing segregation, militarization, and environmental racism. This frame included clear forms of attribution, both implicit and explicit, that blamed authorities and systems for Gray’s death and the resulting unrest. The rage in Baltimore, and black rage generally, was constructed as an understandable consequence of inequality. For example, in an editorial in the Baltimore Afro-American, Walter L. Fields detailed the lack of employment and educational opportunities in Baltimore: “Let’s get one thing straight: the system has failed Black people, and particularly Black youth, time and time again.… [T]hus, the anger over Gray’s death should come as no surprise” (Fields, 2015).

The Black Press and Baltimore  149 Black journalists frequently reported statistics reflecting racial disparities in policing and sentencing in Baltimore and the nation as a whole. In reporting this data, black press journalists frequently cited the Justice Department alongside the American Civil Liberties Union and other non-profits invested in tallying human and civil rights abuses at local and national levels. Statistics were used alongside names to both humanize and quantify the costs of racialized policing. Jabari Asim (2015), the executive editor of The Crisis, a magazine founded by the NAACP in 1910 with W.E.B. DuBois at the helm, included an Editor’s Note with statistics on the frequency of police killings of black Americans but also listing the names of ninety black men, women, and children killed by police. The last name to appear on this list is Freddie Gray. Such statistics appeared alongside those on unemployment and education, clearly connecting Gray, the anger and desperation of Baltimore citizens, and systemic injustices. The cost to black citizens’ psycho­logical and physical well-being was also underscored. Melvin Miller, for example, reported in the Bay State Banner how disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates as a result of the “war on drugs” and “driving while black” resulted in the everyday “invasion of personal rights” and “humiliation” of black citizens. He asserted, “The US criminal justice system has been abusive of blacks for decades, and this is one of the reasons for the Freddie Gray rebellion in Baltimore” (Miller, 2015). In Ebony Jamilah Lemieux (2015) similarly described the “sustained psychological terror of being reared in an economically disenfranchised neighborhood, babysat by a failing school and abused by aggressive police.” The Los Angeles Sentinel’s Jazelle Hunt interviewed a Baltimore high school teacher who said “people need to understand the history of poverty, negligence, and police brutality” in Baltimore” in order to understand the “fear, anger, worry, and frustration” among young people there (Hunt, 2015). Ultimately police brutality was framed, as in ­Amsterdam News reports, as a “national crisis” and “plague” that was a major part of “decades of disenfranchisement and poverty” (“Baltimore uprising,” 2015). This frame reaffirmed the validity of anger and frustration in response to severe and systemic racial inequalities and also legitimized the work of those fighting against it, including everyday people taking to the streets of Baltimore. It pointed out the hypocrisy of asking disenfranchised citi­zens to perform “respectability,” “calm,” and “peace” when the state actors and institutions they depend on never did. Thus, the frame of unresolved inequalities became intimately intertwined with the second most common frame in black press coverage, i.e., direct critique of mainstream narratives of unrest in Baltimore as one-­dimensional. In this frame, the black press challenged mainstream coverage of the ­Freddie Gray/Baltimore story, both implicitly in news reports and expli­ citly in editorials, for failing to tell a complete, inclusive and just version

150  Sarah J. Jackson of the story. This frame was especially constructed through critiques of mainstream journalists’ focus on violence and destruction of property rather than on inequalities and destruction of black life at the hands of the state. For example, the Pittsburgh Courier quoted a protester, a former ­Marine who lived in Gray’s neighborhood: “[W]hen I was in the ­Marine Corps they called me a patriot.… But now that I’m fighting for my people they call me a f-ing [sic] thug.” The article’s author affirmed the Marine’s statement: “Unfortunately this is the reality for far too many African Americans in this country” (“Former Marine,” 2015). By “they,” the Marine presumably was referring to cultural stereotypes about blackness, particularly black protest and anger, that exist alongside contemporary celebrations of American troops. Thus, critiques of media representations of blackness generally, and of Freddie Gray’s local community specifically, were intertwined. Similarly, Amsterdam News staff reporting on a Freddie Gray demonstration included a tweet from the activist organization Millions March NYC that read: “The media will continue to paint the people of ­Baltimore as rioters and looters but people forget that the City and Police of ­Baltimore loot and destroy Black and Brown communities of Baltimore every day of the year” (“Demonstrators gather,” 2015). Jet magazine, in reporting on “a growing list of celebrities who are expressing disapproval of how the media has been covering protests” extensively quoted from an interview with Morgan Freeman, who opined, “F*** [sic] the media.… You were not there when we were just talking and trying to make a point, but if we set something on fire, all of a sudden you’re here” (Jamison, 2015b). A frequent theme here was that sensational, superficial mainstream coverage of Gray’s local community through the language of “riots” and “thugs” worked to distract from and silence important conversations that otherwise might highlight black experiences with state violence, the city and state governments’ neglect of black neighborhoods, and, most of all, the issue of accountability for Gray’s death. In order to challenge this “distraction” black press journalists and columnists contrasted sensationalized media narratives about Baltimore to the continuing lack of “answers” and “facts” regarding what exactly happened to Gray and critiqued the “rush to condemn looters without any context.” This is not to say that black journalists ignored the violence in Baltimore, or that they did not critique this violence, but rather that they saw such critiques as less important than providing readers with a complete picture of events in the pursuit of justice. The Pittsburgh Courier and Amsterdam News, for example, embedded a video of clashes between protestors and police in an article headlined, “Small group of #FreddieGray protestors turns violent; media immediately sensationalizes it.” Without context the video might be interpreted as protestors being confrontational

The Black Press and Baltimore  151 to police. But the headline critiques such oversimplistic interpretations and the author insists that “hours of peaceful protesting demanding answers” had taken place until “police in riot gear” blocked the path of protestors and, instead of protesters concerns, mainstream media began reporting on “violence” and “chaos” (Jobson, 2015). This frame also critiqued the frequency with which mainstream reports posthumously denigrated victims of police violence, connecting media reports about Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s supposed “criminal histories” to those surfacing about Freddie Gray. The Afro-­ American, the Sentinel, and other black papers questioned both the relevance of these reports to justice and their accuracy. For example, several Afro-American articles noted that initial mainstream media reports on Gray’s arrest relied heavily on police accounts that misspelled Gray’s name, misreported Gray’s age, and detailed “suspicious behavior” that could not be quantified or confirmed.4 Finally, black journalists framed black public figures, including acti­vists and celebrities, but most frequently government officials, as ­empowered to create change for the larger African-American community but s­ imultaneously limited by the immensity of the structures to which they are subject. This nuanced frame accomplished two types of ideological work. First, it legitimized and celebrated black public figures’ successes while calling on them to give back to the African American community. Individuals who failed to adequately support black communities were critiqued; those fighting uphill battles for civil rights and racial justice initiatives were lauded. In particular, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Baltimore Police Chief Anthony Batts were criticized for aligning themselves with mainstream narratives rather than black counternarratives, including by calling protestors “thugs” and responding too slowly to community concerns about Gray’s death. Second, journalists challenged popular neoliberal logics that suggest token representation can address systemic inequality. In this context, black journalists and columnists drove home the reality that black representation in and of itself is not justice, nor does it necessarily dismantle systems of oppression. Ebony Senior Editor Jamilah Lemieux noted “how easy it is for us to get caught up in the idea of Black faces in political spaces as The Solution—even for those of us who’ve long since known it’s not that simple” (Lemieux, 2015). President Barack Obama occasionally was subjected to the criti­cal version of this frame. For example, Crisis board member Janelle Wright Middleton wrote of Obama, “African American men are the highest suffering group affected by [police] abuse in a country that has their brother as a spokesman and role model” (Middleton, 2015). L ­ emieux commented that just “as the two-term presidency of President Barack Obama did nothing to save the lives (nor punish the killers) of Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd and Eric Garner, the presence of Mayor Rawlings-Blake did

152  Sarah J. Jackson nothing to prevent the violent, prolonged death of Freddie Gray in the custody of the Baltimore police” (Lemieux, 2015). Yet, on a more hopeful note, Obama also represented the importance of the ongoing fight for racial justice. Every black press outlet quoted portions of Obama’s speech about Freddie Gray, in which he stated, “Justice needs to be served.… [W]hat the people of Baltimore want more than anything is the truth.” Black intellectuals, activists, and artists, both living and dead, were also included to legitimize black experiences. In an Amsterdam News editorial, Elinor Tatum (2015) quoted novelist Ralph Ellison’s famous Invisible Man to contextualize Gray among “missing and invisible black men.” Ebony quoted poet Langston Hughes’ prophetic “Warning” and Martin Luther King’s critiques of “white moderates” (Lemieux, 2015). Living civil rights figures, from Harry Belafonte to Jesse Jackson, were quoted on the significance of justice in Baltimore. Black celebrities too, including members of the Baltimore Ravens football team, musical artists Prince, Beyoncé, and Jay Z, and actor Jesse Williams were cited as sources on issues like the importance of activism and community oversight in cases of police violence. Most visible in this frame were Maryland State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who were treated as community heroes fighting the fight that people in the first category failed to commit to and those in the second category articulated. Of all the public figures covered in black press coverage of the Gray/Baltimore story, these women were the only to earn individual profiles highlighting their personal and professional biographies alongside details regarding their roles in investigating Gray’s case; they were constructed as fair-minded figures with the power—despite considerable obstacles—and motivation to seek justice. An Ebony profile titled “Marilyn Mosby, the Hero of Baltimore” detailed Mosby’s connections to law enforcement, professional qualifications, and sympathy for “people—especially African Americans— who are worried about police misconduct” (“Marilyn Mosby, the Hero of Baltimore,” 2015). Other profiles of Mosby detailed the objections she faced from Baltimore law enforcement who attempted to frame her as unfit for the job, rebutting these claims vis-à-vis recitation of Mosby’s resume and support of her from highly respected public figures including Congressional Black Caucus members. 5 Similarly, when the Justice Department began investigating the Gray case, the Amsterdam News profiled its recently sworn-in head in an article titled, “Welcome, Attorney General Loretta Lynch.” Noting the delays in confirming Lynch because of Republican senators’ attempts to block Obama nominees, the article quoted Lynch at length on her commitment to “work with leaders throughout Baltimore to ensure we can protect the security and civil rights of all residence”; it also quoted Senate and House members who praised her “judicious balance” and “embodiment of the American dream” (Boyd, 2015).

The Black Press and Baltimore  153 Ultimately this third frame reflects the centering of black subjects and inter-community debates. Like the centering of every day black citizens and activists in the sourcing trends in the black press, the centering of black politicians, celebrities and intellectuals, insists on the legitimacy of these figures as leaders and thinkers, especially in the context of a greater American culture that is often dismissive of or resistant to black figures and communities.

The Importance of African American Journalism in Baltimore and Beyond Scholars have devoted much attention to the so-called post-civil rights decline of the black press. My findings, however, demonstrate that while black journalism has changed over the decades, having adapted to new technologies, forms of information gathering and reporting, and reader demands, it continues to offer important perspectives on national conversations about race and inequality. The news values of the black press have remained consistent, i.e., to provide a specific readership with frames, sources, and debates that center African American history and knowledge. Yet, the black press’ adaptation to new technology creates the possibility of reach far outside of its originally conceived audience and certainly further than in the last decades of the 20th century when its death seemed only a matter of time. In combination with the synergies of 21st-century black newsmaking, the continued legacy of the values of the black public sphere constructed the story of Freddie Gray and Baltimore as representing the larger struggle for long overdue systemic reforms. The black press performed important discursive work often absent from mainstream coverage of police brutality and civil unrest: the black press legitimized black experiences with systemic oppression, held accountable state actors, illustrated the need for systems level change, articulated critiques of the still ­A mero-Eurocentric values and frames of mainstream media and politics, and demonstrated the power that African Americans can wield to create change if allowed the opportunity. The need to present official accounts and use mainstream sources in order to fully cover the Gray story presented a challenge to the black press in that its staffs had to rely on the very accounts of racial violence, state-citizen interactions, and community upheaval that the black press has longed critiqued as exclusionary of the experiences and contexts of black America. Some of the challenges long faced by the black press, particularly as related to the resources and access necessary to be seen as legitimate by elites, have not changed much despite other shifts in newsmaking. Contemporary black newsmakers addressed this contradiction in values and sources much as their antecedents did—by centering the accounts of non-elite African Americans in their stories and

154  Sarah J. Jackson giving legitimizing attention to community accounts that contradict or add context to those which they include from mainstream news sources. Notably, even fairly conservative editorials on the Gray/Baltimore story included these frames, often while also espousing ideologies of black uplift. For example, in an Amsterdam News editorial, black conservative Armstrong Williams spoke of a “moral decay” in Baltimore, criticized the lack of black leadership in the city, and simultaneously legitimized the connection between outside real estate speculation and the segregation, poverty, and deplorable condition of Baltimore public school (Williams, 2015). Similarly, in the tradition of the Black church, columnist E.R. Shipp strongly critiqued violence by people she characterized as “mindless marauders” “in the purging mood” while also acknowledging that Baltimore children lacked the resources for more respectable expressions of anger; she noted that their “mayhem” had forced local black churches and civil rights leaders to move more quickly toward solutions (Shipp, 2015). These editorials notably reflect the long legacy of the black press as enabling members of the black public sphere to center narratives neglected in mainstream spaces (particularly those that legitimize the realities of systemic inequality) and to engage in ­intra-community debates about solutions to inequality. These have always included strains of black conservativism, especially narratives of self-­determination and respectability. Ultimately, in this case, the black press provided counternarratives in print and online to anyone willing to look. Black journalists worked to include both official accounts and those of everyday black citizens, making use of traditional media and technologies more familiar to a new generation of millennial activists. They constructed a story of desperate injustice but without presuming that a solution was out of reach, and always legitimizing the reality of black experiences of both oppression and reclamation.

Notes 1 Mainstream sources in this search included the Baltimore Sun, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, Newsweek, Time, and the Atlantic. 2 Internet penetration is difficult to determine because of smart phones: while low-income, minority communities have a lower rate of broadband/at-home internet access, African Americans in cities own smart phones with internet access at the same rate as the rest of the country. In fact, African Americans are over-­ represented in some online spaces (like Twitter) because of smart phones. http:// technical.ly/baltimore/2013/02/20/digital-divide-hispanic-black-americanslead-the-way-in-social-media-smartphone-adoption-report/. 3 Via “About Vox,” retrieved from http://www.voxmedia.com/pages/aboutvox-media.

The Black Press and Baltimore  155 4 See for example Robert Alejandro’s (2015) article in the Afro-American. 5 See for example Zenitha, Prince (May 8, 2015). CBC chair rebukes ­Baltimore police union prez for statements to prosecutors. Afro-American Retrieved from http://www.afro.com/cbc-chair-rebukes-baltimore-police-union-prezfor-statements-to-prosecutors/.

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9 The Case of “Misguided” “Thugs” Baltimore Youth, Activism, and News Khadijah Costley White The local response of citizens in the forms of demonstrations, marches, vigils, and even isolated incidents of vandalism drove much of the local, national and international media attention to the killing of Freddie Gray. Scenes of young people, visibly upset, speaking out against police violence and clashing with armed officers filled television screens and swept through social media. The Guardian blamed rioting and looting on “young people [who] began hurling bricks and bottles at police in riot gear soon after Gray was buried” (Swaine, et al., 2015). During a press conference, in what she later described as a burst of “frustration and anger,” Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake referred to the city’s “misguided young people” as “thugs who only want to incite violence and destroy our city” (Fang, 2015). A headline for the local ABC TV news affiliate declared the Baltimore riots the result of a “long misunderstanding between youth [and] police” (Bourg, 2015). Thus, the media coverage of Baltimore protests in response to Freddie Gray’s death frequently depicted young people as looters, criminals, and rioters. But, what did black youth think of news media’s portrayal of their activism? What news sources did they trust? How did those who participated in protests, rallies, and vigils decide to get involved in the scenes they saw laid out on TV screens, newspaper photographs, and images circulating in social media? Few (if any) audience studies address black youth as consumers of news coverage of racial social movements or uprisings. This may be, as Harp, et al. (2010) argue, because most teenagers are ineligible to vote; as a result, their responses to political news generate less interest. Moreover, Williamson, et al. (2012) note “a paucity of research examining the everyday-life information seeking of young people, especially investigating the role that the news media has in providing information” (p. 258). Interviewing young people who were active in attending marches and other demonstrations for Freddie Gray will help fill in that scholarly gap.

Method This chapter draws on a series of in-depth (between 45 minute–1.5 hour) interviews with eight politically active teenagers from Baltimore about their feelings, actions, and insights in relation to the news coverage of

The Case of “Misguided” “Thugs”  159 the protests and killing of Freddie Gray. All of them participated in (and in some cases, organized) protests, demonstrations, vigils or direct actions related to the killing of Freddie Gray. Seven of the interviewees were African-American and one was Jewish; they ranged in age from 15 to 18 (mean = 16.5). The sample was comprised of three boys and five girls. While the sample size is small and cannot be generalized, the interviews were long enough to provide insights into the perspective of predominantly black Baltimore youth regarding local news and the coverage of the events surrounding Freddie Gray’s death. These interviewees were identified through activist networks in ­Baltimore—primarily one youth-led Baltimore-based organization that focuses on issues of social justice and education. This organization provided use of its headquarters for the interviews. Seven of the interviewees were high school students. One, having recently graduated from a local high school, was a local college freshman. Each reported attending, participating in, organizing, or leading a vigil, rally, march, or demonstration related to Freddie Gray’s death. At least half of the interviewees described being involved with youth organizing and advocacy for one to four years prior to Freddie Gray’s arrest. While the number of interviewees is small, such in-depth data allows for “greater detail and depth than the standard survey, allowing insight into how individuals understand and narrate aspects of their lives” ­(Clifford, n.d., p. 1). Scholars have also found that as few as four interviewees with experience and expertise can provide “complete and accurate information within a particular cultural context” (Guest, et al., 2006). Experts consulted by Baker and Edwards (2012) note that a small number of interviewees can be particularly helpful in getting information on populations that are difficult to access. In the context of this chapter, that point is relevant to the attempt to understand the perspectives of marginalized urban minors active in political protests and demonstrations around a specific event. As Patricia and Peter Adler argue, scholars who insist on larger numbers “show a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of inductive research” (Baker and Edwards, p. 9). The eight youth were asked where they got information about what happened to Gray and what were their best sources of information; whether they saw the video of Gray being arrested; what stood out to them about the news reporting on Gray. They were also asked a series of evaluative questions about what they wished the news media had reported but didn’t; and what they thought the news media got right or wrong when reporting on Gray and on the Baltimore protests. Specific themes repeatedly emerged as the students reflected on the news coverage, as discussed and outlined in sections below. In discussing their primary sources of news, interviewees described getting their information on events related to Freddie Gray by word-of-mouth, local news organizations (both television and print), and social media (specifically, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram). No professional black news organizations were mentioned.

160  Khadijah Costley White Their responses were analyzed for repeated emphases and patterns in discussing the news coverage related to Freddie Gray, the way they accessed it, and how they viewed it. After providing some background on black youth and media, the remainder of this chapter describes the common themes and tropes that emerged during the interviews. The interviews make clear the news outlets, media sources, issues, and information seen as most important to Baltimore teenagers regarding the representation of activism provoked by Freddie Gray’s death. Specifically, interviewees highlighted the video of Freddie Gray’s arrest, feelings of personal connection to Gray’s life and story, and an awareness of simi­lar incidents that provided a larger context for the circumstances of Gray’s homicide. Moreover, they all expressed an awareness of biased news frames in the news coverage on the protests and demonstrations in response to Gray’s death, particularly in the framing of youth. This order mirrors the order of importance of these topics as the youth reflected on the Gray-related news coverage during the interviews. While research shows that young people have little appetite for conventional news ­(Meijer, 2007), these interviews demonstrate that black youth substantially attend to news when the coverage is particularly relevant to them and their community, when it covers current events and includes them as active political agents, and provides information that directly engages in direct democracy. Indeed, as noted by Cortesi and Gasser (2015), these are all important functions of news.

Literature on Black Youth and Media Regina Marchi (2012) notes that contemporary teens are not less informed in regards to legacy or conventional news outlets than youth in prior generations; rather they are “differently informed” because they get their news sources in a wide variety of ways (p. 247). They rely more heavily on personal social networks to get information, including for news they want on an instantaneous and regular basis. Most young people, and to a greater extent than the average in the United States, do not attend to news on a daily basis (Patterson, 2007). Young people are also uninterested in “objective” news; they are uninterested in news that does provides little context or explanation about a set of circumstances or its implications (Marchi, 2012). Consistent with this trend, young people prefer to engage with satirical and opinionated news as a way of getting more history, explanation, and context for the information than traditional news sources typically provide (Marchi, 2012; Feldman, 2007). Moreover, the extent and regularity of use in regards to professional news sources such as newspapers and television news shows tend to depend on parents’ consumption of media, education, and income, as well as the conversations parents have with youth about the news (York and Scholl, 2015).

The Case of “Misguided” “Thugs”  161 In part, the relationship between youth and news is complicated by the portrayal of youth in the news media, especially of African-­ American youth and other people of color. In examining the use of “wilding” meta­phors in news coverage that led to false charges (their convictions were belatedly overturned) against young black men for a brutal attack in 1989 in New York City, Welch, et al. (2002) found that news representations of young black men as “as villains, folk devils, and other representations of evil” led to legislative social controls that further criminalized youth behavior (p. 22). Further, this focus on deviant black youth behavior serves to distract attention from larger systems of economic and political inequality. According to a review of literature on news coverage of race, crime, and youth (Dorfman and Schiraldi, 2001), crime news overrepresents black youth as perpetrators and underrepresents them as victims. Moreover, youth of color are portrayed far more often in crime news than their white peers. Media discourse during the civil rights movements at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s blamed black youth for crime and riots in urban areas, mirroring the media representation of youth in Baltimore uprisings of 2015. The media portrayals of on-the-ground activism in Baltimore and its focus on youth were important: journalists’ depictions of social movements raise the public profile of a movement, validate its importance, and show activists how others see the movement and understand its cause (Koopmans, 2004; Scalmer, 2002). Nonetheless, media coverage can also villify, marginalize, and delegitimize movements, selecting (and excluding) movement representatives for its public face, and focusing on deviant behavior (Boycoff, 2006; Dardis, 2006; Gitlin, 2003). As Paul Kellstedt (2003) explains: “If social movements are defined by conflict between societal groups with grievances and governments, then the ­national press has a distinct role in portraying the origins, processes, and outcomes of that conflict” (pp. 24–25). Race in particular seems to affect the typical news coverage of social movements because marches and other activist events are “produced with a white audience in mind” and tend to outline “the parameters for how whites might define suitable forms of black political advocacy” (Watkins, 2001, p. 97). For African Americans and other marginalized groups of people, these news media depictions function in complex ways in relation to political participation and identity formation. The negative representations of black youth can lower the self-esteem and impact the racial identity development and psychological well-being of African-American youth (Martin, 2008). But they can also help strengthen racial identity, promote resiliency, and protect African-American young people from some effects of racism and discrimination. Positive representations of black youth have been shown to reduce test-taking achievement gaps between whites and blacks (Harp, et al., 2010). Moreover, recent research shows that African-American youth in particular are more likely than white

162  Khadijah Costley White peers to engage in civic activities and talk, participate in political acti­ vities, and “talk about news, follow the news, and demonstrate overall interest in news” (Harp, et al., 2010, p. 239). For these reasons, the intersections between black youth activism and perceptions of social movement coverage in an urban area are of particular interest. By addressing questions about the death of ­Freddie Gray and about circulation of information about the subsequent uprising, young ­Baltimoreans help elucidate the media spaces they found useful, the values that shaped this usefulness, the messages they embraced (or rejected), and the framing that drew them into on-the-ground activism and political participation. The Video For the student activists I interviewed, the video showing Freddie Gray being arrested was a key motivation for their interest and participation in events related to his killing. Grainy cell phone videos taken in April, 2015 in Baltimore reveal three white police officers dragging the limp body of a black man to a nearby police van. The man is handcuffed and propped up between the officers. “His leg looks broke!” screams one witness recording from her phone (WhatThePhuck, 2015). His legs inert, the man looks injured: he seems to have difficulty standing and he cries out in pain as officers drag him. Indeed, most critics accused the police of unjustly arresting Gray and beating him, but assumed that the major injuries came during the “rough ride” to the police station. But WhatThePhuck titled its “FULL RAW VIDEO” of Gray, available on YouTube as “Black Man DIES as Baltimore Cops Break SPINE in Police Beating.”  In a second video recording the arrest, a man is heard saying that the police officers have tased the man in handcuffs (CNN, 2015). Police officers, with two others in the frame as the camera spins around, then put the man into the police van headfirst. A week after these last recordings of the 25-year-old man being taken into police custody, Freddie “Pepper” Gray was dead. All of the interviewees mentioned having seen the video either when it was shown on television or shared through social media. Interviewees described the images and sounds of Gray’s injured body as central to driving the protests and demonstrations related to his death. Reminiscent of the widespread response to the 1993 acquittal of officers caught on video brutally beating an unarmed Rodney King in Los Angeles, the series of protests and uprisings in Baltimore for Freddie Gray in response to v­ ideos of his arrest drew national attention and increased news coverage to the issue of excessive police violence against African-Americans in urban areas. Ultimately, the final recordings of Freddie Gray being taken into police custody and his subsequent death would air on local and national news across the country, flooding social media, and leading to a series

The Case of “Misguided” “Thugs”  163 of protests called by some “the Baltimore Uprising” as well as to high-­ profile criminal charges of six police officers in connection to his death. For young people in Baltimore with whom I spoke, the video of ­Freddie Gray was particularly important in drawing and sustaining their interest and activism after they first learned about the story from peers and family members. The youth interviewed explained that the video was effective in connecting them with Gray’s story because it clearly showed his suffering. In general, Gray’s vulnerability in the arms of the police was repeated as a reason why the video was so striking and motivating to young activists. For example, one 18-year-old girl who participated in several protests said: Yeah. He looks miserable. He’s being dragged, he’s being forced against his will to go somewhere. He’s being forced against his will, he doesn’t know why he’s going to this place, he’s being dragged, he literally looks like he’s about to just collapse and cry. He’s so weak and he’s being man-handled by these random people who just decided that they wanted to get him that day at that time. Another 17-year-old girl echoed similar thoughts about the graphic nature of the video: They didn’t break his spine until they got into the van. And I’m like, you can clearly see in the video that he can’t … when they was dragging him, that he cannot move his legs, and it just—It irritated me, because it’s like y‘all are putting y‘all knee on this boy’s neck and putting him down like this.… It’s … It’s inhumane. You shouldn’t treat people like that. How do you sever eighty percent of someone’s spine? How do you do that? You suppose to be just arresting him.… You killed this boy. It just was too much. A 16-year-old boy also explained: It was just … cruel and unusual. I never saw that happen. Saw a video that close to home, so it was shocking.… It was actually caught on video, and [he wasn’t] armed and then you actually heard him screaming and telling them where it was hurting. It was like, I don’t know how to explain it. It was like no other video was shown like this one. In this way, the youth described how the video, its airing in news, and circulation on social media functioned as an important motivator for their political participation.

164  Khadijah Costley White Personal Connection Participants in my study frequently mentioned the importance to them of having a personal connection to Freddie’s Gray’s neighborhood, community, and family in getting information about his arrest and killing. The feeling of intimacy with Gray and his family helped make the story of his death more relevant and important in terms of following the news coverage of the subsequent demonstrations and responses. One 17-yearold girl explained that she first learned of Freddie Gray via word-ofmouth and she continued to get information about the case from his friends and family: I know people, that in my school specifically, know his family and know his friends. I know people that know him. So that’s how I was getting my information.… When people actually know people and people actually interact with the family, they know more. And the news just says what they want to say and what they can find out. They really don’t … I don’t think the news is always right. They don’t always know what they’re talking about. They only know what people tell them. Other interviewees explained that they had initially learned about ­ reddie Gray through paper flyers printed by churches and community F organizations, from peers and activists involved with demonstrations, and through people they already followed on social media. One 18 yearold girl stressed the significance of receiving physical materials and information about the protest from a person in real life as opposed to social media. For another 15-year-old girl, encountering and sharing information with young people at demonstrations and gatherings for Gray helped form emotional bonds to the story in ways that underscored its relevance to her own life: I think it’s more important than social media and everything because it helps the connection. I think you have more of an impact on someone when you can tell them about the work you do or just share your stories. Some people I didn’t even know and we just communicated about what was going on. It was a very deep connection and a deep feeling of agreement. It was very sentimental, I believe, because I didn’t know anyone and anyone didn’t know me, but still we were talking and those conversations really meant a lot. Another 16 year-old boy, who had also learned about Gray through ­ aper flyers circulated in his neighborhood, explained that he had p known Gray’s sister and was following her on Instagram already before the Gray’s death. For him, the story of the killing of Gray was about his

The Case of “Misguided” “Thugs”  165 own neighborhood, as made clear through his contacts on social media. This resulting sense of Gray’s death as being “so close to home” later on pushed him to participate in protests and actions. These face-to-face sources and feeling that Gray connected to their everyday lives stood out as particularly meaningful to participants in following and caring about the story of Freddie Gray. Larger Context Several participants explained the importance of the Freddie Gray video, news coverage, and activism in connection to a larger history and social movement. In the months and years before Gray was killed in Baltimore, the national Movement for Black Lives (led in large part by the organizers of Black Lives Matter) had drawn increasing attention to the deaths of unarmed black people at the hands of police officers (White, 2016). Started in the wake of the 2012 killing of Travyon Martin, an unarmed teenager shot by a white volunteer neighborhood watchmen, a series of protests and organizing around the country mobilized thousands of people around law enforcement’s failure to arrest and charge his killer. At the same time, a group of young women created and promoted a hashtag #blacklivesmatter, which soon became a rallying cry and a formal network of activists around the country. The interviewees mentioned the series of deaths, showing that the increased attention to such killings, and the failures of the justice system to hold police officers and others involved with these deaths accountable (for example, Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman was acquitted of manslaughter) had resonated with them as well. Notably, the participants in this study mentioned the importance of recording on video the subsequent deaths, which enabled these cases to easily garner a national spotlight. In New York City, video showed a police officer strangling 43-year-old Eric Garner to death; in Cleveland Ohio, the police shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice; in South Carolina, an officer shot Walter Scott and planted a weapon close by his body. Even without video, the presence of dozens of witnesses in the killing of 18-year-old Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, set off dozens of local and nationwide protests that attracted activists and news reporters from all over the country. These youth knew about those cases and understood Gray in that context. Interviewees explained that news about Gray brought home the issues and concerns they saw in national news coverage: Gray’s arrest caught on video and his subsequent death added his name to a longer list of victims nationwide. According to a 15-year-old girl who was not a part of any Freddie Gray-related demonstrations or protests: There’s also a lot of movements before going on in other cities about police brutality. I think it happened around the same time of Eric

166  Khadijah Costley White Garner.… People that were already upset about other brutalities that have been happening, if it happened in their own home town, I think that’s why it really got out of hand. Another 18-year-old female interviewee explained that Freddie Gray provided insight into a larger historical arc of black subjugation in America. Asked why she thought Gray’s story was so important, why it became such a big deal, she responded: I think it became such a big deal because it literally captured what black people go through, not just in this city, but all around the country, hell, all around the world. Like, this actually got it on camera. We’re beat, we’re man-handled, slavery is still definitely a thing. It never was freakin’ abolished, it’s still a thing, it’s just legal now. That is, for the young activists, the video showed familiar and histo­ rically evocative images of black suffering at the hands of white police officers that seemed to transcend both time and space, but also served an immediate and personal relevance to them. Trusted News Sources Overall, the teens described trustworthy news sources as ones that had a perceived connection to the community, both in terms of professional news organizations and people in their social media networks. One 15-year-old girl explained that her most trusted source of news was a television station, the Hearst-owned WBAL-TV, because its reporters made clear their attachment to Baltimore and their investment in the community: I think WBAL, and people that work there, are just more … they can relate more. They really try to get to know the people in the city, and they really like to have strong documentation. One lady … her house had burned down and she had a handicapped son, and the reporter felt so bad that he offered to help donate money for her to get a wheelchair. And I think that is throughout the whole news company. I personally felt as though the reporters, everything they showed about them, they were just very hurt by what’s happening. They felt like us, I believed. Moreover, this perception of WBAL as having a commitment and even affinity for Baltimore also meant that the participant saw it as the most accurate and detailed news sources on Freddie Gray. Conversely,

The Case of “Misguided” “Thugs”  167 the same interviewee said she had less trust in news outlets that seemed more aimed at sensational coverage to attract viewership, but that provided less relevant information. Participants also stressed, in particular, a preference for local news coverage over national news. As one 16-year-old boy explained, local news “really tell the truth” as opposed to national news, which relied more on scenes of vandalism and destruction in its coverage in general and in the case of the aftermath of the arrest and killing of Gray. ­Expanding on this idea, an 18-year-old youth explained why she believes that local news provide more in-depth analysis: Local media is like “well yeah they’re awful, but this is why they’re awful.” And then national news just doesn’t accept the fact that there could be a reason as to why we’re rebelling so much. They just go with “yeah, they’re black and they’re stupid and wild and they’re rebellious, and they just want to burn the place down.” But local media is like “yeah, they’re black and they’re wild and rebellious, but this is why.…” More specifically, according to these eight students, local news was most useful when it gave a fuller, more humanizing, contextualized and positive portrayal of Freddie Gray-related protests and demonstrations, and the Baltimore community. Nevertheless, people within the interviewees’ social network were seen as the most trusted news sources. Consistent with the general notion that youth get their news from non-traditional news sources (Bachmann, et al., 2010) but in contrast to recent research depicting the decline of ­Facebook use among youth, interviewees mentioned both Twitter and Facebook most frequently as the social media they use the most. Participants reported that Facebook was one of the best ways to get relevant and trustworthy news information about Gray. The opportunities for expressing genuine emotions and opinions on and through Facebook seemed especially important to them. For example, a 15-year-old interviewee said: I think my best sources were between what people were saying through Facebook, like blogs or people posting about him and were sharing their feelings and what happened. I think I trust it the most because it was like a million of comments from one page or community. And these people were sharing how hurt they were and how horrible it was that it happened. From the information you gave, they summarize what happened, but then they also put, in their own words, about their own emotions and feelings about it. Showing that this preference for social networks and social media as the go-to source of news went beyond Gray and applied more generally,

168  Khadijah Costley White another 18-year-old girl explained that social media was an all-around better source than local news outlets in terms of providing information: I kind of value social media a lot more, and I don’t think of it as much as I used to. The ways that I value is mainly that it gives me good information, but at the same time, it’s just like local news media. So it’s going to give you conflicting reports.… But then at the same time, they’re like “yeah, this happened.” And then they give you videos, and they actually have photographic proof that the news won’t show you because it’s “too graphic,” or it “shows the truth” or something like that. Similarly, a 17-year-old boy described social media as giving people the “true information” that the news media failed to provide. This suggests that these social media sites serve important information functions that are activated by and during a relevant crisis. These can vary depending on circumstances. In addition to social media, the teenagers reported using apps like GroupMe, which rely on people passing on information to their personal networks, to directly connect with folks that they wanted to attend or inform about protests and other events. At least one interviewee, however, claimed not to use any social media on a regular basis. A 15-year-old girl, who was less involved in protests and activism than other interviewees, expressed a mistrust for social media. She sees them as spaces of rumor. Showing that the oldest media are still very much important, several of these activist-participants described relying on face-to-face and physi­ cal communication for information about Freddie Gray-related protests and rallies. Notably, as mentioned earlier, several young people noted the importance of using paper to convey information about protests. They often cited flyers shared in person as an important way to spread news. In particular, one interviewee explained the significance of “physi­ cality” in using paper flyers (which were also scanned and distributed on social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook): We did put the flyers on the social media, the pictures of the flyers, we put them on social media. Paper flyers, they’re more physical and to us physicality is what’s important. People are going to scroll through whatever they see on their timeline, but if you hand somebody a piece of paper they’re going to look at it. They might throw it away, but at least they’re going to look at it The participants, then, generally shared the sense that personal connection and perceptions of authenticity, community investment, empathy all contributed to the perceived trustworthiness of news sources reporting on Freddie Gray.

The Case of “Misguided” “Thugs”  169 Biased News Frames A number of interviewees focused on the news framing of the ­Baltimore protests. Frames are the organizing ideas or central story lines that provide meaning to a strip of events, and connect them to each other ­(Gamson and Modigliani, 1987). Frames make some features of an event more salient and omit others (Jamieson and Cappella, 2009). The frame metaphor reminds us of how we look at a picture or something through a window: a news story’s frame creates a fixed border that includes some things and excludes others (Jamieson and Waldman, 2003). News frames define problems, identify key characters, explain events, and highlight actions through presentations that often shape the audience’s understanding of a situation. In short, the news media “help determine what the public knows” (Jamieson and Waldman, 2003) and how people make sense of that knowledge. Notably, several of the interviewees said that they first learned of ­Freddie Gray’s death and even the video of his arrest by watching local TV news and reading newspapers—not through the original v­ ideos posted online and on social media. This suggests that professional journalism sources established the early frames for the news coverage of Freddie Gray, the causes of his death, and responsibility of those involved in his death. While the work of amateur reporters recording and commenting on Gray’s arrest garnered attention to the story, citizens were not the ones who established the story’s frame for the wider public. In regards to the news framing of what happened to Gray and subsequent community response, all of the young people criticized the news coverage of Gray and the Baltimore protests as inaccurate. They were especially critical of what they took to be journalists’ extreme bias against youth, particularly black youth. Several of them expressed deep concern about conflicting reports with different details about Gray’s arrest and death. One said: “It was like a bunch of stories. I still don’t honestly know the truth to this day.” Others went further, calling the news reporting, as one boy put it, “full of lies.” Most of them referred to, at a minimum, the “lack of truth” in the news media representations. For one 17-year-old boy, what stood out most about the (legacy) ­media coverage of the protest was that “they’re not accurate at all.” He elaborated on his process of analyzing the news he consumed for correct information: I watch [the news] from home on TV first and then … I will go the website and try to see if the information on the website and the TV show corresponds with each other. If it don’t then we go to somewhere there’s a miscommunication or there’s just a lie.… Then I go to another news channel, then I compare both the information. Like Fox 45, they came up with something different.

170  Khadijah Costley White It was like you really don’t know the truth, because all the news stations have something different. Asked what stood out to her the most about the news reporting on Gray one 18-year-old girl bluntly replied, “The lies.” She elaborated: I guess with the news reporting they didn’t take time to get the facts straight, I mean of course if you’re a reporter you’re supposed to spit them out as soon as you get them, but at the same time it was too many conflicting reports. In part, the students I talked to blamed the flaws in the early reporting about the video of Gray’s arrest for misrepresentations that continued throughout the news coverage of the aftermath. According to various studies, news media reports on videos depicting police brutality against black bodies seek to “restore racial inequality as social order” ­(Swenson, 1995). The journalism re-centers “authoritative interpretation,” drawing on Thomas Dumm (1993), or, as Judith Butler (1993) points out, helps frame the videos as to deny or subvert its content. In this way, a black body being beaten by police can be constructed as threat. The contested interpretations of the video become a way of “seeing” for the white community, allowing these reimagined contexts for police violence to displace the visual evidence displayed on film. In this way, media framing of black victims of police brutality as threatening, even when unarmed, helps to defend and justify police attacks and construct the black body as always rife with ill intent and danger. Moreover, the news media mark these types of events as extraordinary and exceptional, rather than common and systemic. In studying how journalists mythologized Rodney King as both victim of circumstance and as hero, Nicole Maurantonio (2014) found that the news accounts essentially recoded King’s life in accordance with pre-existing, racialized scripts that largely strip black victims of agency and emphasize racial reconciliation and progress as a solution (rather than addressing systemic bias or police misconduct). Along these lines, the interviewees here expressed concern that the news reporting related to the Freddie Gray video dehumanized him and demonized the demonstrators protesting his treatment and fatal injuries suffered in police custody. As one 18-year-old girl explained when asked about what stood out about the news coverage of Gray: I think the truth was very fabricated when it comes to him because yeah, he was poor, yeah, he was black. But I mean, he was a person and a lot of times the media don’t look at black men or black people as people; they look at them as animals or just something that can be easily replaced.

The Case of “Misguided” “Thugs”  171 Moreover, she described several ways that Gray’s innocence and the vio­ lation of his rights by police were obscured by the press reporting on video of the arrest: What fact do I think they left out? The fact that he literally was just chilling, nobody understands that he was not doing anything, he didn’t resist arrest, he didn’t even have a warrant for his arrest.… They didn’t read him his rights, so he didn’t know what he was being charged for, why he was being taken away, they didn’t take the time.… It was just so many things that just went wrong. A 17-year-old girl argued that the news media used the video only as a way to report on Gray and his background rather than the officers involved in his death. She criticized the reporting on the video for failing to give suitable attention to the officers (the officers who first stopped and then chased Gray were on bike patrol), their records, and any consequences for their actions. When I first watched it, I didn’t know who the officers was.… I only seen the two officers that had on yellow jackets whatever, the bike riders. But I want to know like who are these people? Who are these officers? Are they still on the streets? Are they suspended or not paid? All of the interviewees expressed profound concern about the way that the news media, as they saw it, focused on specific incidents that demonized black youth. In particular, they accused journalists as often showing young black people as violent, unruly, and criminal without explaining the full context of the scenes that were being shown. According to one girl: All the media coverage was just.… They were going up to people that were like vandalizing and acting wild and stuff. Of course, they weren’t going to talk, and if they did they’d say ignorant things. They weren’t going up to citizens and people that really showed that they cared and were upset about what had happened. They were just focused on all the negativity. Another 15-year-old girl described the news coverage of people “damaging stuff.” Indeed, she said that, at least in the early days, the coverage discouraged her from participating in most of the Freddie Gray protests. Rather than simply complain about the news content, participants also described what they regarded as missing from the press coverage of the Freddie Gray demonstrations. A 16-year-old girl who only partici­ pated in one small protest organized by her organization expressed

172  Khadijah Costley White particular  concern that Gray’s family members were largely excluded from the news coverage: “Why didn’t the family spoke more in the news, spoke more on television and stuff to let us know what type of person he was, what he did, stuff like that?” A 17-year-old male peer who helped organize protests for two local activist organizations added that the news media devoted insufficient space for black leaders to speak on air and during interviews. According to these teenagers, the dominance of police narratives in the reporting was a major reason for the biased and distorted news frames. One boy observed that much of the early news coverage and details about Freddie Gray’s condition came from live reports and press conferences led by police officers. A girl explained the missing information in the news reports by arguing that the police controlled the news narrative about Freddie Gray: They will give you bits and pieces of the story. They don’t give you the whole story. The who, the what, the when, the where, and the why.… Asked to explain what the police would control the narrative in this way, the girl, 17, added: I think they do that because they can. You know, I feel like the police kind of controls the media. Because they tell us that you can get in trouble for putting some of this stuff out there. I feel like the police control it, that’s why they can say what they want. These concerns about bias, official interference, derogatory opinions of youth, and a preponderance of misleading information were all common throughout the interviews.

Conclusions In discussing media coverage of Freddie Gray’s arrest and death, and the response to the aftermath, the youth focused on issues of bias, personal connections to media, the importance of images of black suffering, connecting to larger social movement struggles, trustworthiness, and bias. As the literature would predict, the teenagers most often noted the negative portrayals of black youth in the news coverage and expressed concerns about the lack of deeper analysis, context, and voices included in such portrayals. Significantly, these interviews suggest that black youth are not only interested and invested in seeking and consuming news, but that news that aims at being personally relevant and rooted in local ties may be able to garner a stronger audience among this demographic. What was particularly valuable was news coverage that had sentimental, personal,

The Case of “Misguided” “Thugs”  173 and meaningful ties to Baltimore, showed local residents in a positive light, connected to larger issues and protests relevant to black people and youth, and provided more of a platform for local, rather than official, voices to air concerns and opinions. Although youth currently consume less news than previous generations (Meijer, 2007), this study suggests that youth news consumption is tied to perceived relevance to their neighborhoods, to the participatory potential of news and the ties of the news professionals delivering the news to their local communities. As minors are formally excluded from voting, the ability for news to engage this population through news coverage of direct actions and events they find relevant is especially important, as patterns of news consumption in youth continue into adulthood (Meijer, 2007; York and Scholl, 2015). Moreover, these interviews with predominantly black and politically active youth living in an urban area show that they are particularly aware and critical of their representations and depictions in media narratives about race and social justice. These students displayed a strong ability to question the goals, ideology, and framing of the press that depicted youth, police brutality, and political demonstrations. This awareness and resistance to media narratives should be included and considered in any studies about African-American news consumption (or lack thereof). Seeing themselves in the news was important to these youth, but especially in ways that showed them as being active political agents in their neighborhoods and communities and the structural issues that they faced. Again, as minors are unable to engage in voting, news coverage that depicts alternative modes of political engagement and visibility may be even more relevant to this population. Future studies may do well to focus not only on the amount and platforms of the news that young people use, but also to observe patterns in the substance and socio-historical context of this consumption and the extent to which media coverage provides relevant information that undergirds direct political participation.

References Bachmann, I., Kaufhold, K., Lewis, S. C., and Gil de Zúñiga, H. (2010). News platform preference: Advancing the effects of age and media consumption on political participation. International Journal of Internet Science, 5(1), 34–47. Baker, S. E., and Edwards, R. (2012). How many qualitative interviews is enough?: Expert voices and early career reflections on sampling and cases in qualitative research. National Center for Research Methods. http://bit. ly/1CT3S6R. Bourg, A. (2015, April 29) Baltimore riots result of long misunderstanding bet­ ween youth, police, advocates and leaders say. ABC 2—WMAR Baltimore. http://bit.ly/2fu2VOx. Boycoff, J. (2006). Framing dissent: Mass media coverage of the global justice movement. New Political Science, 28, 201–228.

174  Khadijah Costley White Butler, J., and Gooding-Williams, R. (Eds.) (1993). Endangered/endangering: Schematic racism and white paranoia. In Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban U ­ prising (pp. 15–22) New York: Routledge. CNN (Username). (2015, April 21). New video shows arrest of Freddie Gray in Baltimore [Video file]. In YouTube. http://bit.ly/1zi9RWK. Cortesi, S., and Gasser, U. (2015). Youth online and news: A phenomenological view on diversity.  International Journal of Communication, 9. http://ijoc. org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/2761. Costera Meijer, I. (2007). The paradox of popularity: How young people experience the news. Journalism Studies, 8(1), 96–116. Dardis, F. (2006). Marginalization devices in US press coverage of Iraq war protest: A content analysis. Mass Communication & Society, 9, 117–135. Dorfman, L., and Schiraldi, V. (2001). Off balance: Youth, race & crime in the news. Building Blocks for Youth. Washington, D.C., www.buildingblocks foryouth.org. Dumm, T. L. (1993). The new enclosures. In Gooding-Williams, R. (Ed.), ­Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising (pp. 178–195). New York: Routledge. Clifford, S. (n.d.) Tipsheet—Qualitative Interviewing. Duke Initiative on ­Survey Methodology. http://bit.ly/21dkQcW. Fang, M. (2015, April 29). Baltimore mayor apologizes for calling protestors “thugs”. Huffington Post. http://huff.to/2f0lCIK. Feldman, L. (2007). The news about comedy: Young audiences, The Daily Show, and evolving notions of journalism. Journalism, 8(4), 406–427. Gitlin, T. (2003). The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley: University of California Press. Guest, G., Bunce, A., and Johnson, L. (2006). How many interviews are enough? An experiment with data saturation and variability. Field Methods, 18(1), 59–82. Harp, D., Bachmann, I., Rosas-Moreno, T. C., and Loke, J. (2010). Wave of hope: African American youth use media and engage more civically, politically than whites. The Howard Journal of Communications, 21(3), 224–246. Kellstedt, P. (2003). The Mass Media and the Dynamics of American Racial Attitudes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koopmans, R. (2004). Movements and media: Selection processes and evolutionary dynamics in the public sphere. Theory and Society, 33(3), 367–391. Marchi, R. (2012). With Facebook, blogs, and fake news, teens reject journalistic “objectivity.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 36(3): 246–262. Martin, A. (2008). Television media as a potential negative factor in the racial identity development of African American youth. Academic Psychiatry, 32(4), 338–342. Maurantonio, N. (2014). Remembering Rodney King: Myth, racial reconciliation, and civil rights history.  Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 91(4), 740–755. Patterson, T. E. (2007).  Young People and News: A Report from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Scalmer, S. (2002). Dissent Events: Protest, the Media, and the Political Gimmick in Australia. Kensington, NSW: UNSW Press.

The Case of “Misguided” “Thugs”  175 Swaine, J., Jacobs, B., and Lewis, P. (2015, April 28) Baltimore protests turn into riots as mayor declares state of emergency. The Guardian. http://bit. ly/2fN6yjr. Swenson, J. D. (1995). Rodney King, Reginald Denny, and TV news: Cultural (re-)construction of racism. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 19(1), 75–88. Watkins, S. C. (2001). Framing protest: News media frames of the Million Man March. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 18(1), 83–101. WhatThePhuck (Username). (2015, April 20).  Freddie Gray FULL RAW VIDEO: Black Man DIES as Baltimore Cops Break SPINE in Police Beating [Video file]. https://youtu.be/8UdzVRm3boo. Welch, M., Price, E. A., and Yankey, N. (2002). Moral panic over youth violence wilding and the manufacture of menace in the media. Youth & S­ ociety, 34(1), 3–30. White, K. (2016). Black lives on campuses matter: Reflecting on the rise of the new black student movement. Soundings, 63, 86–97. Williamson, K., Qayyum, A., Hider, P., and Liu, Y. H. (2012). Young adults and everyday-life information: The role of news media. Library & Information Science Research, 34(4), 258–264. York, C., and Scholl, R. M. (2015). Youth antecedents to news media consumption parent and youth newspaper use, news discussion, and long-term news behavior. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 92(3), 681–699.

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Part III

Journalistic Discourse and Criticism

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10 Historical Continuities in News Coverage of the Baltimore 2015 Riots and the 1965 Watts Riots Bonnie Brennen On December 2, 1965, the California Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots released its report, Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning? The eight-member, blue-ribbon commission, headed by former CIA director John A. McCone, determined that police brutality, substandard schools, poor living conditions and overcrowding, high rates of unemployment and a lack of public transportation were the fundamental causes for the Watts riots, the largest urban uprising of the Civil Rights era. The committee recommended increased communication between the police and the community, a new system for handling citizen complaints, new education programs emphasizing literacy and language skills, preschool education beginning at age three, jobs training and employment bringing together the black community, employers, government and organized labor. In addition, the committee urged the state to upgrade health-care services, create better public transportation services, and build additional low-income housing (Violence in the City, 1965). Unfortunately, most of the commission’s recommendations were never adopted. Fifty years after the Watts riots, similar issues of racism, segregation and economic disparity were once again debated as key issues in the 2015 Baltimore riots. The critical cultural analysis offered here compares legacy newspaper coverage of the 1965 Watts riots and the 2015 Baltimore riots. Using cultural materialist theorizing, this research considers media texts to be cultural artifacts as well as explicit forms of communication. ­Media texts create meanings, thereby providing historically based insights about social, economic and/or political realms of society (Williams, 1981). News reports provide examples of the prevailing ideology of a culture at a particular place and time and so analyzing them can help to understand how standards, values, and perceptions of race and class have been framed on urban daily newspapers during the past fifty years. A variety of the media’s conceptual frameworks construct, ­represent, understand, and interpret issues of race. Insisting that issues of race must be addressed within specific social and historical contexts, Stuart Hall (1981) described how these frames also produce, reproduce,  and

180  Bonnie Brennen transform ideological positions. Language is crucial to the production of meaning (Hall, 1997). For Hall (1986), people construct their understandings of the world through language; ideology is created and reinforced through language. All media texts may be seen to present racist and/or stereotypical representations that serve to protect the power of dominant or elite groups in society. Hall distinguished two types of racism found in media texts: overt racism and inferential racism. Overt racism, usually considered the purview of extremist groups, refers to explicitly racist views that are frequently framed around biological differences. This type of racism is rarely found in mainstream news coverage. Yet Hall continued to see in contemporary news coverage a more subtle type of racism that is based on popular understandings of race. Hall (1981) defines inferential racism as: representations of events and situations related to race, whether “factual” or “fictional,” which have racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions. These enable racist statements to be formulated without ever bringing into awareness the racist predicates on which the statements are grounded. (p. 36) Guided by Hall’s distinction between overt racism and inferential racism, this research analyzed news coverage of the Watts riots and the Baltimore riots in five legacy newspapers: the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. (In 1982 the Atlanta Journal and the ­Atlanta Constitution merged to form the Atlanta Journal Constitution.) These geographically diverse newspapers are large-circulation urban dailies available in the 1960s and still published today. They score high on quality rankings (“These are the best,” 2012). The reportage was assessed using critical literary methods, which are appropriate in analyzing texts’ ideological frames as well as in unearthing dominant attitudes on race. I focused on the use of language and tone of the articles, the recurrence of specific topics, themes and frames. I also looked for news reports that represented exceptions to the dominant or major patterns as well as elements of the coverage that one  would ­expect to see included but that were missing from the reportage. Overall, I analyzed 214 news reports on the Watts Riots published from August 13–20, 1965; and 352 news articles published about the Baltimore riots in the same five newspapers, from April 19–29, 2015.

The Back Story In 1965, Los Angeles was the third largest city in the United States, with a population of approximately 2.5 million people. About 16% of the population was African American. The national unemployment rate

Historical Continuities in News Coverage  181 was 5.7% but the rate of unemployment for African ­A mericans was 16%. At the time of the riots, in the South Central area of Los Angeles, 34% of adults were unemployed (Hillinger and Jones, 1965, p. 3). Only 1 out of 22 Los Angeles hospitals admitted African-American patients. Black entertainers and businessmen were banned from staying in “white” hotels and clubs. African-American women were forbidden from trying on hats in downtown department stores. Black teachers were not allowed to teach at public junior or senior high schools in Los Angeles. (“In L.A.,” 1992) In the 1960s, 4% of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was black and the LAPD had a reputation among African Americans and even among black police officers for brutalizing black suspects (“In L.A.,” 1992). Yet, according to a special report by the Los Angeles Times published in 1992, white residents of Los Angeles were “blithely unaware” of racial inequality and police brutality both because neither of the local newspapers covered such issues and these issues were not a part of the daily lives of white LA. White locals saw Los Angeles as drive-ins, orange groves and Disneyland while many people who did not live in California bought into the myth of Los Angles as “a glamorous Oz, populated by movie stars and beach boys, jet planes and convertibles” (“In L.A.,” 1992, p. T5). Poverty and discrimination produced de facto segregation, keeping most African-American families in South-Central Los Angeles ghettos. Several suburbs in the Los Angeles area restricted non-whites and Jews from buying or renting housing. For example, Highland Park, a suburb known as a cultural and artistic center of Los Angeles, posted signs that said, “No Negroes or Orientals desired.” As increasingly more African Americans moved to Los Angeles, the Board of Education readjusted zoning lines to keep African-American students in overcrowded black schools. The Watts-Willowbrook part of South-Central Los Angeles, where the riots occurred, was an area “of low family income, substandard housing and substandard education” (“Scene of Rioting,” 1965, p. 3). In 1963, a coalition of civil rights activists in Los Angeles requested that the LA Board of Education address problems resulting from overcrowding and underfunding but the board did not respond. In November 1964, shortly after the federal Civil Rights Act was enacted into law, California voters “overwhelmingly approved” Proposition 14, a Constitutional Amendment that voided all fair housing laws in the state. Proposition 14, which violated the new Civil Rights Act, and was later found unconstitutional by the courts, was endorsed by the Los Angeles Times (“In L.A.,” 1992, p. T5).

The Precipitating Moment On August 11, 1965 Marquette Frye was stopped for reckless driving and speeding by California Highway Patrolman Lee Minikus, who also administered a sobriety test. Local citizens gathered, harsh words were

182  Bonnie Brennen exchanged and Minikus radioed for backup. Meanwhile, Frye’s brother, a passenger in the car, walked to their house nearby, and returned with their mother. Angry when Minikus arrested not only Frye but also his mother, observers began to throw bottles and rocks. Thus began a six-day conflict, during which thousands of African ­A mericans in South-Central Los Angeles rioted. They burned down buildings, looted stores, and clashed with police, “unleashing in one fierce, frightening explosion decades of pent-up anger and frustration” (“The Word,” 1992, p. T6). Reacting to years of broken promises, inequality, neglect and abuse, and to a lack of respect by political leaders, police and the justice system, the Watts rioters showed the effects of an urban climate of disillusionment and despair. By the end of the riots, 31 people were killed by police and three others also died; 1,032 individuals had been injured and 3,952 rioters were arrested, including 500 young people under 18. Two hundred buildings were destroyed and an additional 400 buildings were looted and burned, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. In its evaluation of the Watts riots, the Governor’s commission determined that of the approximately 430,000 African Americans living in South Central Los Angeles at the time of the riots, “only” 2% of them participated in the violence (Violence in the City, 1965) Local white residents and political leaders, including Governor ­Edmund G. Brown, insisted that they were shocked by the Watts riots; they maintained that there was no racial injustice in Los Angeles. However, civil rights leaders, black activists, and local African Americans pointed out that they had challenged the racial injustice in Los Angeles for decades. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the surprise of public officials over the Watt’s Riots “dishonest.” King suggested that while Northern political leaders praised the courage of African Americans in the South, when questions were brought up about racial inequality in their communities their “rejection was firm and unequivocal” (quoted in Theoharis, 2015). During the 1950s and 1960s, civil rights groups in Los Angeles had protested against police brutality, housing and school segregation as well as racial inequality. Nonetheless, according to political science professor Jeanne Theoharis (2015), news outlets framed the civil rights movement as a righteous Southern issue. In contrast, these same kinds of activities in the North and the West were framed as “epi­ sodic, disorderly disturbances” rather than as a focused movement. Theoharis suggests that fifty years after Watts, legacy media outlets still frame demonstrations in places like Ferguson and Baltimore as surprising and as individual law enforcement and/or policy problems that break from the norm. Journalists do not investigate the systemic problems, she notes, and they ignore groups who have been addressing these issues.

Historical Continuities in News Coverage  183

Themes of the Watts Coverage As the local newspaper of record, the Los Angeles Times’ coverage of the Watts riots was comprehensive and multi-faceted. Each day, reports addressed the carnage: the costs of the riots, the buildings burned and businesses looted, officials injured, as well as the number of rioters arrested, injured and killed. Journalists detailed the work of the LAPD and the National Guard, and their efforts to re-establish law and order, no matter how much force it took. The coverage addressed legal strategies for processing and prosecuting those arrested in the riots, efforts to feed people in Watts after their grocery stores were looted and burned out, speculation about insurance coverage for business people who lost property in the riots, first-person reaction pieces as well as cleanup efforts following the riots and the establishment of a riot inquiry panel after the end of the conflict. Of the 87 articles written about the Watts riots published the Los Angeles Times during the 8-day period, 83 articles were written by Times staff members. The vast majority of the Los Angeles Times coverage framed the riots as “largely spontaneous outbursts of mob violence” by a group of lawless hoodlums (McCurdy and Berman, 1965, p. 3). The Los Angeles Times reportage drew extensively on Police Chief William H. Parker and Mayor Samuel W. Yorty to help understand the riots. Like Governor Edmund G. Brown they insisted that race relations had always been good in Los Angeles. News stories quoted Mayor Yorty referring to race relations as “exemplary” (Baker, 1965, p. 16) while Police Chief Parker insisted that he would not negotiate with the rioters because they were thugs without leaders. Mayor Yorty called civil rights leaders’ charges that police brutality and the riots were connected a “big lie” “shouted by Communists, dupes and demagogues.” Mayor Yorty complained of a “worldwide subversive campaign to stigmatize all police as brutal” (Baker, 1965, p. 3) and warned that allegations of police brutality could not justify the rioters’ acts. While the Los Angeles Times coverage was comprehensive and in depth and attempted to strive for some balance in its coverage, The ­Chicago Tribune seemed to make no attempt at neutrality in its reportage. Its 17 news reports from a variety of wire services, including the Chicago Tribune Press Service, framed the riots as mob violence by out-of-­control, marauding bands of rioters. In addition to reporting on the looting, burning and destruction of property, the Chicago Tribune coverage also focused on white people who had been injured and the restraint used by the police in dealing with the rioters. Several Tribune articles focused on the alcohol consumption of the rio­ters, informing readers that looters took liquor and “smashed the necks of whisky bottles on the curb, then swilled down the contents, and staggered drunkenly thru the streets” (Korman, 1965, p. 2). Attribution

184  Bonnie Brennen for these charges was missing from the Chicago Tribune news reports. For example, a front-page news article reported that the police and guardsmen managed to take control of Watts the previous night, yet the article commented that “most of the residents in the district last night were out looting and pillaging in other districts” (Korman, 1965). This incendiary statement was not attributed and no other newspaper confirmed the charge. The vast majority of the 35 articles that ran in the Atlanta Journal about the Watts Riots were a mix of AP and UPI wire service accounts, along with articles from the Chicago Daily News Service and the New York Times News Service. The wire service reports, however, provided a much wider variety of perspectives on the riots than did the other newspapers. While some of the articles focused on the riots as mob vio­ lence, other addressed larger systemic issues of police brutality, high unemployment and limited educational opportunities. Some of the articles referred to the police as peace officers, yet other articles addressed police brutality as the cause of the riots, aggravating “the disease of poverty and despair” (“Righter Sees,” 1965, p. 5). Nevertheless, other articles in the Atlanta Journal, such as an AP story from Rome, Georgia, used Watts as an example of why white people needed to organize to protect themselves from African Americans. The un-bylined AP writer interviewed Calvin Craig, grand dragon of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan, who warned that race riots would come to the South and said that P ­ resident Lyndon Johnson and Dr. King “must share the blame” for the Watts ­riots because “you cannot legislate society to integrate the people” (“Craig Says, 1965, p. 32). Given the framing of the Watts riots as leaderless mob violence in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Atlanta Journal, it is not surprising that most of the news stories used official business, legal and political sources and white observers who witnessed the riots. The vast majority of the news articles included no testimony from partici­ pants in the riots or local civil rights leaders. The coverage included some quotes from African Americans who were critical of the rioters; one news article detailed the “heroism” of African Americans who saved “white victims” while putting their own lives at risk ­(“Negro Heroism,” 1965, p. 3). News articles featuring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. focused on the fact that he decried the violence; they quoted but downplayed his belief that “economic deprivation, social isolation, in­adequate housing and general despair” were responsible for the Watts ­riots (King quoted in “Dr. King Arrives,” 1965, p. 15). However, one Los Angeles Times news report included commentary from Watts residents who witnessed police attacks on citizens during the riots. One local mother was quoted saying: “My husband and I saw 10 cops beating one man. My husband told the officers, ‘You’ve got him handcuffed.’ One of the officers answered, ‘Get out of here, nigger. Get out of here, all you niggers!’”

Historical Continuities in News Coverage  185 (Hillinger  and  Jones,  1965, p. 24). Other Watts locals witnessed police officers beating rioters with clubs and shooting at them with shotguns. Interestingly, neither the commentary by Dr. King nor the African ­A merican residents seemed to influence the news reportage: the majority of the coverage continued to frame the Watts riots as mob violence. Comparing the New York Times and the Washington Post’s coverage to the three other newspapers makes clear why both newspapers enjoyed a reputation for excellence during this era. The Watts riots coverage in the Washington Post included a mixture of 34 news articles written by Post reporters, wire service reports and bylined stories from Los ­Angeles Times reporters. The Post ran the Los Angeles Times news stories prominently on page one, providing updates on the status of the riots and offering the latest statistics on those killed along with estimates of property damage and destruction. The news stories written by Washington Post staff members included analysis and interpretation of the riots and addressed police brutality, racism, illiteracy and economic deprivation. The wire service articles the Post chose to run also addressed larger systemic issues; along with the Washington Post news articles, these balanced the Los Angeles Times news reports, providing a point, ­counter-point on key riot-related issues. Similarly, the New York Times coverage was neutral, balanced, and measured. Most of the 41 news articles were credited to stringers with the tagline “Special to the New York Times.” The news reports mixed updates on the progress of the riots with analysis of the larger issues related to civil rights, community issues, poverty, and violence. The Times included reports of the work of relief agencies and compared the problems in Watts with those in urban Eastern slums. While news reports appearing in other newspapers distanced Watts geographically and emotionally from white residents living in other parts of Los Angeles, the New York Times reported the riot-based fears of white people who lived in the greater Los Angeles area. According to that article, one parent said his son had joined “an adolescent vigilante band organized to fight marauding Negroes” (Bart, 1965, p. 1); other white citizens considered what they might do if African Americans attacked their neighborhoods. the New York Times was the only newspaper to report a meeting bet­ ween Governor Brown and 50 prominent African Americans regarding police brutality as the precipitating cause of the Watts riots. The article quoted local African American leaders criticizing Los Angeles newspapers, television and radio stations for never investigating their complaints of police misconduct (Turner, 1965). All five newspapers addressed President Johnson’s response to the Watts riots, emphasizing the President’s condemnation of the violence. Yet, only the New York Times emphasized that President Johnson also wanted to try to solve the causes of the violence so that everyone would “have an equal chance to share in the blessings of our society”

186  Bonnie Brennen (Semple, 1965, p. 17). This New York Times report made clear that the President understood the systemic issues related to the Watts riots and planned to address those concerns. Perhaps some of other newspapers did not think that including these aspects of the President’s comments was necessary given that they had framed the riots as mob violence. All five newspapers addressed the international response to the riots, including by carrying an AP news report on the Communist reaction. This article noted that Chinese and the Soviet Union news agencies had reported that the riots resulted from racial discrimination in housing, employment and education, as well as police violence (“Reds Call L.A.,” 1965, p. A) While the AP framed the response as Communist propaganda, a report in The Washington Post on Cuba’s reaction to the Watts riots used a Cuban source as an authentic source of news. The Post reported that Cuba had denounced the killing of African ­A merican demonstrators in Los Angeles and had said, “The deliberate murder of Negroes in Los Angeles constitutes genocide, a deed which deserves the unreserved condemnation of all humanity” (“Total Support,” 1965, p. A9). Of particular note, the Atlanta Journal, New York Times and the Washington Post included a news article from the Chicago Daily News Service, which reported that earlier in 1965 Los Angeles Mayor Yorty had refused to cooperate with a secret federal government program that was established to try to prevent summer race riots (McCartney, 1965). Notably, however, although the Los Angeles Times extensively covered the riots, it did not address this issue.

The Language of the Watts Riots Coverage The language used in the news reports was telling: many pejorative terms that may be seen as inferentially racist were used without attribution, and were presented as statements of fact. Early on some terms were attributed to an official; but subsequent articles used the terms as if they could be assumed to be accurate and truthful identifiers. News reports in all five of the newspapers compared the riots with a guerilla war—like fighting the Viet Cong—and the language used to describe the police and National Guard actions often read like war coverage. For example, a front page Los Angeles Times news article, on August 14, reported: “Helmeted, shotgun-carrying police formed skirmish lines and cleared various intersections of mobs. They frequently exchanged gunfire with snipers” (Berman, 1965a, 12). Readers were informed that the National Guard was brought in to address “a virtual civilian insurrection” (Hartt, 1965, p. 15) and that the initial 2,000 troops “reported in with helmets, field packs, bayonets, gas masks and weapons. The cavalry units are armed with M-14 rifles, the infantry with M-1s” (Hartt, 1965, p. 1). Another page one article directly compared Watt to the V ­ ietnam War, adding that the death toll from the riots

Historical Continuities in News Coverage  187 “exceeded last week’s US losses in Vietnam and more than all losses in racial disturbances in the nation last year” (Berman, 1965b, p. C). Rioters were consistently referred to as “hate-filled Negroes,” “uncivilized savages,” “arsonists,” “snipers” and “guerrilla bands” “running wild,” “burning,” “looting,” “screaming for vengeance” and “directing their hatred at police and Caucasians.” In addition, they were referred to as “seething,” “brutal” and “insane,” “Negro mobs,” “hard-core hoodlums,” “looters,” “firebugs,” “terrorists,” and “marauding bands.” ­R ioters were “hellbent on death and destruction” (“Riots Unreal,” 1965, p. 3). In a first-person page one account that was picked up by other newspapers, a Los Angeles Times advertising salesman noted: “The rioters were burning their city now, as the insane sometimes mutilate themselves” (Richardson, 1965, p. 1). The Chicago Tribune termed the Watts riots “the most vicious racial uprising in Los Angeles’ history,” and its news coverage called the riots “chaotic,” “dangerous,” “terrifying,” “an armed insurrection,” “a scene of wild frenzy with men, women and children chanting, ‘Burn, burn, burn.’” Atlanta Journal reporters referred to the riots as “a ­Negro insurrection,” “destructive savagery,” and “a Negro revolution.” The Los ­Angeles Times considered the riots “examples of anarchy” and termed them “shameful,” “senseless,” and “appalling.” In an often repeated quote, Police Chief William H. Parker explained the riots as outbursts of Negro mob violence caused because these “people have lost all respect for the law” (McCurdy and Berman, 1965, p. 3). While much of the coverage offered up by the Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Journal and the Chicago Tribune was sensational and while the descriptions of the Watts riots and the rioters may be seen as ­inferentially racist, a first person account by a white Los Angeles Times reporter pushed the line towards direct racism. In a story that was re-published in three other newspapers, Philip Fradkin, a reporter who was injured in the riots and who shared in a Pulitzer Prize won by the Los ­Angeles Times for its spot news reporting on the Watts riots, mentioned that three local ministers asked him if he planned to mention charges of ­police brutality in his article. As if to answer the ministers’ question, his account included the following statement: “No officer I talked to, overheard or questioned referred to the residents of the area as ‘niggers’ or made derogatory comments” (Fradkin, 1965, p. 24). In addition, one of the few news articles written by an Atlanta Journal journalist included an explicitly racist description of the rioters by the governor of Georgia: the governor was quoted as saying that the Watts riots demonstrated that the “organized disobedience of masses stirs up the primitive instinct” (quoted in Pou, 1965, p. 2). ­ ifferent in the The word choice and tone of the reportage was decidedly d Washington Post and the New York Times compared to the other three newspapers. It was factual, neutral, and free of racist slurs or inferences.

188  Bonnie Brennen Information from official sources was augmented with commentary from both African-American and white civil rights activists, witnesses and observers. A front-page first person account by Washington Post staff writer William J. Raspberry (1965) included quotes from local residents. Raspberry also identified a bookshop owner by name but not race although later in the article, Raspberry noted that the man’s store had “the familiar ‘Negro Owned’ sign on it” (A1). This approach was a much more subtle way of identifying the bookstore owner’s race than the conventional description of name followed by the word Negro used by the other newspapers. Here Raspberry, who was himself black, addressed local community members’ hatred and resentment of the police. Comparing this anger with the positive response Watts residents had for National Guardsmen, Raspberry noted: “People talk easily, once they’re sure you’re not a cop. And each one who talks has a story of police brutality to tell you. It’s hard not to believe them” (A1). Apart from a lack of reporting on the larger issues and how they set the scene for the riots, the most glaring omission regarding the Watts riots news was that none of the five newspapers reported anything about the 31 rioters who were killed by police. The newspapers did include information about the two police officers and one firefighter who lost their lives in the conflict. But the rioters who were killed were never identified or discussed.

Response to the Watts Riots Coverage The international response to the Watts riots focused on racial discrimination, police brutality, unemployment and illiteracy as systemic causes for the riots—as did the California Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles riots. The commission’s report noted that its members were “depressed and stunned” by “the dull, devastating spiral of failure” ­(Violence in the City, 1965, p. 5) within South Central Los Angeles that was due to de facto segregation, willful discrimination in employment, illiteracy, and police brutality. The commission commented on evidence of a “deep and long standing schism” (Violence in the City, 1965, p. 27) between the Los Angeles Police Department and the African-American community. It observed that its research on seven riots occurring in Northern cities during 1964 showed that all of the riots began with an incident involving the police. After studying the press’s reporting of “inflammatory incidences” during the Watts riots, the commission urged news media to report issues responsibly, to address both positive and negative information about African American communities, and to be careful not to inflame racially charged situations. While reporting about dramatic incidents is easy, the commission insisted, “the highest traditions of a free press involve responsibility as well as drama” (Violence in the City, 1965, p. 84).

Historical Continuities in News Coverage  189 The recommendations of the Governor’s commission were not an isolated rebuke of the mainstream press. In response to the 1967 urban riots, President Lyndon B. Johnson assembled the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. The resulting 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Report, indicted white ­society for isolating and neglecting African Americans and insisted that it was the responsibility of the news media to provide an accurate a­ ccount of race relations in the US. In addition, researchers who have analyzed the 1965 news media coverage of the Watts riots maintained that press coverage not only inflamed the racial tension but that it has had a lasting impact on the public’s perception of African Americans and has been used to justify the repression, and neglect of African Americans. Matei and Ball-Rokeach (2005) found that news portrayals of Watts as the “problematic zone” (p. 319) of Los Angeles led to a persistent collective memory of Watts as the “Fear Epicenter” of the region. They determined that the news media framing had significant economic and social consequences that continue to impact racial and ethnic issues in Los Angeles. Johnson, Sears and McConahay (1971) found that following the conflict, the majority of African Americans living in South-Central Los ­A ngeles saw the Watts riots as “a violent protest against white mistreatment and neglect” (p. 699); in contrast, white citizens, mainstream news media, and public officials viewed the riots as “a threat to public safety” rather than a serious issue that needed to be addressed. In their content analysis of LA newspapers from 1892–1968, Johnson, Sears and ­McConahay (1971) found a consistent pattern of “black invisibility” in the coverage, with little attention given to minority issues of racial segregation related to housing, employment, education and social life. ­E choing the recommendations of the Governor’s committee, Johnson, Sears and McConahay found that the post-Watts riots news coverage, like the preriot coverage, was focused on the needs and interests of whites, often to the exclusion of African Americans. The researchers suggested that if the mainstream press included more coverage of ­A frican American issues and concerns, the coverage could overcome black invisibility and improve race relations.

Background for the Baltimore Riots Some 50 years later, according to police, an officer “made eye contact” with Freddie Gray, who lived in a West Baltimore neighborhood known for its drug activity (“Friends: Man’s Death,” 2015). Gray was apprehended after he ran: police officers “pinned him to the ground and dragged him to the back of a police wagon” (Schwartzman, 2015) and charged him with possessing a switchblade. While in police custody, Gray’s

190  Bonnie Brennen spinal cord was 80% severed and his neck was broken; he died one week later on April 19, 2015. Shortly after his arrest, local community members began peaceful protests. Following Gray’s funeral, the protests turned violent. Overall the protests led to 202 arrests, 144 vehicle fires, 15 building fires and 15 police officers injured (Eichensehr and Popper 2015). In September 2015, the city of Baltimore reached a $6.4 million settlement with Gray’s family. The Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood where Gray lived was known for extreme poverty, the region’s highest rates of domestic ­violence, and high unemployment. In April 2015, more than 50% of the resi­dents were unemployed, poverty rates were double the city’s average, and 25% of the buildings were vacant (Lopez, 2015). In the wake of Gray’s death, Michael Fletcher (2015), a Washington Post national economics reporter, described Baltimore, where he has lived for more than 30 years, as “a combustible mix of poverty, crime, and hopelessness, uncomfortably juxtaposed against rich history, friendly people, venerable institutions and pockets of old-money influence.”

News Themes of the Baltimore Conflict The news coverage of the Baltimore riots combined detailed information about the conflict, with reactions from community leaders, politicians, and government officials. Presidential candidates, celebrities, and sports figures also weighed in about the conflict. While none of the news­papers reporting about the Watts riots mentioned local citizens who were killed by police, the Baltimore coverage described, debated and psycho­ analyzed the life of Freddie Gray; reporters interviewed family members and friends and connected his death with the deaths of other young black men like Trayvon Martin in Sanford, FL and Michael Brown in ­Ferguson, MO. Some articles even discussed why Freddie Gray’s story did not trend on Twitter. All five newspapers offered multiple news reports that attempted to understand the violence in Baltimore, with the common theme being that Gray’s death illustrated an “ongoing national discussion about policing tactics in minority communities” (Leslie, 2015) Although the local newspaper of record, the Baltimore Sun, was not a part of this study, its news reports, particularly the breaking news coverage of the conflict, figured prominently in much of the coverage of the Baltimore riots in the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Los Angeles Times. Two thirds of the 96 articles published in the Chicago Tribune were bylined news reports from the Baltimore Sun. About a third of the 61 Los Angeles Times and the 15 Atlanta Journal Constitution reports were from the Baltimore Sun. While the New York Times’ 103 articles relied extensively on AP and Reuters wire service reports, all of the Washington Post’s 77 articles on Baltimore were written by its own staff reporters. The majority of the daily news updates on the

Historical Continuities in News Coverage  191 number of injuries, arrests, and damages relied on the Baltimore Sun and wire service reports, although articles written by the newspapers’ own staff reporters provided important context and commentary. One common newspaper strategy was to compare the Baltimore protests with other violent conflicts. For example, the Los Angeles Times compared the Baltimore riots with the 1992 riots in Los Angeles following the verdict in the Rodney King beating case, which resulted in the deaths of 53 people, 2000 injuries, 11,000 arrests and $1 billion in damages. These accounts noted that in both cases the “controversial use of police force on a man of color was the plunger on a powder keg decades in the making” (Lopez, 2015). Similarly, the Washington Post and the Los ­Angeles Times included comparisons with the April 1968 ­Baltimore ­riots following the assassination of Dr. King, during which six people were killed, 700 injured, 5,800 people were arrested and 1,000 businesses were damaged or burned. Noting that the same issues of poverty, racism, and discrimination still exist today as they did in 1968, the reporter quoted Assistant Professor of History Elizabeth Nix: “There’s still a lot of people who don’t feel like their voices are heard and that they’re cut off from the economic and social life of Baltimore” (Wheeler, 2015). A focus of Baltimore coverage was police brutality and the “broken relationship” (Stolberg, 2015, p. A1) between African-American residents and the police as a fundamental cause for the conflict. Noting that years of wrongful-death lawsuits led Baltimore’s Mayor, ­Stephanie ­Rawlings-Blake to ask the Justice Department to review the ­problem, a New York Times analysis of Justice Department data indicated that Baltimore police had killed more people than police officers had in other similar sized cities. Between 2011 and 2014 local taxpayers paid $5.7  million in judgments and settlements on 102 lawsuits alleging ­police misconduct (Stolberg, 2015). There were upbeat reports about local children handing out water to the police and some articles that compared the Baltimore of the HBO drama The Wire to the actual city. The fact that an Orioles game was postponed due to the riots and that a subsequent Orioles game was played without fans merited multiple news articles in all five newspapers. All five newspapers covered the destruction of the local CVS, and a ­Baltimore mother who dragged her son away so he would not throw rocks at the police. Journalists often combined official governmental, legislative, and police sources with eyewitness accounts from local citizens and commentary from protesters and civil rights leaders. The language of the Baltimore coverage was primarily careful, courteous and politically correct. Overt racism was absent and reporters were cautious not to use inflamed rhetoric in describing events. Early coverage referred to the conflict as a protest because the demonstrations were peaceful. However, instances of inferential racism emerged in the coverage both before and after the conflict became violent. During the early

192  Bonnie Brennen protests, Baltimore police union president Gene Ryan compared the protesters to a “lynch mob” because they insisted that the officers involved in Gray’s death be immediately jailed. Following Ryan’s comments the community became outraged, and Twitter users called his comments “racially insensitive and inappropriate” (Barakat and Myers, 2015). The Baltimore Sun quoted the Gray family attorney William Murphy calling for an immediate apology and a retraction. Murphy pointed out that African Americans have been the ones lynched in the United States: The president of the police union called the peaceful protests and the anger at the death of a man to severe and unfathomable injuries while in police custody a lynch mob? It doesn’t get more insensitive or insulting than that. These remarks illustrate why black people and the police don’t get along. (quoted in Campbell and George, 2015) Once the protests turned violent, news reports began to refer to the conflict as a riot. Each of the newspapers quoted Baltimore’s mayor referring to the rioters as “thugs.” In response to Rawlings’ comment, the ­Washington Post addressed the etymology of the term thug and explained how “thug” has always been used “to paint people as lawless, violent, corrupt.” (Ohlheiser, 2015)

Looking Forward Although he preached non-violence as the “most potent weapon” in ­A frican Americans’ struggle for equality, in his speech “The Other America,” Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968) described a riot as “the language of the unheard.” King explained that the US had failed to hear that the lives of African Americans had worsened over the previous decade. He decried the “intolerable conditions” of poverty, unemployment, substandard housing and inadequate education that millions of African Americans still faced and he noted that the American public had not heard that “the promises of freedom and justice” had not been met. King maintained that the US was still a racist country where whites were seen to embody purity, dignity and knowledge while blacks were considered ignorant, unclean and inferior. Almost 50 years after King’s speech, the focus on violent conflict rather than reporting on the systemic issues facing many urban ­A frican Americans may be seen as evidence of the continuation of inferential racism that Stuart Hall described. As President Barack Obama noted in response to the Baltimore conflict, the entire country needs to do some “soul searching” regarding this ongoing social crisis. While he decried the violence, the President criticized news media and some poli­ticians “for failing to address the chronic problems of men,

Historical Continuities in News Coverage  193 women, and children who live in poverty and find their opportunities limited because of poor schools or long stints in prison” (quoted in Mufson and Eilperin, 2015). President Obama urged the press to regu­ larly report on issues of social and economic inequality, poverty, and violence and to pay attention to impoverished communities apart from when a CVS is destroyed or another young black man is killed while in police custody. While this analysis showed much greater diversity in the topics and issues during the Baltimore riots compared with the reportage of the Watts riots, the issue of the Baltimore riots isn’t just the story of B ­ altimore. It is also the story of the continued exclusion, invisibility, brutality and segregation of African Americans in the United States. Systemic issues including police brutality, poverty, unequal opportunities, unemployment, de facto segregation in schooling and housing continue to be ignored by mainstream news organizations, politicians and business leaders except during a riot or some other type of violent protest. During the last 50 years, the academic research as well as a variety of government and commission reports have zeroed in on systemic issues as causes of civil unrest. But while news media continue to cover the conflicts, they neither address the systemic issues nor follow up on the aftermath of these violent conflicts. That is, both the Watts riots and the Baltimore riots illustrate that ongoing, complex, societal issues and concerns are rarely covered unless a conflict erupts. In our postmodern era, many people are skeptical about truth claims, see all information as opinion, do not distinguish between news, public relations, and spin, and filter their news consumption to support their individual beliefs and interests. It is also a time when journalism is “disintegrating” because advertisers and commercial interests no longer see it as a smart investment (McChesney, 2014, p. 231). Once hugely profitable, corporate-owned monopoly newspapers were unprepared for the rise of expanded media outlets and the internet. They responded to the resulting economic crisis by shuttering newspapers and slashing newsroom staff and editorial spending. Between 2006 and 2009, legacy newspapers cut editorial spending by more than 25% and by 2011 newsrooms employed 25% fewer reporters than they had in 2006 (Lebovic, 2016, p. 230). This economic crisis is sometimes used to explain weak reporting—but great journalism is still being done. While journalists know how to report conflicts, crises, and events, they also need to understand the context for conflicts and to put events into a broader perspective. For example, the Orlando Sentinel reporting of the Pulse nightclub massacre is an excellent example of how news media should cover violent, catastrophic issues and occurrences. As the news broke Sunday morning June 12, 2016, Orlando Sentinel reporters began to investigate all aspects of attacks. Although newsroom personnel had been cut from 350 to about 100, throughout the day Orlando

194  Bonnie Brennen Sentinel staff ran 30 videos and 40 news stories online about the shooting and they published an eight-page print section on the violent attack. However, the Sentinel’s actions on June 13 especially stand out as a model for what contemporary journalism can provide. Rather than focusing on the gruesome details of the numbers of people dead and injured, or providing graphic images of the crime scene, Monday’s print edition of the Orlando Sentinel lead with a message of unity in a front page editorial that was accompanied by an image of two individuals hugging at a candlelight vigil. Headlined, “Our Community Will Heal,” the editorial insisted that the people of Orlando could not let “Sunday’s heinous act of brutality and cowardice define our community.” The edi­torial reassured those injured in the attack that they were not alone now and would not be alone in the future; it encouraged the community to “define itself by our unequivocal response. United” (quoted in Hare, 2016). Subsequent coverage has focused on systemic issues of homo­phobia, racism and terrorism as well as the stories of the victims and the impact of the attack on the families of Orlando. While the First Amendment is a fundamental principle in the US, freedom of the news involves more than the right of news outlets to publish and to speak one’s opinions without censorship; it also involves the publication of accurate and relevant information that people need in order to fulfill their role as citizens in a democracy (Lebovic, 2016). Today, more than ever news media must showcase their role as a public good in democratic society. A regular, continued and sustained emphasis on the cultural, ethical, political, and economic issues facing citizens in the US is an important way to illustrate the ongoing relevance and value of an independent, vibrant and vigorous free press.

References Baker, E. (1965, August 18). Yorty hits brutality charges as “big lie.” Los ­Angeles Times, pp. 3, 16. Barakat, M., and  Myers, A. L. (2015, April 22). Developments on Baltimore man fatally injured in custody. Salon.com. http://bit.ly/2fOakce. Bart, P. (1965, August 17). Los Angeles whites voice racial fears. The New York Times, pp. 1, 16. Berman, A. (1965a, August 14). Eight men slain: Guard moves in. Los Angeles Times, pp. 1, 12. Berman, A. (1965b, August 15). Negro riots rage on; death toll 25. Los ­Angeles Times, pp. 1, C. Campbell, C., and George, J. (2015, April 22). Baltimore police union president likens protests to “lynch mob.” The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/2fuWOtg. Craig Says White People Must Organize (1965, August 16). Atlanta Journal, p. 32. Eichensehr, M., and Popper, D. (2015, April 28). How the media covered the Baltimore riots. American Journalism Review. http://bit.ly/1EUKvRf.

Historical Continuities in News Coverage  195 Fletcher, M. A. (2015, April 28). What you really need to know about Baltimore, from a reporter who’s lived there for over 30 years. ­The Washington Post. http://wapo.st/2erY4jM. Fradkin, P. (1965, August 13). Reporter tells violence, fear during rioting. Los Angeles Times, pp. 3, 24. Hall, S. (1981). The whites of their eyes: Racist ideologies and the media. In Bridges, G. and Brant, R. (Eds.), Silver Linings: Some Strategies for the Eighties (pp. 28–52). London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, S. (1986). The problem of ideology—Marxism without guarantees. ­Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10(2), 28–44. Hall, S. 1997. The work of representation. In Hall, S. (Ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (pp. 13–74). London: Sage Publications, 1997. Hare, K. (2016, June 13). Monday’s Orlando Sentinel leads with a front-page editorial. Poynter.org. http://bit.ly/1UpKLgP. Hartt, J. (1965, August 14). Guard force from 40th Armored. Los Angeles Times, pp. 1, 15. Hillinger, C., and Jones, J. (1965, August 13). Residents put blame on police for uproar. Los Angeles Times, pp. 3, 24. In L.A., you don’t know where the lines are. Understanding the Riots: The Path to Fury. Part 1. (1992, May 11). Los Angeles Times Special Report. pp. T4, T5. Johnson, P. B., Sears, D. O., and McConahay, J. (1971). Black invisibility, the press and the Los Angeles riot. American Journal of Sociology, 76(4), pp. 698–721. King, M. L. Jr. (1968, March 14). The Other America, Speech. Grosse Point High School. Retrieved from http://www.gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/. Korman, S. (1965, August 14). Troops are told to use gas and bayonets. Chicago Tribune, pp. 1, 2. Lebovic, S. (2016). Free Speech and Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Leslie, K. (2015, April 28). Mayor Reed weighs in on Baltimore protests; defends Rawlings-Blake. Atlanta Journal-Constitution. http://on-ajc.com/ 2g0CuV5. Linderman, J. (2015, April 22). Friends: Man’s death after arrest reveals Baltimore dynamics. Boston Herald. http://bit.ly/2fIvhoF. Lopez, S. (2015, April 28). Baltimore riots and the long shadow of 1992 Los Angeles. Los Angeles Times. http://lat.ms/1QH4WUQ. McCartney, J. (1965, August 17). Riot city mayors shunned plan talk. ­Atlanta Journal, p. 7. ­ entury. McChesney, R. W. (2014). Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First C New York: Monthly Review Press. McCurdy, J., and Berman, A. (1965, August 13). New rioting: Stores looted, cars destroyed. Los Angeles Times, pp. 1, 3. Matei, S. A., and Ball-Rokeach, S. (2005). Watts, the 1965 riots, and the communicative construction of the fear epicenter of Los Angeles. Communication Monographs, 72(3), 301–323.

196  Bonnie Brennen Mufson, S., and Eilperin, J. (2015, April 28). Obama urges country to do ‘soul searching’ in wake of Baltimore riots. The Washington Post. http://wapo. st/2fv00oK. Ohlheiser, A. (2015, April 28). The changing context of who gets called a “thug” in America. The Washington Post. http://wapo.st/2fv00oK. Pou, C. (1965, August 18). Sanders again rips mass disobedience. ­Atlanta Journal, p. 2. Raspberry, W. J. (1965, August 17). Stillness descends on battered streets. The Washington Post, pp. A1, A5. Reds call L.A. rioting evidence of race bias (1965, August 15). Los Angeles Times, p. A. Richardson, R. (1965, August 15). “Burn, baby, burn” slogan used as firebugs put area to torch. Los Angeles Times, p. 1. Righter sees error in troop use (1965, August 17). Atlanta Journal, p. 5. Riots unreal to most in Los Angeles. (1965, August 15). Chicago Tribune, p. 3. Scene of rioting is substandard district. (1965, August 14). Los Angeles Times, p. 1. Schwartzman, P. (2015, April 27). At Gray’s funeral, outrage over way in which he died. The Washington Post. http://wapo.st/2f3uQEh. Stolberg, S. G. (2015, April 24). Baltimore’s “broken relationship” with police. The New York Times, pp. A1, A12. Theoharis, J. (2015, August 11). 50 years later, we still haven’t learned from Watts. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://nyti.ms/1lBhDfF. These are the best English newspapers in the world (2012). Online Courses. http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/2012/12/17/the-best-english-newspapers/. Total support offered to rioters by Cuba. (1965, August 18). The Washington Post, p. A9. Turner, W. (1965, August 16). Gov. Brown hears negro complaint. The New York Times, p. 16. The word in the streets: “Burn, baby, burn.” Understanding the Riots: The Path to Fury. Part 1. (1992, May 11). Los Angeles Times Special Report, pp. T6, T7. Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning. A Report by the Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots. (1965, December 2). Distributed by College Book Store, Los Angeles. Wheeler, T. B. (2015, April 28). City rioting evokes memories of 1968 unrest. Los Angeles Times. http://lat.ms/2fmARPq. ­ eview. Williams, R. (1981). Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left R London: Verso.

11 Journalists as Victims and Perpetrators of Violence Matt Carlson

Consider these two scenes: In Ferguson, Missouri, a news crew from the Al-Jazeera America ­cable news network prepares for a live shot on a suburban sidewalk as police clash with protestors down the block. Without warning, a tear gas canister fired by police lands at their feet, sending the crew scrambling for safety. Minutes later, police officers armed with assault rifles and outfitted with gas masks take down their lights and tilt their camera toward the ground (Raw Video, 2014). In Baltimore, Maryland, as images of rioting and looting fill television screens, city officials decry journalists’ emphasis on violence. The City Council President publicly criticizes the news coverage: “I’m heartbroken and I’m disturbed about how the news media are focusing on the negativity of this city.… We have young people who are out there protesting peacefully. But you’re not focusing on them. You’re focusing on the people who are burning down buildings and rioting throughout the streets of Baltimore” (Byers, 2015). In the first scene, journalists bravely risk danger to bear witness to the violence perpetrated by both police and protesters when a suburban street is transformed into an unsafe space. In their effort to act as ­society’s eyes and ears, journalists are pulled into the story; they become actors affected by the violence they cover. Here, as caught on video by a nearby local news crew, a news team is both literally and symbolically silenced while working live from a confusing place. In the second story, journalists stand accused of privileging the sensational and the deviant at the expense of attending to nonviolent actions and sustained reporting. The journalists’ shortsightedness places them within the story as powerful social agents who do not simply transmit events, but selectively shape how they are understood by distant audiences unable to witness the story directly. By normalizing conflict while ignoring the peaceful actions of others or the conditions contributing to social inequities, these decisions strengthen the conditions that make violence possible. In scene one, journalists are victims of violence; in scene two, they become its perpetrators. News coverage of the urban unrest in Ferguson in 2014 and 2015 and Baltimore in 2015 confronted a host of social issues. Initial confusion

198  Matt Carlson surrounding the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray at the hands of the police swelled to a broader engagement with policing practices and systemic racial disparities in American society. Local problems became national, and even international, stories that forced society to confront core questions about race, poverty, and the criminal justice system. These incidents also sparked debate about how journalists do their jobs. Normatively, journalists position themselves as detached observers neutrally relaying their accounts to news audiences. Yet the two scenes above demonstrate contradictory visions of the press that nonetheless share a portrayal of journalists as actors embedded within their own coverage. This chapter explores the complicated ways in which journalists became subjects within the stories of Ferguson and Baltimore through a particular focus on the discursive identification of journalists as e­ ither victims or perpetrators of violence. Whether physically embedded through occupying the space of the story or symbolically embedded through the power of their discursive choices, the position of journalist as victim or as perpetrator challenges several underlying assumptions about how journalists relate to the news they report. While this dual frame certainly does not capture the totality of responses to the news, the binary construct of victim/perpetrator brings into relief opposing narratives about the role of journalists in urban unrest. In demonstrating how journalists become part of the narratives they relate to the public, these extremes raise questions regarding journalistic accountability, the relationship between the social positions of journalists and the communities they cover, and how journalists should understand their presence in the stories they produce.

The News About the News Teasing out the relationship between news and talk about news begins with accepting news not as a mirror of what is reported, but rather a conventionalized representational system tasked with producing accounts of the real world. News stories are not isolated texts, but embedded in larger systems of meaning that in turn affect how news stories are understood. This position pivots attention to journalism as a form of cultural production, and invites questions asking why journalists behave according to the patterns and professional norms that they do and why news looks the way it does. Much of journalism scholarship tackles these issues by examining various influences that shape the news (for a summary, see Shoemaker and Reese, 2001). At its core, understanding journalism as a cultural form emphasizes two claims. First, journalists exist within a shared social space with everyone else. They are not separate from the world they cover, but enmeshed through complicated networks and influences (Anderson, 2013; Robinson, 2011). Second, journalists are never granted automatic status as society’s truth tellers. Instead,

Journalists as Victims and Perpetrators of Violence  199 like any other cultural producer, they constantly seek to legitimate their practices as authoritative (Carlson, 2017; Eason, 1986; Zelizer, 1992). In starting from the position that journalists are socially situated actors endlessly engaged in reproducing their legitimacy, this chapter extends outward from the news coverage about the unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore to public responses to this coverage and the actions of journalists. News stories do not simply exist as independent texts; they are consumed, circulated, shared, and contested by news audiences. Moreover, journalists are not invisible monitors, but embodied agents occupying the same physical space as the people they cover. These conditions result in a discourse of “news about the news” that includes a range of topics from stories about how journalists operate in these spaces to critical questions regarding representational accuracy and reporting tendencies that inhibit deeper considerations of racial injustice. To better conceptual how journalistic discourse—i.e. news—coexists with public talk about the news, the latter will be treated as a form of metadiscourse dubbed “metajournalistic discourse” (Carlson, 2015a). On a descriptive level, metajournalistic discourse corrals myriad public utterances about the press into a coherent discursive field. Journalists produce texts about themselves, from metacoverage examples within news discourse to various public forms: memoirs, speeches, awards, etc. Other social actors also produce metajournalistic discourse, including politicians decrying media bias, bloggers questioning accuracy, and academics writing and teaching about news (Carlson, 2015b; Haas, 2006; Vos, Craft, and Ashley, 2012). Metajournalistic discourse is persistent and widespread, but what does talk about journalism do? Conceptually, the importance of metajournalistic discourse derives from its effect on how journalism comes to be understood as a legitimate cultural practice. From this position, news forms and practices do not come by legitimacy naturally, but rather through ongoing discourse giving these forms and practices meaning (Eason, 1986). Metajournalistic discourse becomes a site to work through a tension between deep-seated assumptions about the role of news and contemporary concerns about its viability in a changing media environment. It is also a site of contestation in which different speakers vie to define journalism. Journalists support their claims to professionalism (Waisbord, 2013) in part through discourses about news that they also produce. Meanwhile, others challenge these arguments, including through persistent charges that journalists exhibit a leftward political bias that affects their news coverage. Accusations of bias become a frame that shapes how news audiences consume media (Jamieson and Cappella, 2008). Still others challenge news coverage as overly conservative and lacking diversity (Alterman, 2008). All of these arguments add up to a complicated metadiscursive environment with no monolithic or fixed view of journalism. Yet these discourses compete to shape an understanding of what journalism ought

200  Matt Carlson to look like and how it succeeds or fails, which brings up issues of media accountability. Discourses of accountability are, by definition, metajournalistic in their consideration of why news texts emerge as they do and what their consequences are. McQuail (2003, p. 5) connects accountability to both the purposes and consequences of media texts. The former indicate the normative expectations placed on journalism as an authoritative cultural practice. These metadiscursive expectations are not isolated to journalism, but supported within larger social frameworks of meaning. Principal among these is the connection drawn between democratic self-governance and journalism as a source of information (e.g. Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2001). Such normative understandings are not isolated to the journalistic community, but part of how the public understands the social role of journalism. On the other side of efforts to define core journalistic purposes is widespread concern over the consequences of news performance. The normative expectations journalists espouse to argue for their centrality and indispensability result in extraordinary societal expectations of what news should do (Dahlgren, 1992; Waisbord, 2013). This disconnect between journalism’s ideals and what it produces fuels condemnation from journalism’s critics (Carlson, 2009). At the same time, the suggestion that news performance fails to match the lofty expectations journalists embrace carries with it an argument about the symbolic power of news. Media accountability matters to the extent that the news has consequences for how its audiences understand the world. The symbolic power of the press to confer both visibility and meaning ensures continued public concern over the exercise of this power. Media accountability is a social process with legal and regulatory dimensions, but also a public discursive one. As McQuail (2003) argues, “we can view accountability as the entire process (within a communication relationship) of making claims based on expectations and appeals to norms, the response of the other party (rejecting claims or explaining actions), and any ensuing procedures for reconciling the two” (p. 15). This definition stresses the self-presentation of journalists in confronting questions about their work while also acknowledging the role of non-journalists as stakeholders who create and react to discourses about news performance. Media accountability discourses are contextual, and it is crucial to consider the special case of reporting on impoverished African-­ American urban communities. Critics have long accused journalists of either ignoring urban minority-majority areas or representing them exclusively through crime frames (Ettema and Peer, 1996; Macek, 2006). Critics ranging from community members to academics denounce both practices for perpetuating stereotypes that impugn the residents of whole geographic areas. Macek (2006) points to the stigmatizing effect

Journalists as Victims and Perpetrators of Violence  201 of this one-sided news coverage at the expense of other potential news narratives: “The complex realities of urban life and the larger forces responsible for the city’s troubles rarely figure in the self-perpetuating cycle of frightened coverage begetting ‘get tough’ political rhetoric begetting yet more frightened coverage” (p. 143). Macek argues that the privileging of episodic news frames in place of thematic coverage leads to individualized moralizing instead of systemic scrutiny. This pattern also severs these communities from the surrounding space, resulting in “an ideological role in which a myth is being perpetuated of The ­Inner City as an alien place, separate and isolated, located outside white, middle-class values and environments” (Burgess, 1985, p. 193, original emphasis). The fact that Burgess exposed this conceptualization in the mid-1980s underscores the familiarity of this critique well before it emerges in talk of Baltimore and Ferguson. What is important about these arguments is how they problematize news coverage as propagating a mythology of African-American communities that further harms them. These news coverage practices have consequences for those who live in them. The link between one-dimensional news coverage of poor urban ­African-American communities and the inability to ameliorate or address social problems in them raises important questions about media accountability during times of unrest. A combination of neglect of reporting on urban minority communities outside of examples of criminality coupled with a surge of attention stemming from protests results in a difficult situation for journalists to cover. So this chapter focuses on the ways in which stories of Baltimore and Ferguson ultimately swelled to entangle journalists as actors within it and what this tells us about journalism.

Two Narratives About Journalists How did news media move from producers of news to its subject in the cases of Ferguson and Baltimore? This chapter will focus on two evaluative frameworks: journalists as victims and journalists as perpetrators of violence. The former comprises the self-presentation of journalists as under attack by the very subjects they cover. Having assumed the legitimacy of journalists’ claims to occupy public space in pursuit of a story, this argument is based on the acclaimed purpose of journalism to act as a public witness for socially and politically important news stories. The second narrative springs from various actors inside and outside of journalism who are upset by the patterns of news coverage around ­Ferguson and Baltimore. Their denunciations suggest that news reporting, both in what is included and what is omitted, has consequences for the communities being depicted. The sections below examine each one using examples both from news coverage of the two cities and stories about the news coverage.

202  Matt Carlson The Press as Victim of Violence The August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer led to a rapidly swelling wave of protests in Ferguson that the police countered with a strong-armed display of weaponry and personnel. The story quickly drew national and international attention, resulting in the arrival of scores of journalists to document the story firsthand. With so many reporters present on the ground, they became an unavoidable part of the scene: they occupied the same space as the police and the protesters, and the police sought to control journalists’ movements just as they did protesters. One Washington Post reporter summed up the situ­ ation using imagery closely resembling military encounters: “Threats, tear gas and even arrest have become occupational hazards for reporters in ­Ferguson. Some journalists have been seen  wearing bulletproof vests and gas masks, as the risk of injury by real bullets, rubber bullets and tear gas is high” (Phillip, 2014). These images appeared on tele­ vision when reporters donned visible protective equipment while relaying their reports. When the standoff escalated after the police began arresting protestors as a means of crowd control, journalists were also detained. Within a week, the Poynter Institute’s running feature “Which journalists have been arrested in Ferguson?” swelled to twelve names (Hare, 2014). Most journalists were arrested and released, but the arrests continued to draw attention and widespread condemnation. Other journalists escaped arrest by following police orders to move or stop recording. In all these ways, journalists became swept up in the story they were covering. They were not spectators, but subject to the aggressive policing that they sought to document. Perhaps the most prominent example of journalists falling victim to vio­ lence was the arrest of two reporters, Wesley Lowery of the ­Washington Post and Ryan J. Reilly of the Huffington Post, in a ­McDonald’s restaurant near the site of the protests. In an exchange that was caught on camera, police officers stormed the restaurant and ordered them to move on the grounds that their presence constituted trespassing. The journalists began to comply, but apparently not to the liking of the officers. They were arrested and released. A year later, just before the statute of limi­ tations could expire, the St. Louis County prosecutor filed trespassing charges against both Lowery and Reilly that carried potential fines and jail time. Both the initial arrests of Lowery and Reilly and the charges a year later were met with outcry among journalists. Washington Post editor Martin Baron blasted the prosecutor’s decision: “This latest action represents contemptible overreaching by prosecutors who seem to have no regard for the role of journalists seeking to cover a major story and following normal practice” (Mullin, 2015). In the Columbia Journalism

Journalists as Victims and Perpetrators of Violence  203 Review, Jonathan Peters (2015) summed up the significance of these actions: “The arrests seem to have been deliberate and unjustifiable attempts to interfere with the press, and the charges, perversely, memorialize and magnify that interference.” Further condemnation came from the Society of Professional Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, and the Committee to Protect Journalists. The two reporters became symbols as victims of police and prosecutorial overreach. Lowery and Reilly also became part of the story of the Ferguson protests. The Washington Post included their arrest in its “Timeline of Events in Ferguson, MO” (Itkowitz, 2014) as did other news sites. In this sense, explaining the events of Ferguson could not be adequately reported without including news of journalists falling victim to heavyhanded policing. In becoming imbricated with the larger story, the narrative of journalists as victims aligns them with protestors experiencing brutal police tactics. Even as journalistic norms dictate distance and a level of detachment from what is being reported on, reporters in ­Ferguson paired the experiences of the protestors with their own experiences. More than this, the journalistic community represented its detained and harassed colleagues as heroes risking danger to provide their public to distant audiences (Carlson, 2006). The willingness of reporters to imperil themselves while bearing witness in turn supports the authority of the press as working on behalf of the public. While stories of journalists becoming victims of aggressive policing were common, the metacoverage of Ferguson included far fewer reports of attacks on the press by protestors. In the initial week after the shooting of Michael Brown, journalists trying to cover looting (i.e., away from the clashes between police and protesters) were met with threats of violence. According to Politico: “Reporters were repeatedly and forcefully told to move away, turn around, put down their cameras or simply to leave the area when trying to get close enough to film the scenes of destruction and theft. Most reporters on the scene were simply recording the events as they unfolded—making no effort to interfere or interview participants in the rioting” (Tau, 2014). A year later, in August 2015, in the aftermath of the non-indictment of Officer Darren Wilson for shooting Brown, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter was beaten and robbed while covering looting in Ferguson (Bell, 2014). Four other reporters were reportedly robbed at gunpoint. These incidents did not become a prominent part of the news about Ferguson. This shows, then, how threats of violence hindered journalists from doing their work, and, by extension, reduced what could be presented to news audiences trying to understand the situation. In Baltimore, journalists also became part of the story as victims of ­violence perpetrated by both protestors and the police. However, attention pivoted more to accounts of journalists being attacked by protestors. For example, while the Poynter Institute studiously tracked police arrests

204  Matt Carlson of journalists in Ferguson, in Baltimore it more closely followed attacks from protestors, tallying nine journalists with injuries (­ Thompkins, 2015). New York Daily News reporter Edgar Sandoval wrote a parti­ cularly harrowing first-person account about helping two reporters from the Daily Caller news site who had been attacked by angry protestors. His article walks through the attack and its aftermath in language remi­ niscent of reporting from a conflict zone: [Daily Caller reporter Casey] Harper did not look good and I realized I needed to get him to a doctor fast. I also knew that heading forward was not an option. “I’m not going that way,” I said and turned the car around and raced the wrong way down a one way street. Out of nowhere a fire truck with sirens blaring barreled into my path and I had to swerve to avoid a collision. Several block [sic] later I saw cops in riot gear and pulled over. This account appeared in the Daily News alongside its package of reporting on Baltimore. Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak (2015) described a similar assault in a column titled “I was knocked to the ground by Freddie Gray rioters, then helped to my feet.” Dvorak begins her column with an account of being attacked—and spared—by rioters before turning to the underlying economic and social issues affecting Baltimore. Her column weaves her personal experience as an imperiled journalist with an attempt to add context. This approach demonstrates the degree to which narratives about journalists intermesh with the object of the reporting. The most notable journalist victimized by Baltimore police was J.M. Giordano, photo editor for the alternative weekly Baltimore City Paper. Standing on the front line between police and protesters Giordano was snapping pictures at close distance when a thrown rock prompted the police to surge forward and begin forcefully making arrests. As the City Paper recounted: Five or six police officers in riot gear hit Giordano and the other protester with their shields, knocking them to the ground. “They just swarmed over me,” he says. “I got hit. My head hit the ground. They were hitting me, then someone pulled me out.” (Serpick, 2015) Remarkably, Giordano continued to take pictures throughout the attack, which the City Paper (2015) used in a photo gallery bearing the name, “The Battle of Sandtown-Winchester” (2015). The 35 photos in the gallery document protestors interacting with police at close range before the situation escalated. A series of blurry, frenetic images taken by Giordano unmistakably show him to be on his back with police looming over him. During the same altercation, police arrested Reuters

Journalists as Victims and Perpetrators of Violence  205 photographer Sait Serkan Gurbuz, citing him for “failure to obey orders.” A Reuters spokesperson berated the police account, adding, “We hope the Department will dismiss the citation and, in the future, respect the First Amendment right of the press to lawfully take images in the public interest” (Rector, 2015). The police department’s treatment of journalists covering Baltimore earned a stern rebuke from the Society of Professional Journalists that encapsulates the narratives of journalists as victims of violence in both cities. In its statement, the SPJ based its arguments on a larger normative framework connecting journalism with democratic functioning: “When law enforcement, military, government agencies—or the general ­public—attempt to stifle journalists through force, intimidation or other unwarranted ethical practices, democracy is compromised.” This argument links the victimization of journalists, particularly at the hands of the state, to the public’s diminished ability to gain information about events outside its experience. This is the core defense of journalistic autonomy in the space of conflict: journalists should be allowed to work unmolested because they serve the larger public interest. Ultimately, stories of journalists falling victim to police or protestors strengthen journalists’ arguments for the authority to represent the world to distant audiences. These portrayals do not present journalists as passive targets of violence, but as active agents who insert themselves into dangerous places for the greater good. In this sense, victimization is the marker of good journalism. Reporting can be hazardous, yet it is also essential to documenting happenings on the ground, whether it be the excesses of police violence or destruction by protestors. Journalists’ self-endangerment indicates the ultimate level of professional commitment as they demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice themselves personally for those that cannot be present (Carlson, 2006). This heroic narrative transforms reporting from the passive capturing of event to the active pursuit of the story. Ironically, this selflessness is very much about the presence of the self—the corporeal self—in the space of news. Narratives of journalistic victimization insert journalists into the story as embodied actors sharing the same space as police and protestors. Journalists cannot avoid being part of the story and therefore shaping how the actors being observed act and interact. In Ferguson, this meant becoming part of the story of police aggression while in Baltimore, journalists became part of the story of violent unrest. This presence shaped what the reporting looked like while also pushing aside issues of performance and accountability—­ issues that sprung up in different forms, as the next section attests. The Press as Perpetrator of Violence Compared to the graphic images of journalists being tear-gassed, f­ orcibly arrested, or trampled upon by police and protestors, examples

206  Matt Carlson in which the press may be considered as perpetrators of violence necessitate a more nuanced interpretation. Unlike the physical violence against the bodies of journalists described above, this section describes symbolic violence arising from particular patterns of news coverage. A wide range of voices, including from within journalism, publicly chided journalists for reportorial choices argued to only exacerbate the conditions that ultimately stoke violence. These rebukes rest on a common argument that violence is not a given or even the preeminent mode of reacting to injustice. Instead, critics insisted, entrenched journalistic biases lead to an emphasis on depictions of violence that then come to misrepresent the actions and character of whole communities to the news audiences relying on this coverage. In linking patterns of news coverage to these deliberate choices of journalists, critics challenge notions of journalists as detached observers. Journalists are held to account for their choices. Arguments that the press perpetrates violence comprise a diverse array of perspectives and actors. To make sense of this discourse, this section traces two particular lines of critique that emerged in response to the news coverage of Baltimore and Ferguson. A more immediate response decried the prevalence of violent imagery and the lack of attention to peaceful protests and other forms of political action. This synchronic perspective accused journalists of selection practices that privileged violence over alternative story frames. The second response adopts a diachronic perspective condemning a persistent lack of depth or commitment to news stories of minority poverty across time. This neglect makes understanding the antecedents of urban unrest difficult, particularly given the intensity of the situations in Baltimore and ­Ferguson. These two narratives of journalistic deficiencies resonate with existing critiques about press coverage of cities (Macek, 2006). They share a common concern that incomplete reporting on urban conditions ultimately fosters the type of violence that flared up in both cities. It is not only about press performance, but more poignantly about reporting patterns having adverse effects. The familiar accusations that journalists, particularly on television news, accentuate the sensational over the substantive arose in both ­Baltimore and Ferguson. The second anecdote at the start of this chapter exemplifies the former. As looting and destruction filled television screens, the Baltimore City Council President angrily denounced these images as offering only a partial snapshot of what was happening in the city. This sentiment was echoed by President Barack Obama in his own statement on news coverage of Baltimore: “The violence that happened yesterday distracted from the fact you’d seen multiple days of peaceful protest … that were constructive. And, frankly, they didn’t get much attention” (Warren, 2015). The president’s labeling of such imagery as distracting again implicates journalists for deliberately choosing to emphasize violence within the larger story of what was happening in

Journalists as Victims and Perpetrators of Violence  207 Baltimore. Obama is accusing journalists of being irresponsible by stymieing peaceful political efforts to curb violence. One poignant scene in which press critique became part of the story involved Fox News Channel’s Geraldo Rivera. Rivera’s fame as a journalist derives from his notoriety for crossing boundaries and for fabrication (Potter, 2012). As Rivera took to the streets of Baltimore ostensibly to seek a firsthand account, he was confronted by a protester who challenged both Rivera and Fox News for accentuating violence while downplaying the systemic issues that contribute to violence. During the encounter, which was captured on video and widely circulated, a ­silent Rivera paced around the crowd as this protester condemned Fox’s coverage: I want you and Fox News to get out of Baltimore city because you’re not here reporting about the boarded up homes and the homeless people under MLK. You’re not reporting about the poverty levels up and down North Avenue. But you’re here for the black riots that happened. The implication is clear: the coverage of rioting distorts the larger story while portraying African Americans as violent. Even if journalists don’t directly inflict violence, this cycle reinforces violence by seeming to justify harsh policing practices to keep violent populations in check. Journalists confronted by these critiques justified their focus on images of violent clashes and property damage as journalistically appropriate. On his CNN program, Anderson Cooper directly condemned the Baltimore City Council President quoted above on the grounds that the degree of violence in the city warranted news attention: I’m not sure what he thinks cameras should be focused on at a time when police cars are being destroyed, lit on fire, 15 police officers are being injured and stores are being looted. I’m not sure exactly what images he would like us to be photographing at this time, but it seems pretty important that authorities know what is happening in their own city, and it doesn’t seem clear that the mayor, at this point, does have a firm grasp on it. In defending journalists this way, Cooper distances journalists as actors in the story; instead he positions them as reacting to already occurring events. The city official placed journalists in the story, but Cooper pulls them out. This same “don’t shoot the messenger” argument was made by Baltimore Sun television critic David Zurawik: The terrible images of cars and buildings burning through the night, as looters crawl through the shattered windows and doors

208  Matt Carlson of businesses, are indelibly etched into my mind along with those of millions of viewers worldwide. But don’t blame the media. They didn’t light the fires and loot the stores. They just showed what was happening in Baltimore to the world. That’s what we do. (Zurawik, 2015) Importantly, this response was not monolithic. Even Zurawik himself, although he stood up for CNN while dismissing President Obama’s accusations of undue attention on violence, simultaneously accused Fox News of sensational and insensitive coverage of Baltimore. The frustration over journalists’ privileging of images of violent clashes between police and protestors fed a second accusation, that journalists had long ignored the complicated story of poverty and racism in Baltimore and the St. Louis region. The deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray may have been catalysts, but they were also part of a larger pattern connecting to deeper issues. This view was expressed in a ­Columbia Journalism Review commentary condemning the lack of context in news coverage of Ferguson: What’s missing from this coverage are the regional dynamics of racial inequality—the policies and systemic realities in housing, crimi­ nal justice, schools, and the workforce that enable and sustain that inequality and that sow the anger and mistrust and frustration that eventually help create the circumstances in which young black men like Michael Brown get shot. (Lanahan, 2014) Such a pivot to systemic issues provides vital context for news audiences, but is also difficult to communicate in the heat of clashes ­bet­ween police and protestors. NPR television critic Eric Deggans (2014) made this point: “Real progress on racial issues happens when people thoughtfully consider perspectives different from their own—and that’s much tougher in a crisis.” Writing about Ferguson, Deggans chastised CNN in particular for its focus on minutiae and its failure to take in the larger view: What viewers really needed in the hours after the grand jury’s decision was solid, factual reporting on issues such as the evidence considered, the extent of rioting, the police response to violence, and details about the grand jury process. Watching [CNN analyst Van] Jones and CNN anchor Don Lemon squabble over how many protesters were acting violently felt like watching an oddly personal dispute fueled by too many hours on camera and too little sleep— the kind of buzz-inducing conflict that drives cable news ratings and kills enlightening conversation.

Journalists as Victims and Perpetrators of Violence  209 Deggans’s comments support the need for reporting on the systemic issues that lead to violence and ask how they can be mitigated to avoid future clashes. Journalists’ failure to do so only leads to further problems. Like many of the critics above, Deggan directed his attention to cable television in particular, and its need to fill larger blocks of time with visual stimulation. These demands exacerbate the trend toward shallow reporting at the expense of the necessary depth to explain the bevy of problems plaguing the African-American communities in Baltimore and Ferguson. Critiques condemning journalists, and cable television news in parti­ cular, for accentuating violent images instead of sustained reporting also emerged in satirical news commentaries. On Comedy Central’s The Daily Show (4/28/2015), host Jon Stewart skewered CNN for declaring the Baltimore protests to be unprecedented: “These cyclical eruptions appear like tragedy cicadas. Depressing in their similarity, predictability and intractability.” Stewart argued that the absence of sustained reporting on issues affecting urban African-American communities led to ignorance when conflict did arise. As evidence of this lack of attention, he presented a montage of shocked cable journalists who failed to recognize systemic issues during previous instances of unrest. Larry Wilmore echoed this argument that same evening on his Comedy Central program The Nightly Show. Wilmore had long addressed African-­A merican issues on the Daily Show as the “Senior Black Correspondent” before going on to host his own program from January 2015 until its cancellation in August 2016. In criticizing news coverage of Baltimore, he blasted a Fox News Channel reporter who compared images of urban violence to that of a third world nation. Wilmore responded to the clip by addressing Fox News directly, “You’re never going to be able to relate to this. If there’s anything that explains America, it’s those pictures.” Connecting the events in Baltimore to deep-seated social and economic issues, Wilmore excoriated Fox News, and cable news by extension, for its failure to do the necessary reporting to illuminate why these issues matter. Wilmore further attacked Fox’s focus on violence: “There’s a lot of anger and a lot of frustration and yes there are a lot of people who vandalized the city, but there’s even more people who turned up to do some good.” In all these ways, journalists became part of the story of unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore as perpetrators of violence for their selective reporting practices. These critiques derive from an argument that journalists become part of the news they report on through the consequences of the choices they make about their coverage. News stories represent the world back to news audiences, so distorted or partial portrayals of whole groups influences policy-making toward them while reinforcing the conditions that enable future violence. This pattern perpetuates itself. To accept this argument is to place journalists within the stories of Baltimore

210  Matt Carlson and Ferguson as actors who affect the actions of others. Doing so raises many questions about media accountability that cannot be dismissed by simply positing journalists to be outside of the news they cover.

Beyond Victims and Perpetrators The events unfolding in Ferguson and Baltimore following the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray have a complicated legacy. At best, they helped bring to public consciousness issues of entrenched racial disparities and heavy-handed policing. At worst, these issues were overshadowed by images of violence and stereotypes of black criminality. The argument here is that the broad story of these two cities also includes a moment of reflection on press practices. Journalists covering Ferguson and Baltimore became actors in the story they were covering in complex ways. Journalists could not escape the stories they covered, either physically as victims of the same violence they covered or as perpetrators through the symbolic power of their coverage choices. That these positions were not incommensurable raises important questions about what this seeming contradiction indicates about journalism. From practical, normative, and ethical perspectives, it is imperative to argue that journalists should be free of physical or legal intimidation in the course of their reporting. Journalistic work is a public good in that it provides impartial accounts in a space of competing interests. ­Journalists should be left alone, unhampered by authorities or protestors, to provide this service. Ideally, journalists would thus cease to be victims and disappear from the story. Such a viewpoint rightly deserves support and the harassment of journalists should be avoided. But this argument, as familiar as it is, should not be oversimplified. Any assumption that journalists can fade into the background as detached observers runs into the problems explored in the second critique. Journalists are not separate  from what they report, but part of the stories they cover because of the choices they make. Accusations that journalists overemphasized violence while underreporting non-violence and ignoring systemic issues portray journalists as perpetrating violence by contributing to the conditions in which such violence occurs. This narrative requires an introspective stance that acknowledges both the selectivity of news accounts and the consequences of these accounts. In the first instance, various actors should be accountable for their actions toward the news media; in the second, journalists should be accountable to the subjects they cover. Even as we recognize the particular issues at hand with these two narratives, the question remains as to how to reconcile their differences. Many scholars and observers of the press are inclined to agree that journalists are biased toward conflict and sensationalism at the cost of substance. Much of journalism studies and political communication

Journalists as Victims and Perpetrators of Violence  211 research criticizes this pattern in news coverage. At the same time, journalists working in dangerous places need to bear witness to events outside of everyday observation, and their efforts to do se deserve and require support. Ideally, we want the news media to be neither a victim nor a perpetrator of violence. A way forward is to stress the need for journalists to recognize that they do become part of the story; in the act of covering events they become part of those events through their physical choices of where they go and their symbolic choices of what they show. Journalists need to be aware of the patterned disparities in news coverage and reflective about how and why they cover what they do. This does not necessitate abandoning normative commitments to neutrality; the issue is not about staking out a position of advocacy. Rather, it means acknowledging an involvement in the story by their presence that cannot be avoided and taking responsibility for this. Journalists cannot hide from the stories they report, but need to confront them or else face a torrent of criticism from others. As tragic as the events in Ferguson and Baltimore were, they also serve as instructive episodes for examining discourses of media accountability and the journalistic assumptions and patterns that emerge. They provide useful moments to look at news coverage to see what works and what fails these communities. But ultimately journalists setting foot in episodes of unrest have responsibilities that cannot be wished away through appealing to the ideal of journalists as detached observers. Journalists covering confrontations need to confront themselves and examine why they do what they do.

References Anderson, C. W. (2013). Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University. Alterman, E. (2008).  What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News. New York: Basic Books. Bell, K. (2015, August 10). Post-dispatch reporter recovering after attack while covering Ferguson. St. Louis Post Dispatch. http://bit.ly/2foBiWT. Burgess, J. (1985). News from nowhere: The press, the riots and the myth of the inner city. In Burgess, J. and Gold, J. R. (Eds.), Geography, the Media and Popular Culture (pp. 192–228). London: Croom Helm. Byers, D. (2015, April 27). Baltimore city officials fault media. Politico. http:// politi.co/2eGdOes. Carlson, M. (2006). War journalism and the “KIA journalist”: The cases of David Bloom and Michael Kelly. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23(2), 91–111. Carlson, M. (2009). Media criticism as competitive discourse defining reportage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 33(3), 258–277.

212  Matt Carlson Carlson, M. (2015a). Metajournalistic discourse and the meanings of journalism: Definitional control, boundary work, and legitimation. Communication Theory. doi: 10.1111/comt.12088. Carlson, M. (2015b). Keeping watch on the gates: Media criticism as advocatory pressure. In Vos, T. and Heinderyckx, F. (Eds.), Gatekeeping in Transition (pp. 163–179). New York: Routledge. Carlson, M. (2017). Journalistic Authority. New York: Columbia University Press. Dahlgren, P. (1992). Introduction. In Dahlgren, P. and Sparks, C. (Eds.), Journalism and Popular Culture (pp. 1–23). London: Sage. Deggans, E. (2014, December 6). Four lessons from the media’s conflicted ­coverage of race. NPR. http://n.pr/2eOdMkJ. Dvorak, P. (2015, April 27). I was knocked to the ground by Freddie Gray rioters, then helped to my feet. The Washington Post. http://wapo.st/2fG67cH. Eason, D. L. (1986). On journalistic authority: The Janet Cooke scandal. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 3(4), 429–447. Ettema, J. S., and Peer, L. (1996). Good news from a bad neighborhood: Toward an alternative to the discourse of urban pathology. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 73(4), 835–856. Haas, T. (2006). Mainstream news media self-criticism: A proposal for future research. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23(4), 350–355. Hare, K. (2014, August 19). Which journalists have been arrested in Ferguson? Poynter. http://bit.ly/2eWHS6o. Itkowitz, C. (2014, August 16). Timeline of events in Ferguson, MO. ­The Washington Post. http://wapo.st/2fGi2DS. Jamieson, K. H., and Cappella, J. N. (2008). Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. New York: Oxford ­University Press. Kovach, B., and Rosenstiel, T. (2001). The Elements of Journalism. New York: Random House. Lanahan, L. (2014, November/December). Ferguson before #Ferguson: ­B ehind every Michael Brown is a story of structural racism waiting to be told. ­C olumbia Journalism Review. http://bit.ly/2fmAZyl. Macek, S. (2006). Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McQuail, D. (2003). Media Accountability and Freedom of Publication. ­Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Mullin, B. (2015, August 12). Outcry against charges in Ferguson arrest continue. Poynter. http://bit.ly/2fGgPwe. Peters, J. (2015, August 13). Why the charges against Wesley Lowery and Ryan Reilly in Ferguson are absurd. CJR. http://bit.ly/1DQOT3q. Phillip, A. (2014, August, 18). Police in Ferguson arrest and threaten more journalists. The Washington Post. http://wapo.st/2emRVpm. Potter, D. (2012, March). At what price publicity? American Journalism Review (archive). http://bit.ly/2fB9HT7. Raw video of Al Jazeera America crew hit with tear gas (2014, August 14) KSDK. http://on.ksdk.com/Y7KkhG. Rector, K. (2015, April 26). Photojournalists taken down, detained by police in Baltimore protests. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/1zbqlQA.

Journalists as Victims and Perpetrators of Violence  213 Robinson, S. (2011). “Journalism as process”: The organizational implications of participatory online news.  Journalism & Communication Monographs, 13(3), 137–210. Sandoval, E. (2015, April 28). A Daily Newser’s account of saving four reporters from rioters in Baltimore during Freddie Gray protests. New York Daily News. http://nydn.us/1JNTGki. Serpick, E. (2015, April 26). City Paper photo editor J.M. Giordano beaten by police at Freddie Gray protest. City Paper. http://bit.ly/2eO9tsR. Shoemaker, P. and Reese, S. D. (2011). Mediating the Message. New York: Routledge. Tau, B. (2014, August 16). Ferguson rioters threaten reporters. Politico. http:// politi.co/2fG3LdT. The battle of Sandtown-Winchester (2015, April 26). Baltimore City Paper. http://bit.ly/2eGa1xR. Thompkins, A. (2015, April 27). Journalists attacked and injured in Baltimore riots. Poynter. http://bit.ly/2foyU2p. Vos, T. P., Craft, S., and Ashley, S. (2012). New media, old criticism: Bloggers’ press criticism and the Journalistic field. Journalism, 13(7), 850–868. Waisbord, S. (2013).  Reinventing Professionalism: Journalism and News in Global Perspective. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Warren, J. (2015, April 28). Obama calls out media for coverage of Baltimore. Poynter. http://bit.ly/1JPrOMG. Zelizer, B. (1992). Covering the Body. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Zurawik, D. (2015, May 1). On Freddie Gray coverage, don’t blame the messenger. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/2fB30jI.

12 Who Speaks for Baltimore? How Journalists Understood their Authority and Ability to Represent “Place” During the 2015 Unrest Katy June-Friesen It was nearly midnight on April 27, 2015, after Freddie Gray’s funeral and the upheaval in parts of downtown and West Baltimore that followed, when Baltimore Sun crime reporter Justin Fenton (2015) tweeted: “Out of town reporters will try to survey the damage tomorrow not realizing how many burned/damaged bldgs already existed in these n’hoods.” His prediction spoke to the skepticism of local reporters—and residents— about how well national media outlets understood Baltimore, and how accurate their depictions of places there might be. Such skepticism was justified, particularly during the early days of national media attention. Grand pronouncements from journalists about what was happening and about what kind of city Baltimore was abounded. An incredulous Wolf Blitzer (2015), narrating CNN’s footage of fires and looting, insisted the unrest did not comport with the place: It’s hard to believe this is going on, as I keep saying, in a major American city right now.… Yes, you know, this is Baltimore. Home of the Baltimore Orioles.… Camden Yards is not very far away from this community, from this area where the rioting, the burning, the looting has been going on, Baltimore, home of the Johns Hopkins University. It’s a beautiful city. The Baltimore Harbor. And it’s hard to believe if you take a look what’s going on in Baltimore right now that this could be happening. MSNBC contributor Mike Barnicle (2015) claimed knowledge about Baltimore and its “huge minority population” on the basis of train rides passing through the city: “You can see if you take the Amtrak train from Washington to New York when it rolls through Baltimore, you see a visible display, out of both sides of your window, of poverty, of decaying neighborhoods that have been there for decades.” A few days later, host Joe Scarborough (2015) repeated that second-hand assessment: “Get on Amtrak, drive through Baltimore, parts of that city looks like a war zone and it has now for 40, 50 years. And you talk about the

Who Speaks for Baltimore?  215 hopelessness that sets in after all of that time; this is a complete and total failure of public policy over the last past half-century.” These outsider-looking-in descriptions aimed to construct a stage, a place in which current events made sense. Yet many of these constructions relied on describing the physical landscape instead of the parti­culars that constitute place—the local conditions (Adams and Jansson, 2012) by which places are “made and remade through networks that ­involve people, practices, languages and representations” (Hubbard, 2010, p. 5). As scholars have emphasized, “place” is not a priori, but arises out of specific circumstances and interpretations (Adams and ­Jansson, 2012; Cresswell, 2014; Gutsche, 2014; Hubbard, 2010; L ­ efebvre, 1991; Massey, 2005). Baltimore, West Baltimore, Sandtown, the intersection of Pennsylvania and North Avenues, or any other place: all are the outcome, not the backdrop, of social, cultural, economic, and political activity. Therefore places are experiential, constituted by subjective lived experience and the ways in which that experience is articulated, both by people inside and outside that space. Articulations, as Hall (1996) explained, are “non-necessary links” between ideologies and subjects such as events or experiences (pp. 141–144). That is, the ways in which ideas are “articulated” to these subjects—how ideologies and events, ­experiences, or other political subjects are brought together and made to mean—are contingent on social, political or economic conditions, as well as how different groups interpret these conditions. Interpretations, then, may be joined to events such as protests or violence in different ways and from different sources; multiple articulations are possible. In the national media coverage of Baltimore’s unrest, most “articulations” of place came from outsiders. The question posed here, then, is how journalists evaluated their professional peers’ depictions of Baltimore City and its neighborhoods. What did journalists and media critics say about national coverage of Freddie Gray’s death and the unrest that followed? More specifically, what does this criticism tell us about how journalists understand national news media’s ability and authority to convey the complexities of places? Does it suggest ways for journalists to produce fuller, more accurate representations of these networks of people and activity? In focusing on what national journalists said about their own (or others’) performance, I am not trying to determine what or who was misrepresented, or to judge the accuracy of the coverage. Rather, my intent is to examine how news professionals understood their role in constructing Baltimore places for a national audience. This chapter analyzes more than 75 editorials, columns, TV commentaries, and other national media in which journalists and media critics evaluated national news coverage of Baltimore during April and May 2015. I define “national” media as mainstream outlets whose coverage is targeted to a non-local audience (such as CNN or Slate.com) or outlets

216  Katy June-Friesen that are viewed or read widely beyond their geographic area (such as the New York Times and Washington Post). I use the theory of paradigm repair as well as theories of place, identity and representation to explain why much of the commentary condemned cable news coverage—in particular CNN. Further, as part of this paradigm repair, critics’ normative claims about what news coverage should have looked like were most frequently embedded in discussions about the need to provide “context” for events in Baltimore. Yet these discussions revealed differing ideas about what constitutes “context,” and what kind of context is needed to produce fuller, more accurate representations of place. I found that critics who analyzed national coverage via non-local outlets seemed more concerned with providing historical context (journalists should more closely examine the systemic problems that shaped Baltimore or Sandtown) than experiential context (journalists should solicit or facilitate articulations of these places from these places, as told by those who live there). In calling for more attention to “root causes,” critics typically foregrounded narratives of despair. Journalists and cri­ tics of color, however, also expressed concerns that these and other journalistic narratives would pathologize people-in-place. Besides national mainstream media, which is the focus here, many other spheres of news coverage and media criticism were active during the unrest, including local Baltimore media, independent blogs, Twitter and other social media. Baltimoreans, including Baltimore journalists, evidently had many conversations on and offline about how national news media portrayed their city and/or their neighborhood. Local journalists expressed frustration with national journalists’ g­ eneralizations about the city and their lack of knowledge—or effort to gain ­knowledge— about the specific histories and actors in the places they were covering. For example, one local journalist interviewed for this research expressed “disgust” that CNN did not specify where and how widespread the ­violence was (Anonymous, personal communication, May 23, 2016). She fielded calls from concerned friends elsewhere who couldn’t tell from the TV coverage whether the whole city was on fire; it was nowhere near her home. In the midst of the unrest, Baltimore journalist Lawrence ­Lanahan tweeted a photo of a man standing in his living room with a TV tuned to CNN; the ticker reads “State of ­Emergency: Baltimore pharmacy looted.” Lanahan wrote: “Everything in a nutshell. In a house in Sandtown, guy tells beautiful story of neighbors coming together to save community from fire night before. Outside his door, dozens clean. As he talks, @CNN in background.” Another local reporter I ­interviewed mocked national TV media as “drive-by artists” who didn’t do their homework (Kenneth Burns, personal communication, May 20, 2016). Likewise, some residents were frustrated with the narratives they heard about their city. For instance, Baltimore resident Kwame Rose, whose confrontation with Fox’s Geraldo Rivera was caught on camera,

Who Speaks for Baltimore?  217 later told Media Matters, “After Monday night when the media started pouring in, I sat at work and watched how the media basically forced people to believe that Baltimore was some Third World city. I just wanted to set the record straight and let it be known that this generation refuses to be misinterpreted” (Powell and Watson, 2015).

News Media and Paradigm Repair In criticisms of Baltimore news coverage, explanations of what went wrong and assessments of what journalists should have done focused not just on individual stories but on cable TV news as a whole; CNN was a primary target and representative of the cable platform. This commentary and criticism revealed and reinforced values that undergird the journalistic paradigm. Journalists operate within a self-sustaining paradigm, “a set of broadly shared assumptions about how to gather and interpret information relevant to a particular sphere of activity” (Bennett, Gressett and Haltom, 1985, p. 54). Journalists and often their news sources and audiences share this vision of what is news, how to do news, and implicitly, what can be known (Berkowitz and TerKeurst, 1999). Zelizer (1993) has shown how, as members of an interpretive community, journalists produce “collective interpretations of key public events”; this “shared discourse is thus “a marker of how they see themselves as journalists” (p. 223). Moreover, this “culturally shared vision of ‘the way things are’ … mightily resists challenge, either from external or internal sources” (Hindman, 2011, p. 184). Paradigm repair, then, reinforces professional expectations, legitimizes the importance of journalism to the public, and fends off challenges to shared assumptions and interpretations, whether the challenges come from without or within. Members police their profession, “defining, shaping, and reinforcing its norms, values, standards, and practices” (Hindman and Thomas, 2013, p. 13). Paradigm repair often involves identifying “bad apples,” isolating “outlier” people and practices, and distancing oneself or one’s organization from bad actors (Hindman, 2011). When the paradigm is challenged, journalists are more likely to claim that the outliers have violated standards for good practice than to question the paradigm (Hindman, 2011). Instead, journalists publicly restate the paradigm’s characteristics “by drawing express or implied boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable, legal and illegal, ethical and unethical journalistic practice” (Berkowitz and Eko, 2007, p. 782). Bennett et al. (1985) specifically mention editorial commentary as a type of “active repair work” because it explains how a problematic story results from improper reporting methods, “the implication being that the event triggered a spurious story based on methodological error rather than on blind spots in the current professional understanding of news” (pp. 53–56).

218  Katy June-Friesen

Place, News Media, and Representation Theorists are concerned with the discursive construction of place, who has the power to define places, and the inherent instability or contingency of place representations (Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 2005). Among the scholars who understand “place” to be what happens when “space” is defined, named, or claimed, Cresswell (2014) describes places as “spaces which people have made meaningful,” the “material setting for social relations” (pp. 12–13). Massey (2005) calls space “the dimension of multiple trajectories, a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (p. 24) while place is “the coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes rather than a thing” (p. 141). Lefebvre (1991) emphasizes that spaces are socially produced and always changing. The point here is that places are active, in the material and social sense, and also in the meaning-making sense; place has no essential definition or singular identity. The “seeming solidity, authenticity or permanence” of the definition of place is “a (temporary) achievement of cultural systems of signification that are open to multiple interpretations and readings” (Hubbard, 2010, p. 5). Of course, some interpretations—or articulations—of place may be more dominant than others. News stories reproduce some interpretations and not others. As sites of discourse—what Hall (2013) calls “the production of knowledge through language”—news media texts provide “a language for talking about—a way of representing the knowledge about—a particular topic at a particular historical moment” (p. 29). In making sense of a place in particular moments, journalists act as ­authorities of knowledge, attempting to “fix” or pin down their meaning. Gutsche (2014) argues that journalists engage in “news place-­making” through language and source choices that “contribute to dominant ­characteristics of geography based upon long-standing narratives about race, place, and people” (p. 4). Residents of that geography, however, may articulate their neighborhood differently than officials and journalists. Journalists sometimes use the language of social pathology to talk about place, framing lower income urban neighborhoods only in terms of their problems—as “poverty-stricken, crime-ridden, violence-prone, ­welfare-dependent, drug-infested, gang-ruled, predator-haunted” (Ettema and Peer, 2004, p. 283). News media help make “common sense” out of ideas that attribute problems in impoverished, urban areas to social defects and the flawed values of people who live there (Macek, 2006). Parisi (1998) has shown how efforts to “personalize” place through individual stories can end up foregrounding narratives of despair while obscuring broader structural forces operating in a community. Although individual stories may be “true” without encompassing the truth of a place, journalists sometimes use individuals as stand-ins for their neighborhood’s pathological problems.

Who Speaks for Baltimore?  219 Given how news media typically represent poor urban communities of color, Ettema and Peer (2004) call for a journalistic “vocabulary of assets” that draws on movements in urban sociology and community development for assets-based planning approaches (Kretzmann and McKnight, 2012). This new language for describing communities would produce news in which “urban neighborhoods would be not only a set of social problems but also an array of human resources including small groups and ordinary people as well as social institutions” (Ettema and Peer, p. 299). Rather than trying to balance “good news” and “bad news,” this lens sees the capacities of people and community organizations in neighborhoods instead of only absences, deficiencies or needs. While this kind of reporting may be more likely to emerge from longterm relationships between local reporters and communities, the language of assets versus deficits is relevant both to national news coverage of the 2015 unrest as well as calls for more “context.”

Methodology Using combinations of relevant keywords, I searched several databases for editorials, criticism, analysis and commentary in national news­ papers, magazines, online publications, media trade publications and TV broadcasts that specifically addressed how news media had covered the unrest. To allow time for publication of journalists’ self-reflection, I collected articles and transcripts published between April 12, 2015, the day Freddie Gray was arrested, and May 31, 2015. For a window into local concerns and observations, I also included the Baltimore Sun, which I considered here to be simultaneously national and local; the Baltimore Afro-American, the flagship publication of the Afro-American News­ papers group; and the Baltimore City Paper. For several outlets whose content was unavailable through standard databases, I searched their individual websites for Baltimore coverage; a snowball collection technique turned up some articles and commentary that journalists and critics referenced. My final corpus of more than 75 articles included articles and commentary from The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Root, NPR.org, The Atlantic, Politico, Slate, Salon, Mediaite, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, among others. I used commentary by people who work for or regularly write or are commentators for news media as well as stories and programs in which journalists solicited comments from non-journalists or researchers who study media, as this suggested journalists and critics’ areas of concern about the Baltimore coverage. I discarded one-off pieces by activists or other leaders. I first coded references to representations of place and identity; telling the “real,” “true,” or full story; news media authority and/or ability

220  Katy June-Friesen to represent place, people, and the full story; and journalists’ language choices related to these categories. In my second and third readings of the corpus, I used an inductive approach, documenting emerging themes in commentary, analysis and criticism. After developing an initial list of themes, I continued reading and sorting and developing themes, eventually consolidating major themes and organizing relevant excerpts from primary texts under each theme. To ground my understanding of the street-level events and news ­coverage, I interviewed six local journalists, black and white, who report on Baltimore, live there, and have spent time in Sandtown-Winchester, and who were involved in reporting issues and events related to Gray. Three were print reporters and three worked for broadcast outlets. I asked these journalists about their experiences during the 2015 unrest, their thoughts on the national media coverage, and ideal approaches to covering what happened in Baltimore. Indeed, some of the local journalists’ concerns were consistent with those of national journalists and critics.

Findings Using CNN to Engage in Paradigm Repair The primary target of criticism by print journalists and media critics— but also on-camera commentators—was cable TV news. In particular, CNN was often used by critics as a stand-in for the whole of cable news; as such CNN was accused of flouting the values of serious journalism. “CNN appears to aim for programming that is news-themed, delivered by journalists obsessed with their own emotions,” Washington Post TV critic Hank Stuever (2015) complained. The cable news transgressions most mentioned by critics were: sensationalizing at the expense of facts; over-interpreting or misinterpreting events; inflaming tensions in ­Baltimore and nationally; not providing the “big picture” or attending to underlying causes; being overly concerned with violence, fires, and law and order. Cable news was also accused of limiting its coverage to certain areas of the city, as a result of which on some nights media figures outnumbered non-media at the intersection of Pennsylvania and North Avenues, next to Freddie Gray’s neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester. These criticisms implied that good journalists would have done otherwise; and sometime explicit examples of better work from other outlets were provided. CNN journalists were positioned not as complete outliers from the professional paradigm, but as operating on the edge or as a lesser version of journalism. Criticism of cable news, in showing what was not good enough, gestured to a larger paradigm in which CNN existed. Not all analyses and criticisms of news coverage targeted the same outlets in the same way. As Hindman and Thomas (2013) have noted, as an “interpretive community,” journalism exists through norms and

Who Speaks for Baltimore?  221 values rather than some more formal structure. As a result, journalism as an institution does not speak univocally in response to an ethical crisis; “rather, it exists as a cacophony of voices through which common themes emerge” (p. 269). In the case at hand, the discussion turned on variations in quality and the degree to which journalists fulfilled their role. A common theme was that CNN (and cable news as a whole) failed to do the kind of reporting that the situation merited. On April 26, when events turned violent in Baltimore, CNN provoked this criticism by covering the White House Correspondents’ Dinner instead of events 55 miles north. Baltimore Sun media critic and TV commentator David Zurawik (2015b), who had previously praised CNN for its “journalistically sound coverage of the protests,” chastised the channel for shirking its duty and focusing “on this self-aggrandizing exercise in black-tie narcissism.” CNN had failed to uphold journalistic values about what constitutes news. He continued, “I guess the so-called 24/7 ‘news’ channels don’t go all out to do real news on weekend nights anymore.” The criticism quickly turned from whether CNN was covering the Baltimore events to how it was representing the city, its history, and the particular dynamics at play. Performing “repair work,” criticism began drawing boundaries between good and bad—or at least greater- and lesser-quality—journalism. CNN’s sensational and incendiary coverage proved to be low-hanging fruit for journalists and critics, who questioned its news values and used the channel to talk about problems with cable news coverage in general. Politico’s Jack Schafer (2015), in a piece titled “CNN feasts on Baltimore riot coverage,” wrote: [CNN was] not the only cable network to loop scenes of Monday’s violence as video wallpaper for Tuesday’s jabbering anchors—even though the real rioting had ceased. Nor is such looping unusual. Cable news routinely recycles and re-recycles the most striking video from newsworthy accidents, plane crashes, riots, and natural calamities without adding a time/date stamp to indicate that they’re not “live.” … [CNN] knows sensational footage, no matter how dated, is an easy way to keep viewers emotionally engaged—and, in turn, keep them tuned in. Stuever’s (2015) column, titled “Is CNN as bad as everyone thinks it is? Yes … and no,” asserted: “The network’s live coverage of Monday’s destructive acts in Baltimore, and its seeming appetite for more trouble on Tuesday, in many ways demonstrated the strengths and shortcomings that are involved when a cable news channel tries to chase a live (and incendiary) story while haphazardly feeling around for a central statement or a bigger picture.” Such criticism reminded readers—and viewers—to not over-rely on the kind of journalism that makes “it look as if the entire city is ablaze

222  Katy June-Friesen and scores have died” (Schafer, 2015). Targeting CNN’s news promo, a Mediaite.com article proclaimed: In less than 30 seconds, CNN managed to show its viewers every horrible thing that has happened in Baltimore over the last 48 hours in the style of an epic movie trailer before finally landing on the network’s slogan: ‘Go there.’ Yes, CNN just went there. (Wilstein, 2015) Tina Nguyen (2015) critiqued the “narrations of every little thing CNN observed going wrong in Baltimore during live coverage” while a Slate commentator complained, “As CNN aired wide-angle footage Monday of nonchalant looters entering and exiting the chain drugstore … Blitzer described the scene like it was the fall of Rome” (Peters, 2015). This critique—that CNN worked to dramatize Baltimore and parti­ cular places within the city while treating “truths not captured on CNN’s video feeds as if they didn’t exist,” as an Atlantic writer put it (Friedersdorf, 2015)—showed concern about misrepresentation. ­Critics charged that CNN was making things mean more than they really meant: “You’d think that Freddie Gray’s death and funeral are all the context one needs to understand unfolding events” (Friedersdorf, 2015). Critics also noted how TV coverage conflated the fictional series The Wire, and 2015 ­Baltimore, even using cast members as on-air experts and representatives of the city. The implication was that CNN and cable news outlets failed to dig deep enough for the real story. More and better work was necessary to understand Baltimore. And doing such work was possible. Cable news had simply chosen not to. Referencing the “media camp” at Pennsylvania and North Avenues, Post reporter and Baltimore resident Michael Fletcher (2015) said on May 2 on MSNBC Up with Steve ­Kornacki: “Many journalists aren’t even doing journalism. They’re just kind of interviewing talking heads as they’re standing [in] that place.” Critics also challenged CNN’s deference to authority. They highlighted how CNN hosts repeatedly asked why more force wasn’t used to rein in protestors and looters, hyped events so that more force seemed like a logical step to restoring order, and treated police primarily as a solution (and authoritative source) instead of a problem. Several critics cast this law-and-order focus as taking the easy way out while dodging the real issues and crucial explanations. Yet critics were skeptical of CNN’s ability to be anything different or to produce more useful coverage. As David Graham (2015) wrote in The Atlantic: The appeal to force is particular [sic] tone-deaf in the context of clashes set off by what everyone seems to agree was an excessive use of force by police against Freddie Gray. It also points to an additional problem with the media’s authority in a riot situation: A camera is

Who Speaks for Baltimore?  223 very effective at capturing acute scenes of destruction, from fires to thrown bricks to looting. But it’s not good at capturing the invisible forces that are more important in explaining what’s ­happening— chronic, hidden things like a long history of police brutality or ­poverty entrenched by government policy choices. This commentary reveals what may be a print reporter’s bias toward print but also a common theme in the criticism, a sort of news-format determinism. That is, certain kinds of news outlets will inevitably do certain kinds of work, which may prohibit them from finding what needs finding. As another writer proclaimed, “Credulous, deferential statism is the soul of cable news, and CNN will never be something that it isn’t” (Peters, 2015). This evaluation of CNN put forth a spectrum of journalistic respectability, with CNN on the lower end, incapable of the digging and thinking required to understand complexities. Nevertheless, critics also absolved CNN of intentional bad behavior, calling it the “nature” of cable news and the 24-hour cycle to swoop in, pick the best visual drama it can find and amass talking heads to interpret the scene. Critics indicated this was “just the way it is”: expecting the ratings-driven CNN to not focus on fires, looting and other bleeding leads would be unrealistic. A former Baltimore journalist cited CNN president Jeff Zucker’s ratings strategy: “If the audience came to CNN when there was a big story, make sure there was always a big story.… And so with the death of Freddie Gray, Baltimore became CNN’s latest ground zero” (Hill, 2015). If the story didn’t fit the mold of previous “big stories” such as Ferguson didn’t matter: Once Baltimore had been deemed the big story, it had to be covered in a way that justified that. Thus a gathering of 100 or so people outside of Western District police headquarters became a huge gathering of people seething with rage.… Anything could happen! Stay tuned! Yet critics also seemed to excuse cable news for its bad behavior because of the circumstances. On May 3 commentator Amy Holmes said on Fox’s Media Buzz that what happened to Freddie Gray was still a mystery, so “what we got was the media going out into the streets, of course the media is going to cover a riot and cars on fire.… These are all made-for-TV images, but we didn’t get a lot of information about the underlying case.” Contrasting the entertainment factor with the “real” news story, the Baltimore Sun (Zurawik, 2015a) noted that a story with this kind of “mystery” was “the kind of entertainment formula cable news can really sink its teeth into. The thing we all have to remember is that a human being died after being in police custody.”

224  Katy June-Friesen By casting CNN as a certain “kind” of journalism, journalists and critics could distance their own outlets from cable news, and position non-cable news journalism on a higher rung in the professional hierarchy. The paradigm was strong, CNN just wasn’t respecting all the rules. “The strongest visual will always win,” wrote the Post’s Stuever (2015) of the riot footage, followed by the tongue-in-cheek: “CNN would be shirking its duty if it declined to show such events to appease some nobler effort to accentuate the positive, which, in this case, included the many people who chose peaceful protest.” CNN’s “duty,” this suggested, was to its own principles, not necessarily those of the journalistic paradigm. Critics offered examples of better efforts elsewhere, making the point that CNN didn’t represent “the media”; good journalism was being done if one looked in the right place. For instance, Richard Prince (2015) cautioned against lumping all news media in the same category, arguing that “some outlets made an effort to explain the unrest’s decades-old underlying causes and resisted impulses to paint residents with a broad brush.” Journalists repeatedly lauded the Baltimore Sun for the time and staff it had devoted to the various stories surrounding the unrest. While acknowledging that its obligation was different than that of n ­ ational outlets, critics held up the Sun as an example of the strength of the ­paradigm—of journalism done right. Journalists also used criticism from outside the paradigm to defend it, pushing back against activists, city officials, and other leaders who chastised news media for showing only negative images of Baltimore. For some critics, “blaming the media” deflected blame and attention from where it belonged. Columnist LZ Granderson, appearing on May 3 on Reliable Sources, called it a “cop out”: “That’s like blaming a doctor for you having a cancer diagnosis. Just because we’re telling you that there’s ill in the world doesn’t mean we’re responsible for that ill.… I think it’s a way for people not to deal with the fact they have to do something about the ill.” Saying he welcomed the increased attention to Baltimore’s problems, Zurawick (2015c) mocked the “lame political-P.R. talk about how the media isn’t ‘positive’ enough,” and warned against glossing over the real story—the lack of progress on issues underlying the unrest. “But don’t blame the media,” he argued. “They didn’t light the fires and loot the stores. They just showed what was happening in Baltimore to the world. That’s what we do.” Such sentiments made clear that news media still had an important, essential job. As Bennett et al. (1985) note, “When a particular system of representation advances desirable values and goals, people tend to regard the underlying assumptions and the formal means of applying them as a valid system of knowledge” (p. 54). By pointing out what journalism could accomplish when done right—reporting that illuminated the “why” of the unrest, understood the complexities of place,

Who Speaks for Baltimore?  225 and showed audiences a broader picture of what was happening—the critiques spelled out the utility of news knowledge. Cable news journalists acted problematically. Yet in the end, journalism was the solution for understanding Baltimore, not the problem.

A Prescription for Better Journalism: “Context” For journalists and critics evaluating Baltimore news coverage, “more context” was the primary prescription for repairing the poor journalism work detailed above. But critics had differing ideas about the type of context that could produce better representations of the city, its neighbor­hoods, and the actors in those places. This is not surprising; there is, after all, no single definition of “context,” nor are there specific criteria used by journalists. Fink and Schudson’s (2014) study of the rise of “contextual reporting” since the 1950s found that journalists offer context in their reporting in different ways, but “what all contextual stories share is an effort at offering analysis or context that goes beyond the ‘who-what-when-where’ of a recent event” (p. 11). This leaves the “why.” In the case of Baltimore, critics indicated that if journalists had done their job the way they should have, the “why” would have been more apparent. In urging attention to causes, critics seemed most concerned with the absence of historical and spatial context, such as the history of segregation and disinvestment in black neighborhoods, or more specific descriptions rather than “Baltimore is burning.” Despite calls for national media to tap local media knowledge and dispense with predetermined narratives (such as grafting Ferguson onto Baltimore and then trying to account for Baltimore’s black leadership), most critics were less concerned about the absence of contemporary experiential context—that is, articulations of events by people in the places being reported on, such as Sandtown. This suggests that journalists and critics believed more context about Baltimore institutions and systems of discrimination would beget more accurate, in-depth understanding of place. For instance, critics called for more reporting on the history of law enforcement practices in ­Baltimore. Nicholas Kristof (2015) wrote in the New York Times, “We focus television cameras on the drama of a burning CVS store but ignore the systemic catastrophe of broken schools, joblessness, fatherless kids, ­heroin, oppressive policing—and, maybe the worst kind of poverty of all, hopelessness.” Katrina vanden Heuvel (2015) quoted the 1968 Kerner Commission report on the riots of the mid-1960s, which blamed news media for not communicating “to the majority of their audience— which is white—a sense of the degradation, misery and hopelessness of life in the ghetto.” She contended, “That criticism of the media resonates today, as sensational coverage of the destruction and looting too

226  Katy June-Friesen often has disregarded the systemic devastation of the communities in which they are taking place.” Appearing on CNN’s Reliable Sources on May 3, Sally Kohn wondered out loud whether the media had made connections between Baltimore and Ferguson and other places “so that they don’t just seem like aberrations, that it seems clear to people it’s a systemic problem.” These calls for context foregrounded narratives of despair and community deficits, not unlike some of the TV coverage they were criticizing. This is not to say such context was not needed, or that these narratives about causes in West Baltimore were untrue. Yet the litany of reasons—in coverage and criticism of coverage—about why Sandtown and other poor neighborhoods were the way they were became what Cotter (2010) describes as “boilerplate”--a piece of text that serves as shorthand. For instance, the income level in Sandtown or the average life expectancy became context “boilerplate.” When employed repeatedly, such “backgrounding essentially renders uncontested (or incontestable) the information it sets apart, making the issue of ‘given’ or pre-existing seemingly innocuous information key” (p. 180). Discussion of Sandtown’s problems, even its physical landscape, became a standard part of “why” stories, as well as the media criticism. For instance, in discussing Baltimore’s wealth gap and racial segregation for Atlantic Media’s CityLab, two researchers (Florida and Roman, 2015) insisted: “The thing to know about ­S andtown-Winchester is that there is little there. Many, if not most of the row houses are boarded and sealed. There are no corner stores. Every tree box is barren. Hope lives elsewhere.” Such bleak statistics were undoubtedly accurate, and the poverty real, but perhaps only part of the truth. Would residents describe their neighborhood as having “little there”? Some critics, particularly those of color, were attuned to the question of who gets to define whom. They worried that searching for causes of despair was also leading journalists to pathologize place and people. For instance, conservative media were criticized for deploying the “culture of poverty” argument to explain Baltimore and blaming problems in Sandtown and other poor neighborhoods on the lack of nuclear fami­ lies. Appearing on CNN, New York Times columnist Charles Blow (2015a) contrasted the journalists’ response to the Baltimore unrest and the May 17, 2015, shootout in a Waco, Texas, biker bar—in which nine people were killed and the majority involved were white. Blow said that when black people break the law, journalists—not only commentators on the right—“pathologize” the entire African American community and “then look for the differences about their family structures, and we have to ask the tough questions. And in this case, we’re not asking the same thing about the white [lawbreakers].” His column (2015b) said the language that news media used to describe Waco lacked the “pathological

Who Speaks for Baltimore?  227 markings of those used to describe protesters in places like Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore.” Blow argued: [T]here is something about black violence that makes some people leap to a racialized conclusion that the violence is about our fraying culture—that it’s not simply about people behaving violently, but about the entirety of the environment from which they sprang. Black violence stops being about individual people, and starts being about the whole of a people.… By the way, is anyone asking about the ­family makeup of the bikers in Waco? The Root’s Kirsten West Savali (2015) similarly charged news media with “rendering the humanity of black people invisible,” adding that many media professionals didn’t realize what they were doing. ­“Relying on a well-worn template that frames black people as thugs and cultural malignancies by default is not news; it is propaganda that serves only to reaffirm for many Americans what they think they know about black people.” The events in Waco, along with the use of the word “thug”—by m ­ edia, President Obama and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake –to describe rioters, touched off conversations among media critics about whether language is unequally applied and serves a discourse of patho­ logy. Such analysis showed an awareness of the power of language especially when repeated across a range of texts. NPR’s Karen Grigsby Bates (2015) noted that news media reproduce dominant ideas about what unrest means depending on whether black or white people are ­i nvolved—the difference between, say, “rally” and “riot.” The words matter, she said. “The words may describe the same event, but they mean very different things.” Appearing on CNN’s Reliable Sources on May 3, ­Soledad O’Brien (2015) urged journalists to recognize the politics of word choices such as “thug” but argued that the real problem was journalists not doing their jobs: Journalists should strive to use words that describe accurately what’s happening.… I think there’s violent protesters. I think there’s peaceful protesters. I think there’s drunk protesters. I think there’s angry protesters.… The journalist’s job, and I think what’s been sorely lacking in this story, frankly, is context, right, description and context.… Words deliver meaning. They deliver context. They also can trigger emotions. Some journalists also recognized that the news media’s visual discourse of Baltimore had “largely been dominated by photos of burning police cars, teenagers throwing rocks at law enforcement, and shattered glass from looted stores” (Crowder, 2015). For example, one AP photo

228  Katy June-Friesen of a man walking in front of a burning police van proved particularly popu­lar on daily front pages, from small West Coast outlets to the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times (Eichensehr and Popper, 2015). The Post’s Nicole Crowder cautioned that a few images “cannot capture the entire context of a city besieged by such unrest.” Numerous different images, she noted, were more visible on social media. Clearly, journalists and critics worried about how news stories represented places and the people in those places. Some warned of journalists’ tendency to obsess about tragedy and despair. Suggesting Baltimore had become a scene for talking about problems that could be found in our “own back yards,” the Post’s Colbert King (2015) said the city was “for journalists and talking heads, a paradise of easily obtained stories of rage, anguish, neglect and fear—more than enough to satisfy the morbid interests of an audience that would never set foot in the place.” On MSNBC’s Up with Steve Kornacki. on May 2, Harry Smith accused both news media and viewers of having appetites for “riot porno” and tragedy, as evidenced by journalists’ eagerness to “dive into the story of endemic poverty.” Critics called more attention to systemic, historic problems. But what about information outside the frame of broken families, “thugs” and burning cars? Critics spoke less about the possibility that Baltimoreans, their neighborhoods and their city might also exist outside the narrative of despair, systemic injustice, and the events at hand. Writing for NPR’s Code Switch blog Mary Curtis (2015) noted that that at the same intersection in West Baltimore where media featured a drug store on fire was the Enoch Pratt Free Library branch, where she spent countless hours as a child reading. She urged broader knowledge claims about place: The complexities of Baltimore seem largely out of the reach of the media outlets that descend, as usual, only when certain neighborhoods burn. Birthday parties and backyard barbecues—rituals of daily life and love—seem to never make the headlines. Yet images of overturned cars claim the top spot on the evening news every time. The Afro, the Baltimore-based flagship of the Afro-American News­ paper chain, also gave voice to different articulations of Sandtown (as did many other local or alternative outlets not analyzed here). Afro reporters talked to Freddie Gray’s friends, who “expressed pain at the callous fact that the media had not even managed to learn and report basic facts about Gray (like his age)” (Alejandro, 2015a). They interviewed neighborhood gang members who “expressed frustration at the inability of media accounts to capture the complexity of the life of inner city gang members, young men whose options were often limited to choosing between bad and worse” (Alejandro, 2015b). Said one man, “all these days that we’ve been helping, they don’t put that out, they don’t show

Who Speaks for Baltimore?  229 us [helping], they just throw it all down and play what they want to show.” The Afro also covered an annual block party attended by nearly 1,000 people, complete with dance, music, resources, and community advocacy, held in the same West Baltimore community that was the site of turmoil and unrest (Afro staff, 2015). Such coverage expanded the definition of place and recognized multiple articulations of different communities. There was despair, but also assets. Every person’s story was different.

Conclusion: Place and the Limits of Journalistic Knowledge In calling for more “context” in covering Baltimore, most commentators implied that good journalists could understand the complexities of place. Only a few acknowledged the limits to their authority or ability to articulate such complexities. Appearing on CNN’s Reliable Sources on May 3, NPR’s Steve Inskeep called for attention to complexities: Every place is a little different. Every story is a little bit different. Even Ferguson is not exactly what we thought Ferguson was, was it? … In Baltimore, you have just got a different particular history. You’ve got a different police force. You’ve got a different ­population.… We in the national media have this tendency to plug each new incident into a narrative that we think we already know. Inskeep cautioned journalists against using predetermined narratives: “Yes, it’s familiar, it can be easy, but it can also be just in very subtle ways a little wrong.” A few critics mentioned that national media would do well to tap the knowledge of local journalists—even reading the local paper would help—and of community leaders. NPR’s Gene Demby (2015) described Baltimore’s community organizers and politicos who were working the street long before the incidents: “They know who everyone is and where everything is, so they’re indispensable to outsiders, like reporters who must catch up quickly.” But most critics talked more about how journalists (particularly cable TV journalists) undermined their own authority than about the limitations of journalistic knowledge itself. This supports paradigm repair findings that journalists are unlikely to question the system of representation itself. “Ethical assumptions that undergird journalistic practice go unquestioned” (Hindman and Thomas, 2013, p. 270). Baltimore Sun reporter Erin Cox tweeted her criticism of parachute journalists: “CNN guy reporting from one corner declares Baltimore is ‘a city out of control.’ I guess since he knows everybody, he must be right” (in Graham, 2015). David Graham (2015) touched on these limitations in summarizing “the problem with taking

230  Katy June-Friesen news reports at face value” in the days of protests and violence in Baltimore: Reporters flooded into Baltimore from around the country, and in particular from D.C. But most of the reporters in the city don’t have much background in Baltimore or a particularly rich understanding of race relations there or elsewhere. As a result, they transmitted a necessarily patchy and incomplete picture of what was happening. Meanwhile, Baltimore City Paper columnist Kate Drabinksi (2015) proposed that authoritatively synthesizing everything that happened was impossible: “Perhaps what I should do is just shut up for a minute, be patient, get outside, do some listening and talking with people live and in person, and learn to tolerate the discomfort that comes with not knowing what’s happening right now and not having much to say about it just yet.” For local journalists, Freddie Gray’s death and its aftermath were part of a long, ongoing story, one to which national reporters arrived late and uninformed. As insiders looking out at national coverage, some local journalists were glad to see certain issues get attention but frustrated by inaccurate, broad-brush representations of the city and its people. ­Several local reporters interviewed for this research said that national outlets treated Baltimore, in particular West Baltimore, like it was foreign country. According to Jayne Miller (WBAL-TV), some residents were offended by the national coverage; they felt it portrayed their communities as enemy territory (personal communication, May  20, 2016). “Pennsylvania and North in West Baltimore does not look like a third-world country to us,” she said. Charles Robinson (Maryland Public ­Television, Ebony, Jet), who grew up in Sandtown-Winchester, said many national reporters neither questioned the police narrative that people in Sandtown were always up to no good, nor did they talk to resi­ dents there (personal communication, May 19, 2016). Kenneth Burns (WYPR) concluded, ­“Sandtown residents didn’t get much of a voice in news media.… Their voice hasn’t become any louder than it was before” (personal communication, May 20, 2016). This absence, he said, reinforced the suspicion of many African Americans that mainstream news media do not report fairly on their communities and concerns. Freelance reporter Lawrence Lanahan, who is white, said, “It takes a long time to understand ­Baltimore, and if you’re white you never truly will” (personal communication, May 20, 2016). Reporters must do more than quote statistics to explain a place, he added—they need human context, and they have to spend a lot of time with people in that place. Local reporters understood that national reporters were at a disadvantage as far as knowing the complexities of West Baltimore. They were bothered, though, by some national journalists’ lack of effort to understand yet willingness to make authoritative characterizations of the city and its communities.

Who Speaks for Baltimore?  231 Overall, the national media critics analyzed here expressed some of the same concerns as local reporters about depictions of Baltimore and the practice of journalism itself. In many cases, critical analysis of how journalists treated “place” also served as a method of paradigm repair via public disapproval. Journalists criticized CNN in particular, and cable news in general, for the lack of context in their reporting, then identified what kind of context should be included in paradigm-­ worthy journalism. This effort to prevent CNN from representing—and damaging the reputation of—the entirety of journalism played to both internal and external members of the journalistic “interpretive community.” While the majority of criticism studied here came from print and/ or online journalists, broadcast journalists and critics also cast CNN’s work as not good enough. By positioning CNN and its reporters as a lesser version of journalism, at the edge of the paradigm, these critics reinforced collective ideas about what constitutes good journalism and implicitly, what is knowable. Most suggested that if reporters followed good practices, journalism’s system of representation could produce more accurate, complex renderings. The paradigm provided the tools. Place was knowable if journalists worked hard enough. Charges that CNN’s coverage was sensational, inaccurate, inflammatory and lacking big-picture context indicated that journalists were both concerned about how news media represented Baltimore and aware of journalists’ power to construct place. But what should journalists do to understand the networks and activities that constitute place? What did the paradigm demand? Again, critics seemed to agree that explaining Baltimore, its neighborhoods, and the causes of unrest required more “context,” meaning more historical context about systems, institutions, and policies that shaped Sandtown. They were less concerned about the absence of contemporary experiential context in reporting, such as articulations of Sandtown by Sandtown residents. Thus, calls for context privileged journalist-driven narratives of disinvestment, despair, and community deficits over West Baltimore residents’ interpretations of place. Some critics of color, wary of outsider-looking-in generalizations about race and place, cautioned journalists about pathologizing and essentializing communities. Yet many critics, in discussing what kind of context was needed, themselves engaged in “place-making” (Gutsche, 2014) that foregrounded deficiencies. For these critics, place was a space in which journalists could act as primary makers of meaning and producers of knowledge. Overall, national journalists and critics, while concerned about some portrayals of Baltimore, believed that journalists did have the ability and authority to produce complex, in-depth representations of places to which they had no previous ties. In reporting on the unrest in Baltimore, national journalists constructed places for readers, viewers, and listeners who had never been to Baltimore, much less talked to anyone from Freddie Gray’s neighborhood.

232  Katy June-Friesen Reporters and producers selected pieces of information from the confluence of specificities that are a city, neighborhood, or block, and created places. They articulated connections between these places, the people who live there, and the events of April 2015. These representations were inevitably incomplete, but they added to our conceptions of how race, class and power can intersect in particular places, and why. This is why who gets to tell the stories of these places, and from what vantage point, matters.

References Adams, P. C., and Jansson, A. (2012). Communication geography: A bridge between disciplines. Communication Theory, 22(3), 299–318. Afro staff (May 16-May 22). West Baltimore block party brings celebration, healing. The Baltimore Afro-American, p. A11. Alejandro, R. (2015a, April 25-May 1). Friends remember Freddie Gray as “the life of the neighborhood.” The Baltimore Afro-American, p. A4. Alejandro, R. (2015b, May 9-May 15). Gang members’ role in Baltimore uprising. The Baltimore Afro-American, pp. A1, A3. Barnicle, M. (Contributor). (2015, April 27). Morning Joe. MSNBC. http:// huff.to/2fLxKO3. Bates, K. G. (2015, April 30). Is it an “uprising” or a “riot”? Depends on who’s watching. NPR Code Switch. http://n.pr/1WzCIPo. Bennett, W. L., Gressett, L. A., and Haltom, W. (1985). Repairing the news: A case study of the news paradigm. Journal of Communication, 35, 50–68. Berkowitz, D., and Eko, L. (2007). Blasphemy as sacred rite/right. Journalism Studies, 8(5), 779–797. Berkowitz, D., and TerKeurst, J. (1999). Community as interpretive community: Rethinking the journalist-source relationship. Journal of Communication, 49(3), 125–136. Blitzer, W. (Host). (2015, April 28). The Situation Room. CNN. http://cnn. it/2eOhUBf. Blow, C (Commentator). (2015a, May 19). CNN Tonight. CNN. http://cnn. it/2fmzGzt. Blow, C. (2015b, May 21). Of bikers and thugs. The New York Times. http:// nyti.ms/2fum6b0. Cooper, A. (Host). (2015, April 27). Anderson Cooper 360. CNN. http://bit. ly/2fNkI3V. Cotter, C. (2010). News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cresswell, T. (2014). Place: An Introduction. Hoboken: Wiley. Crowder, N. (2015, April 28). Baltimore native captures recent tensions in his hometown unlike anyone else. Washingtonpost.com. http://wapo.st/2g2VqRY. Curtis, M. (2015, May 1). Beyond the headlines, there’s much more to west Baltimore. NPR Code Switch. http://n.pr/2g5WZPb. Demby, G. (2015, April 30). Councilman’s star rises fast amid Baltimore unrest. NPR Code Switch. http://n.pr/2f3D5Ai.

Who Speaks for Baltimore?  233 Drabinksi, K. (2015, May 5). Field tripping: Time traveling. Baltimore City Paper. http://bit.ly/2eSP45R. Eichensehr, M., and Popper, D. (2015, April 28). How the media covered the ­Baltimore riots. American Journalism Review. http://bit.ly/1EUKvRf. Ettema, J., and Peer, L. (2004). Good news from a bad neighborhood: ­Urban journalism and community assets. In Heider, D. (Ed.), Class and News (pp. 283–304). New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Fenton, J. (2015, April 27). [justin_fenton] Out of town reporters will try to survey the damage tomorrow not realizing how many burned/damaged bldgs already existed in these n’hoods [Tweet]. http://bit.ly/2fHFjq3. Fink, K., and Schudson, M. (2014). The rise of contextual journalism, 1950s–2000s. Journalism, 15(1), 3–20. Florida, R. and J. Roman. (2015, May 4). There are plenty more Baltimores. CityLab. http://bit.ly/1DPQBLr. Friedersdorf, C. (2015, April 28). Two states of emergency in Baltimore. ­T heAtlantic.com. http://theatln.tc/1PRW2Cx. Graham, D. A. (2015, April 28). The absence of legitimate authority in ­Baltimore. TheAtlantic.com. http://theatln.tc/1DICFUX. Gutsche, R. E. (2014). A Transplanted Chicago: Race, Place and the Press in Iowa City. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Hall, S., Evans, J., and Nixon, S. (2013). Representation (2nd ed.). London: Sage. Hall, S. (1996). On postmodernism and articulation: An interview with Stuart Hall, Edited by Lawrence Grossberg. In Hall, S., Morley, D., and Chen, K.-H. (Eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Hill, M. (2015, May 7). CNN’s ‘big story’ approach. The Baltimore Sun, p. A21. Hindman, E. B. (2011). The Princess and the paparazzi: Blame, responsibility, and the media’s role in the death of Diana. In D. Berkowitz (Ed.), Cultural Meanings of News: A Text-Reader (pp. 183–199). Los Angeles: Sage. Hindman, E. B., and Thomas, R. J. (2013). Journalism’s “crazy old aunt”: Helen Thomas and paradigm repair. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 90(2), 267–286. Hubbard, P. (2010). Space/place. In Atkinson, D. et al. (Eds.), Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts. London: I.B. Tauris. King, C. I. (2015, May 9). The ills of Baltimore, W. also exist here. The ­Washington Post, p. A17. Kretzmann, J. P., and McKnight, J. L. (2012). Mapping community capacity. In Minkler, M. (Ed.), Community Organizing and Community Building for Health and Welfare (pp. 171–186). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kristof, N. (2015, April 30). When Baltimore burned. The New York Times, p. A31. Lanahan, L. (2015, May 2). [llanahan] Everything in a nutshell. In a house in Sandtown, guy tells beautiful story of neighbors coming together to save community farm from fire night before. Outside his door, dozens clean. As he talks, @CNN in background. Photo of man standing in his living room with CNN on the TV behind him—ticker (?) reads ‘State of Emergency: Baltimore pharmacy looted [Tweet]. http://bit.ly/2fLyVwE, http://bit.ly/2fmycoM.

234  Katy June-Friesen Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Macek, S. (2006).  Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Massey, D. B. (2005). For Space. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Nguyen, T. (2015, April 27). CNN not exactly helping right now in Baltimore riots. Mediaite. http://bit.ly/2g5XY1O. Parisi, P. (1998). The New York Times looks at one block in Harlem: Narratives of race in journalism. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 15(3), 236–254. Peters, J. (2015, April 28). Where are the police? When cities spasm with violence for complicated reasons, that’s the only question that CNN wants to ask. Slate. http://slate.me/1Jylzjv. Powell, B., and Watson, L. (2015, May 1). Baltimore’s Kwame Rose responds to Geraldo’s personal attacks, talks about media and Freddie Gray. Media Matters for America. http://mm4a.org/1GMqKJ9. Prince, R. (2015, May 1). News media struggle to present a balanced picture of Baltimore unrest. The Root.com. http://bit.ly/2fNkiL4. Savali, K. W. (2015, June 2). How media bias is killing black America. The Root.com http://bit.ly/2evWX31. Scarborough, J. (Host). (2015, April 28). Morning Joe. MSNBC. http://huff. to/2fLxKO3. Schafer, J. (2015, April 28). CNN Feasts on Baltimore riot coverage. Politico. http://politi.co/2eOkt6n. Stuever, H. (2015, April 28). Is CNN as bad as everyone thinks it is? Yes … and no. The Washington Post. http://wapo.st/2fLyPoW. Vanden Heuvel, K. (2015, May 8). The shame of separate and unequal. The Washington Post, p. A15. Wilstein, M. (2015, April 29). CNN goes there with especially incendiary ­Baltimore riots promo. Mediaite. http://www.mediaite.com/tv/cnn-goes-therewith-epically-incendiary-baltimore-riots-promo/. Zelizer, B. (1993). Journalists as interpretive communities. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 10(3), 219–237. Zurawik, D. (2015a, April 21). Cable TV shapes national perception of city police and Gray’s death. The Baltimore Sun, p. A6. Zurawik, D. (2015b, April 26). CNN MIA, local TV tries to step up as Freddie Gray protests turn ugly. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/1IccFqa. Zurawik, D. (2015c, May 3). Don’t blame the messenger for riots. The ­Baltimore Sun, p. E1.

13 “I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray” The Hero Mom on Trial Linda Steiner and Carolyn Bronstein

Nearly all US news consumers who paid attention to coverage of Freddie Gray’s death know about the mother who ran after her son to prevent him from looting or participating in the chaotic Baltimore riots. After spotting her son—wearing a hoodie and a black balaclava, with a rock in his hand—on television, the mother went to the scene and repeatedly clobbered him over the head. Unaware that she was being recorded by a news crew, she let loose a stream of obscenities; as television commentators put it, she “cussed” at him. The video, originally taken by an ABC photojournalist, was shared widely on social media, including YouTube, shown on national and international television, and posted on numerous media organizations’ websites, as well as activist and commentary websites. Journalists “from everywhere” immediately began scouring Baltimore to find the mother because, according to one television news director, “this is a story that people have connected with” (Tompkins, 2015a). Journalists soon identified Toya Graham, often going on to describe her as an “unemployed single mother of six and grandmother of one struggling to scrape by in West Baltimore” (Britto, 2015). The Y ­ ouTube video of Graham, 38, and her son Michael Singleton, 16, reached 8 ­million viewers, making the “avenging mother” (McCoy, 2015) “one of the most visible (and enduring) images” of African American women during the protests (Henderson, 2015). Although one of her daughters aspires to be a police officer, Graham later explained, her son resents ­police for mistreating black citizens. “He has a lot of anger for what the police have done to his friends,” Graham told the Baltimore Sun ­(Williams, 2015). Moreover, she recalled, during the preceding year she saw “the deaths of unarmed black youths unfold on television”; “her heart ached” for their mothers (Williams, 2015). Graham told CBS News, “I don’t want [Michael] to be a Freddie Gray.” Social media commentators and posters who called Graham a “hero mom” asserted that she acted out of love and concern for a child in harm’s way. She knew that he could easily have become a target of ­police violence that afternoon. Baltimore Sun poster flow555 (October 23, 2015) showered the “hero mom” with praise: “[W]itnessing her on that

236  Linda Steiner and Carolyn Bronstein day, doing whatever it took to get her son … taps into mother-bear energy that is so fierce, so powerful, so moving.” Graham herself never endorsed the “hero mom” mantle. Instead, she told the Baltimore Sun: “I see myself as a regular mom who had to get out there to protect my child” (Williams, 2015). Many internet posters put this in a political context; they attributed her actions to fear that her son would end up like Gray or other tragic representatives of police violence against young black men; they appreciated that Graham was not acting for a camera and sought neither fame nor glory. Elevating Graham even further, observers and columnists on both ends of the political spectrum described Graham as a model for m ­ others, especially African American mothers who are often stereotyped as neglect­ful and too self-absorbed to pay much attention to their c­ hildren’s behavior. Oprah Winfrey telephoned Graham, gave her actions a “thumbs up,” and sent her a check for $15,000. Two Republicans then seeking the presidential nomination—Ben Carson and Jeb Bush—­expressed admiration for Graham; Bush said Graham and his mother, former first lady Barbara Bush, had “a lot in common” (Burlij, 2015). Baltimore’s long-running black paper, the Afro-American, applauded ­Graham as another woman (along with Baltimore’s State Attorney M ­ arilyn Mosby, Maryland National Guard Major Gen. Linda Singh, and Mayor ­Stephanie Rawlings-Blake) who helped restore peace and “staked a claim in the fight for justice and safety of Black citizens” (Afro staff, 2015). For the Afro-American, “she showed not only passion but resembled Black mothers—really all mothers—in America through her fear of losing a child.” Many internet posters agreed, adamantly arguing that children, especially poor black children, would be better off with mothers who actively intervened to correct their behavior. Graham, sometimes accompanied by Singleton, gave numerous interviews to major news networks and appeared on shows such as “The View”; several celebrity journalists crowned her “Baltimore’s Hero ­ ashington, Mom” and the “Mother of the Year.” She appeared on the W DC, ABC affiliate’s program Good Morning Washington, which treated her to a shopping spree and beauty makeover. A TMZ (2015) article that drew 4742 comments said “the so-called ‘Baltimore Riots mom’” became “a media darling for her now famous public shaming—and butt-­ whupping—of her son.” Atlanta’s black paper, the Atlanta Daily World (Shropshire, 2015) described how the whirlwind media tour made “the now-famous Baltimore ‘smackdown’ mom” a national phenomenon. Toya Graham apparently believed those who told her that her ­maternal heroism would earn her a path out of poverty. She told one reporter: “When you have struggled for so long, you don’t know where your next meal is coming from. It means a lot.… I’m grateful that they heard me say I was struggling” (Williams, 2015). Graham became the beneficiary of a GoFundMe page that yielded more than $12,000; a

“I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray”  237 stranger paid several months of rent (Britto, 2015). A couple of companies promised her a job, although only one followed up. Having just received her medication technician license, Graham turned down Under Armour’s assembly line offer to look for healthcare work (Britto, 2016). When journalists returned to her story six months later, however, ­Graham was no better off than before. She was earning $10 per hour as a caregiver, but faced eviction for unpaid rent. As ABC’s follow-up story put it: “It proved to be just 15 minutes of fame. Promises of a better life, were empty, and today life for her and her son is still the same.” A weary Graham confirmed her day-to-day efforts to stay afloat: “You got to do what you got to do. And that’s what I got to do. I just got to keep moving” (Britton, 2016). The Atlanta Daily World claimed Graham received “universal praise for going into the streets of riot-torn Baltimore and yanking her son” (Shropshire, 2015). In reality, printed opinions and social media commentary were mixed. Many journalists, commentators and audience members treated the “single mom” as an object lesson about urban black mothers’ deficits. Posters quickly moved beyond analysis of her disciplinary style, challenging Graham’s ability to be a “good” mother on the basis of her limited education, lack of financial resources, and even her appearance. Conflating Graham as a single, poor African-­A merican mother with Reagan-era “welfare queens” (i.e., the welfare mom who is also an emasculating, domineering black matriarch unscrupulously drawing on public benefits), many posters discounted Graham as a mother and distanced her from white, middle-class mothers. The characterization of Graham as a “hero mom” also rested on ­racist assumptions, albeit ones subtler than the welfare queen trope. She was celebrated as an exception and in implicit contrast to educated ­middle-class mothers, who typically have fewer children, and whose protectiveness is not physical but social and intellectual, involving aggressive monitoring and promotion of children’s health, opportunities, and s­ ocial interactions. Graham was subjected to contradictory comments: She was praised for her active presence (although using a physical parenting style, not one aimed at cognitive development) but lambasted for not working sufficient hours outside the home to support her family, thus remaining a drain on public resources. In the context of the ghetto welfare queen that dominates discourse around poor black women, Frances Henderson (2015), a political ­scientist, predicted that some people would interpret Graham’s actions as evidence of blacks’ supposed deviance, whereas others would regard her as having emasculated a black man, “further personifying the Sapphire stereotype ­ raham that dominates the cultural landscape.” Henderson suspected that G recognized the life-and-death consequences of her son’s participation in rebellion or acts of protest, “with his black male body-­iness and burgeoning black masculinity on full display.”  But  several  black  journalists and

238  Linda Steiner and Carolyn Bronstein posters worried that white audiences would see Graham as embodying a toxic combination of long-standing ugly stereotypes of black women— the Jezebel, Sapphire, and Mammy. Indeed, at least some of both praise and condemnation of Graham endorsed the black stereotypes, including in ways that ignored, if not distorted the historical genesis of those stereotypes. After summarizing the literature on the three primary stereotypes of black women, as well as research on philosophies of child socialization and discipline popular in the African American community, this chapter examines news accounts, online narratives and commentary, and subsequent reader posts to see what lessons were drawn from Graham’s actions as a mother, and even more so, her racialized body. Attacks that cast her as an abusive mother and welfare queen, as well as characterizations of her as a “hero mom,” expose the ways that black women are subjected to standards overdetermined by gender, class, and race. Ultimately, the various debates reveal her enjoying less authority and status than white, middle-class mothers.

Stereotypes of Black Women/Mothers and Their Legacy A handful of stereotypes of black women have long dominated US cultural, political and media landscapes. According to several scholars, the asexual Mammy, the hypersexual Jezebel, and the angry Sapphire were expressly created to justify white owners’ brutal treatment of slave women. Representing female slaves as sexually insatiable and promiscuous or rebellious and uncontrollable let slave owners justify rape and abuse. Carolyn West  (2008) argues: “The Jezebel stereotype, which branded black women as sexually promiscuous … gave the impression that black women could not be rape victims because they always desired sex.” Meanwhile, the loyal asexual Mammy who happily subordinated her own needs in caring for the master’s family appeased the conscience of the exploitative owners. Mammy had the utmost respect for whites, and law and order, but was a temperamental bully at home who domi­ nated her children and treated her sons in particular with contempt (Green, 1998–99). According to scholars, these stereotypes live on in popular culture, advertising, and news. Black women asked to identify stereotypes associated with modern black women consistently mentioned Jezebel and the Mammy, and to a lesser extent Sapphire (Harris-Perry, 2013). Moreover, the legacy of these images can be traced to the critique of the single black mother in sociologist Daniel Moynihan’s 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. According to Moynihan, emasculating mothers discouraged black fathers from accepting their responsibilities. Journalists for decades have promoted a dichotomy between celebrity moms (usually white, perfect, married, and in control)  who  can  be

“I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray”  239 emulated versus welfare queens (usually black or Latina, irresponsible, unmarried), who should be pitied, if not scorned (Douglas and Michaels, 2000). Hancock (2004) regards the disgust over the welfare queen as representing Moynihan’s long and hegemonic shadow. She shows how political elites as well as dominant groups on opposite sides of the welfare reform debates draw on and disseminate a common public identity of the welfare queen; crucially, media discourse also perpetuates that identity. Referring to Britain, Tyler notes that with welfare reform debates relying on the specter of the “moral underclass” and “undeserving poor,” poverty and unemployment are attributed to bad choices, laziness, and irresponsibility rather than structural inequalities produced by neoliberal economies (Tyler, 2013). Notably, research shows the benefits of “racial socialization” for ­A frican-American adolescents exposed to community violence (Banerjee, Rowley, and Johnson, 2015;  Bannon, et al., 2009); black parents recognize their responsibility to teach children, especially sons, to handle racial discrimination and racially motivated dilemmas such as profiling. Relative to other racial/ethnic groups, African-American youth have a greater likelihood of exposure to violence, which leads to adverse emotional and behavioral outcomes, including depression, anxiety, poor academic performance, and aggression. Black mothers’ messages of racial socialization and cultural pride may promote a positive self-image and identity that help children who face economic hardships or are exposed to stressful life events (Henry, Lambert, and  Bynum, 2015). As a matter of life and death, black mothers must consider when to step in to advocate on behalf of their teenagers who get in over their heads. A study of “racial socialization” messages communicated to teenagers (Smith-Bynum et al., 2016) found that mothers emphasized development of coping skills for sons more than daughters in preparation for situ­ ations involving racial discrimination. Public discourse following police killings of other young black men underscores why black mothers teach their sons how to interact with police; routine situations can turn deadly given racial profiling and fear. Henderson (2015) claimed that representations of the events in ­Baltimore simultaneously reified and challenged standard stereotypes of black women. Pointing out that many black women activists remain invisible because none of the stereotypes fit them, she said the highly visible roles in which the media cast black women “mirrored the stereotypical imaginings that white Americans hold about black women” as incompetent, emasculating, and domineering. So this chapter explores whether, in her actions and in her post-hoc explanations, ­Graham subverted or, alternatively, confirmed the standard stereotypes. Did mediated discourses about Graham, especially what was shown in the YouTube video but also in response to news coverage, either deploy or reject (implicitly or explicitly) those stereotypes?

240  Linda Steiner and Carolyn Bronstein

Method The research is based on qualitative analysis of relevant articles and reader comments in the Baltimore Sun, other local “mainstream” newspapers, and the Afro-American, Baltimore’s black paper. Other black newspapers carried little coverage about Graham, at most re-using commentary from black websites and syndicated material. From the ­Baltimore Sun, we analyzed all six news articles featuring Graham, drawing a total of 630 comments, including 64 that appeared on the newspaper’s Facebook site. Given the continuing and intensifying blurring of legacy and digital news, with audiences regularly ignoring such distinctions when they want to engage, we also analyzed the relevant commentary and posts found in the mediated public sphere, examining a total of 23 sites. Among the black-oriented and/or women-oriented and feminist sites, we analyzed two articles at TheRoot.com (drawing 15 and 35 comments, respectively); one each at Crunk Feminist Collective (61); ThyBlackMan (15); A Voice for Men (38); Black Girl ­Dangerous; Mic; Madame Noire (104); Essence (12); Bougie Black Girl (in two parts, 10); +972 Magazine; Elle; Empowering Women Now; Bitchtopia; Modern Mom (2); Heavy (87); Vibe (9); and the website of the Center for ­Community Change. Among general news sites, we analyzed Joan Walsh’s Salon piece (581), a second Salon piece (28), and pieces from Huffington Post (440), Mediaite (36), Talking Points Memo (28), The Hill (354), and The City Paper (8), which is published by the Sun. We identified themes and sub-themes based on multiple readings, coded them, then went back and produced several close readings of all texts and posts. We did not alter punctuation or capitalization. The results below are organized by major theme, including whether Graham was a good mother or bad mother; her status as a single mother receiving welfare; the larger context, including whether this was institutional racism; and the extent to which media were held accountable.

Was She Disciplining Her Child or Was This Crime and Punishment? Professional journalists nearly always supported and praised Graham, although they typically mentioned that physical discipline of children is controversial. But readers’ posts were highly divided. Some readers lionized Graham, insisting that she acted appropriately given the deadly threat to her son. Others attacked her for embarrassing her son, and worse, teaching him violence. Singleton ultimately told ABC News that although he had been embarrassed at first by his mother’s actions, “I ­understand how much my mother really cares about me so I’m just going to try and do better.” But critics observed that violence and humiliation never produce nobility, and feared that Graham was trapping her

“I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray”  241 son in a cycle of abuse that he would surely perpetuate. Indeed, Graham had told CBS News that when she recognized her son in the crowd, rock in hand, “I just lost it.” Graham’s reference to “losing it” was said to mean that even she realized that her reaction was one of uncontrolled anger, fear and emotion, not rationality. The debate over physical discipline had evident significance at sites aimed at black audiences, and columnists and posters explored at length the connections between corporal punishment and slavery. S­ everal ­T heRoot.com posters, such as Joe Black (Apr 30, 2015), noted that slave owners exploited mothers’ love for their children, using mothers to control sons by hitting and whipping them. Black journalist and self-­ described scholar-activist Stacy Patton (2015) also invoked the destructive history of physical abuse of black children. “From the plantation moms who whipped their kids so white masters and overseers wouldn’t more harshly do the same, to the parents during Jim Crow who beat their children to keep them safe from the Klan and lynch mobs … heaping pain upon their children actually seems like a sane and viable act of parental protection.” Rather than celebrating Graham, Patton argued, our society ought to deplore how “beating black children is the only way to keep them safe from the dangers of a racist society or from stepping out of line.” Representing the pro camp, a (white) mother of six posted a “letter” to Graham on a mothering site: “Thank you for taking responsibility as a mother, and loving your son enough to drag him away from the chaos.… Thank you for not standing down, not trying to defend your actions. Thank you for saying, ‘My child is not a perfect child, but he is still my child,’ because you truly hit the nail on the head with that one” (Spencer, 2015). At the Heavy, a news and information portal, dozens of posts suggested that Graham should run for mayor or some other political office; for example, DeoMor (April 28, 2015) described how, as a single mother, her heart burst with pride at seeing Graham: “I praise her love for her son, the investment in his future and just being a damn GOOD MOM.” Baltimore Sun readers posted numerous images of trophies and medals, commenting that these were commendations for Toya Graham. Reader Frank Castle (April 30, 2015) was unequivocal in his praise: “She should be applauded. Baltimore needs more parents like her.” Jim Rainge (April 29, 2015) agreed: “Every one of those kids needed a smack in the head like that. She was protecting her son from something much worse than he got from her!” One poignant essay was posted on the Crunk Feminist Collective site (and then widely shared and reprinted) even before Graham was identified. Rboylorn (2015) took the then-unnamed woman to represent all urban working-class black mothers. Rejecting journalists’ characterization of Graham as acting from anger, Rboylorn insisted the cause was fear—“because his black bodied-ness and maleness and open defiance

242  Linda Steiner and Carolyn Bronstein to authority could cost him his life.” Rboylorn described a political and explicitly “radical” love. “It might seem aggressive or abrasive or too much on the outside looking in, but a black mother’s love is desperate and deep.… To me, this mother demonstrated what a black mother’s love looks like in public.” Baltimore Sun reader YoYoPa (October 23, 2015) concurred that Graham symbolized a particular version of black mother­hood: “The fact is Graham could be any of a number of determined single mothers in the inner city who struggle desperately every day to keep their kids out of trouble, and themselves in a job. The difference here is that she happened to be caught on camera at the very moment she found her son when her instincts and fear for his safety took over.” For like-minded readers, Graham was heroic in her commitment to doing whatever was necessary to save her son, refusing to let him become another grim statistic in the war against black male youth. Almost all of the Crunk Feminist Collective commenters—nearly all of whom described themselves as black mothers—deeply appreciated Rboylorn’s essay, several saying it brought them to tears. Vera LeGree King (April 28, 2015) posted: Graham “is the epitome of a woman and motherhood.” Sarah  (April 28, 2015) added: “It’s easy to put myself in her shoes and do anything to keep my child safe. However, it’s also easy to put myself in [Michael’s] shoes and feel that something must be done—someone has to take a stand. Both are being brave and courageous in their own way. I wish it were safe for her to feel pride instead of fear for the amazing man her son is.” One of the two exceptions, however, was shirley liotta (April 29, 2015), who criticized both black mothers who beat their children and white mothers who coddle theirs: “Moderation is the key!” Graham’s use of physical force against her son attracted the greatest number of reader comments at the Sun, too. The paper’s Facebook posters generally criticized Graham for her choice to discipline her son physi­ cally, their negative responses ranging from mild disapproval to horror. Reader Wes Skillestad (April 30, 2015) recalled being subjected to corporal punishment as a child: “Physical abuse made me want to rebel,” he asserted, and did not “scare me straight.” “Graham’s angry actions were understandable, he wrote, but “does swinging on him encourage him to really be better?” Many Sun posters opposed the heroic characterization of Graham, urgently arguing that no hero would ever hit a vulnerable individual. Sun commenter Peter 225 (October 23, 2015) further criticized Graham as “a failure” for “teaching her son that you hit people to resolve your issues. The real hero Mom’s are the one’s who raise their children so they’re not going to riot in the streets, and doesn’t [sic] have to beat them because she’s earned their respect over the years.” Ferguson Foont (October 24, 2015) similarly asked, “Since when does publicly berating and physically abusing your offspring make you some kind of ‘hero?’”

“I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray”  243 Some went even further, agreeing with Patton that Graham had committed a form of child abuse. At the Heavy, YoullSee (April 29, 2015) noted the irony of Graham “beating” her son for criminal behavior and giving women justification to beat their sons whenever they misbehave: “If it had been an adult male beating his daughter in public for misbehaving, would the responses here be the same? … Violence begets violence. I’m betting he grows up to be more violent as a result of her actions, not less. It’s likely, after witnessing her strike him repeatedly in the head, that she regularly abuses him—which might be why he and so many other boys were out there in the first place.” Among the Baltimore Sun readers echoing this concern, Jct4 ­(October 23, 2015) asked: “If she does this in public, what kinds of abuse did she inflict in private?” Several posters agreed that under any other circumstances, e.g. not during a riot, Graham’s actions would have been viewed as child abuse. But Graham’s defenders pointed to statistics explaining why all black parents are “burdened with the knowledge that for a black child the price of error—real or imagined—is higher than it is for white children,” and pointed out that Graham personally knew of many child­ ren killed in her neighborhood, some by police (Murphy, 2015). A few people positioned themselves in the middle. In an essay written for HelloBeautiful—a site “where Black women go to talk about themselves shamelessly … [to] share, confess, indulge, encourage and celeb­rate each other”—and reprinted by the Chicago Defender, Danielle Young (2015) said, “We all cringed as Toya pulled at her son’s clothing, slapping him in the face.” Ultimately, however, Young asserted: “We’re still applauding Toya Graham because, as a single mother, she has a responsibility to raise up a Black man and it’s obvious that she’s taking it seriously.” The Root’s contributing editor Demetria Lucas D’Oyley (April 30, 2015) insisted that praising Graham’s violence while condemning the Baltimore protesters was hypocritical; both were acting out of desperation. That said, D’Oyley challenged people who called Graham “mother of the year” and a “hero” by citing studies that reveal that hitting child­ ren neither increases responsibility nor elicits lasting positive behavioral change. As someone who endured corporal punishment as a child, D’Oyley deemed Graham’s approach wrong, although she understood that Graham’s reaction was born out of anger and fear. She asked readers to consider that Singleton’s reaction, also violent, had similar origins, and that he and the other rioters deserved a measure of understanding. Commending D’Oyley’s balanced essay, Lydia Howell (Apr 30, 2015) called on “fellow WHITE Americans to EDUCATE themselves about the hideous conditions in our inner cities, the LONG history of police brutality and murder of un-armed Black people WITH IMPUNITY and

244  Linda Steiner and Carolyn Bronstein to DIG INTO YOUR SOULS FOR SOME EMPATHY.” After listing Baltimore’s problems, she suspected that if whites faced the same repugnant conditions as blacks, “they would ‘riot’ too.” Nonetheless, nearly all the top TheRoot.com commentators disagreed with D’Oyley, if for different reasons. Iris Toyer (Apr 30, 2015), who self-identified as African American, totally rejected D’Oyley’s “absolutely ridiculous” comparison of Graham and the protestors: “Most if not all of us empathize with the people of Baltimore who are struggling everyday against a system that is stacked against them. I am not so sure that that empathy extends to those who felt it okay to burn stores, loot businesses and wreak havoc in their own neighborhood.” C ­ assandra Mosley (Apr 30, 2015) articulated the most common rebuttal to D ­ ’Oyley. She acknowledged that parents often hit and curse when they are scared. Nonetheless, she wrote: “I cringed when I saw her slapping that young man and yelling fbombs at him. Who applauds that?” Pamela Golden (May 1, 2015) put it even more forcefully: “Violence is violence, no matter what the reason or goal. If you hit someone and tell them that it is wrong to hit, that is just crazymaking. Violence is not power—it is a reaction to helplessness, hopelessness, and powerlessness.” Across the internet, many commenters mentioned journalists’ expressions of horror when NFL running back Adrian Peterson beat his 4-year-old son with a switch. However, others criticized the “spare the rod” form of child-rearing, claiming that it produces spoiled children. TheRoot.com poster Sydney Chandler (Apr 30, 2015) wrote: “The problem across this country with some parents is they want to coddle their children to the point that their kids run them and the household instead of kids knowing there will be consequences for their actions.” Criticizing “the PC, candy-a** way parents are bringing up children,” Chandler claimed that she and her brothers are “all educated, successful, healthy and happy” despite being physically disciplined. Elsewhere, commentators depicted Graham as an impassioned vigilant mother who caused no physical pain. Dozens of posters suggested that people should go to a domestic abuse center to see a real beating victim. Addressing Sun posters who criticized Graham, Maryland82 (October 23, 2015) retorted: “[W]hat do you expect in the middle of a riot? She should have given him a timeout?” This comment was “liked” by more than 30 readers.

The Welfare Queen Graham was frequently attacked as a “welfare queen” on the Baltimore Sun’s site, where posters focused on the fact of her six children, lack of employment and, as Jusayn (May 20, 2015) put it, her pricey “ghetto glam” appearance. On the Sun’s Facebook page, Tiffany Stuck (April 30, 2015) dared readers to ask Michael Singleton when he had last eaten a

“I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray”  245 meal prepared by his mother. Her own answer: “i bet he cant say bc its been so long or never bc his moms spends the welfare check on fake nails n straightened hair n ripped jeans to get more sperm donating men to keep the welfare check coming.…” Patterson Gal’s (May 20, 2015) response to a Sun story likewise focused on appearance: “[F]or being on welfare, her hair was nice, tattoos, lots of jewelry, nice clothes, when she went out to get her kid. This is where her welfare money is going?” In the same comments stream NJ Citizen (May 20, 2015) agreed with those who saw Graham’s lifestyle as too luxurious: “People understandably question how a ‘charity case’ living on the confiscated earnings of others can have ALL of the nice things she apparently has, including fashionable new shoes and clothing, jewelry, expensive salon treatments, and fancy ornaments for her apparently comfortable home.” Criticisms of Graham’s status as lacking a husband or father for her six children, popped up all over the internet, although they did not always reference welfare. In many places across the internet, including Bougie Black Girl and Salon, Avery Jarhman (May 2, 2015) pasted in the hashtag #protect-kids-from-irresponsible-caregivers to spread his message: “Speaking of poverty … am I the only American with a basic or higher education who believes Toya Graham chooses to keep her ­family in poverty and pain by struggling with six, instead of raising two she could properly supervise?” At the Heavy, PJ (April 30, 2015) wrote: “Good moms don’t have kids out of wedlock and raise kids without a dad. Selfish moms do.” But when one Heavy poster attacked Graham as a welfare queen, Anonymous (May 1, 2015) replied: “Tired of this asshats who automatically assume that if you are Black with many child­ ren, you MUST be on welfare. What a miserable, bigoted troll.” Baltimore Sun reader Alexander Mitchell (October 27, 2015) chastised news coverage that sanitized Graham’s family structure: “Two critical words are conspicuous by their absence from this article, very important words that could have made all the difference in the world to this family: ‘Father’ and ‘husband.’” Plantagenet (October 23, 2015) posted a similar comment: “The one lesson not discussed as a reason for her struggles is she has six children and an unknown number of grandchildren, most of whom have different fathers, and apparently none are active in supporting her.” This poster claimed to be “sympathetic to her plight” but also pointed out that “by her choices in men and having a large family [Graham] has put herself in this position.” Sun reader MDNMDN (April 18, 2016) saw Graham as a desperate product of a broken welfare system, draining public resources: “This endless handout incentive cycle DOES NOT WORK. Women such as herself would be better off in the long run not having these multiple kids, and then only having the one or maybe two they can actually raise themselves when they are self-sufficient and more mature.” Mocking Graham on the ­Baltimore Sun website, Tomato Head (April 29, 2015) pretended

246  Linda Steiner and Carolyn Bronstein that TV executives were so impressed with Graham’s ratings that ABC/ Disney was developing a sitcom about a Baltimore single mother with six children: “Mariah Carey is rumored to play Toya with a general casting call for the various fathers.” Not surprisingly, the clearest attack on Graham appeared on A Voice for Men, which advocates the Men’s Human Rights Movement. This group insists that with the elimination of sex-based expectations and limitations on women, men’s autonomy has eroded, causing “gynocentric parasitism.” An AVfM columnist (Ali, 2015) reminded readers that he faced intense resistance to his previous criticisms of “Baby Mama-led homes,” with their “ungodly levels of violence, often starting with said Baby Mamas themselves.” Ali imagined that Graham, for whom there was no Mr. Graham, vindicated his argument. Ali speculated that any black dad who beat up his daughter would face very different consequences. He called Baltimore a de jure matriarchy, as such, causing violence, disorder, chaos, pestilence, poverty and anarchy. The first poster to respond to Ali was banned from the site (for his ad hominem attack and general contempt for AVfM) when he called Ali “pathetic and racist.” Nonetheless, nearly all the other commentators agreed, as poster Jack Strawb put it, that Graham “regularly bullies, is a violent abuser, and is teaching her son to deal with the world through violence.” Acknowledging this dichotomy as a double bind, Bougie Black Girl (2015) observed that in accusing Graham of reinforcing stereotypes of the angry Black woman, critics deployed racist stereotypes: “They have assumed Ms. Graham is poor, desperate and lonely. Others called her an agent and wondered why she didn’t throw rocks beside her son. Some even blamed her being a single mom.…” In Bougie Black Girl’s view: “Black moms can’t win. Either we are the reason our kids are dying or we should let our kids throw rocks at the police, become another martyr and be a picture on a Black Lives Matter poster.… Either Ms. Graham is a race traitor coon for grabbing her son off the street or if he were killed during the riots, Ms. Graham would be labeled as a horrible mother.… So keyboard warriors, neverolutionaries, think piece writers, cultural critics and academic elitists, our children will not be cannon fodder for your revolution. Our children will not be another bullet point for your resume. Our children will not be the next topic for your book deal, and our children will not be another face on a poster.”

Race and Racism as Social Context Carla Murphy’s (2015) Talking Points Memo article explained Graham in the context of both Baltimore’s high levels of violence and suspicion of police. According to Murphy, Graham personally knew a dozen kids over the years who were gunned down. And in the first half of 2015 Graham’s southwest Baltimore district saw 50 shootings and 30 total

“I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray”  247 homicides. The Baltimore police themselves had identified a disturbing pattern of officers abusing alleged suspects. She quoted Graham discussing fears of walking down the street: “I don’t know who’s being targeted for whatever reason. We just don’t know.” Murphy, a reporting fellow at The Nation Institute, concluded: “[W]hile all parents ultimately realize that they cannot protect their children, black parents confront a world almost eager with violent intent toward their offspring. They parent while burdened with the knowledge that for a black child the price of error—real or imagined—is higher than it is for white children.” The black press and black websites went farther. The Root poster ­Ernest Monroe (Apr 29, 2015) asserted that in celebrating Graham, few Americans, black or white, understood that “with no disposable resources at her fingertips, this poor and wretched mother has no other recourse than that of turning upon her own son.” Monroe insisted: “This is de facto institutionalized economic victimization and cannibalization.” Institutional racism was mentioned by few others. Nonetheless, at MadameNoire, an online magazine geared to African American women, Charing Bell (2015) explained “Praising Graham distracts from a hard truth: No matter how black children behave, they risk being killed and blamed for their own deaths because black youths are rarely viewed as innocent or worthy of protection.” What’s worse, she said, is that white and old-school conservative blacks who lionized Graham largely ignored the desperate conditions she faced. To Bell, Graham was a single jobless woman raising six children in a poor community suffering lack of job availability and affordable housing, as well as redlining, predatory lending and a host of other problems. Graham’s story also turned on the failure of the black church (and other black religious institutions), police brutality, and failures of government policies and agencies. Similarly, at the website of a progressive center that works on behalf of low-income people, Wendi Thomas (2015) observed tartly that better parenting won’t make the Baltimore police department follow its own policies: “Every black mother in Baltimore could go ballistic on misbehaving children—and none of that parental violence would fix a system where police brutality goes almost completely unchecked.… Public shaming of black teenagers can’t fix a corrupt culture where, as in Gray’s case and in an echo of Jim Crow laws, police detain black men simply because they made eye contact.”

Blaming the Media Both news and entertainment media played a significant role in hyping the story and positioning Graham herself as a metaphor for larger social issues involving race and motherhood. Acknowledging the power of the media in making Graham famous, the Sun’s television critic David Zurawik (April 29, 2015) described how the video of her “went viral

248  Linda Steiner and Carolyn Bronstein with monsters like CBS News doing its best to drive it.” In response to Zurawik, Sun poster ashleyidelle (April 29, 2015) lamented the media’s fixation with Graham and its desire to lionize her as a strong mother whose watchful parenting could have prevented riots from taking place at all. “There are layers to the events that went down Monday night and no one solution could have fixed all the damage that was done.… Toya cannot be seen as an answer to the rioting that occurred. This is not a black and white situation and it is unfortunate that the media is trying to simplify it.” Posters like ashleyidelle focused on the style of media coverage, highlighting journalists’ misleading preference for personalizing macro-level social issues. In response to the Sun’s piece checking in on Graham six months later, Judson666 (October 23, 2015) took this farther, saying Graham was unprepared for the onslaught of attention, including “the relentless judgmental snipes on social media by people who know nothing about her, and all the other bouquets, barbs and brickbats that come when you ‘play ball’ with big league media.… Big Media can raise you up to Hero status, and just as quickly dump you on the trash heap.” No poster lauded the mainstream media’s treatment of Toya Graham. Indeed, most media figures, experts, and citizens indicted the media for simplistically championing Graham without attention to structural factors that compelled her to use physical force. For example, Joan Walsh (2015), then Salon’s editor-at-large (she later went to The Nation and MSNBC), explicitly refused to criticize either Graham or African ­A mericans’ praise of Graham. But, she denounced the white mainstream’s “sickening” hypocrisy for heroizing Graham as if her method was the only way to discipline a black child: “Anyone white who’s applauding Graham’s moment of desperation, along with the white media figures who are hyping her ‘heroism,’ is essentially justifying police brutality.” Notably, Salon posters aggressively condemned Walsh (­nonsense, preposterous, offensive, and embarrassing were among the milder critiques). But they primarily turned it into a referendum on corporal punishment, not white media. Minxangel (May 2, 2015) posted: “Stop playing the race card!!! I’m white and would have done the same if my son was doing this kind of stuff!!! Race is not the issue here! Teaching your kids not to be a thug and destroy other peoples property and lives is the issue!!!” MalvolioSF (May 2, 2015) pointedly replied: “What web-site do you think you are on? Here on Salon, race is always  the issue. There is no card but the race card.” And, arguing that the issue was not race but economics and class, XyzzyAvatar (Apr 30, 2015), concluded: “Unfortunately Salon has gotten into the habit of using controversial or provocative articles and ‘clickbait’ headlines to keep people on-site in the comments.” One of the few journalists who attempted to explain the media focus on Graham, Zurawik (2015) proposed that she made Baltimore events

“I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray”  249 seem controllable. By jumping in without worrying how she looked or sounded to others, Graham made viewers feel empowered. “As much as television gets accused of only looking for violence and negative stories,” he added, “the truth is there’s nothing the medium loves more with big news stories like this than finding and celebrating heroes.” And in Graham, TV “found a winning and upbeat story line”—and a huge audience. He might have said the same about his peer television critics, such as Mary McNamara (2015), who wrote that Graham, although she originally looked “like an angry bird, an Easter chick gone wild,” ultimately not only smacked sense into her son, “she smacked some sense into the rest of us too.” The harshest critiques of mainstream journalism came from black critics, who accused white journalists of offering faulty, incomplete analyses of Graham and the riots. Wendi Thomas (2015) objected to Zurawik’s description of Graham as “one of the most positive figures to emerge from the conflict.” She explained: “By implying that Graham was an outlier, Zurawik regurgitates a favorite conservative narrative of the dysfunctional black family. This message is dangerous, dishonest and devoid of any historical context about the policing of black bodies in America.” This is not to say, however, that black commentators always agreed with one another. Rodney Thomas’s post (Apr 30, 2015) savaged D’Oyley’s account of Baltimore on several grounds, including that her conflation of rioters and protestors was “as bad as the white female CNN reporter who referred to the fraternity group at City Hall as a gang.…” A black journalist ought to be better equipped to cover a race-­ related story, he argued: “YOU OF ALL PEOPLE SHOULD KNOW THE D ­ IFFERENCE BETWEEN PROTESTERS AND RIOTERS!!!!” Toya Graham experienced what many posters referred to as an unexpected “15 minutes of fame” for actions catapulting her to the center of a major national news story, as well as significant backlash. Her previously private life became the subject of intense public discussion and debate that was often accusatory and deprecating with regard to her finances, personal appearance and family life. For Graham, this was bewildering and disappointing. She was no better off financially. ­Frustrated and angry, Graham sought to escape the media circus and regain some autonomy, telling the public relations consultant who signed her up as a client that media interviews were “all a waste of time.” She told the Washington Post’s inequality and social justice reporter: “You had some big ideas that I just swallowed up and went along with, but none of that is coming true. And the reality of it is, it’s over” (McCoy, 2015). Apparently she regretted not taking the advice of those who warned people not to acquiesce to the media’s demands. As Sun poster arnoldnet (October 24, 2015) put it: “The media … are just vampires, sucking the life from individuals and families and often leaving ppl as bad off as when they first found them.”

250  Linda Steiner and Carolyn Bronstein

Conclusion Journalists often cause collateral damage to individuals like Graham, that is, those who find themselves by happenstance at the center of stories. The term collateral damage is most often used to refer to the unintended or incidental killing or wounding of non-combatants, or damage to their property, during an attack on a legitimate military target. But, as in military contexts, journalists’ attention can hurt bystanders, unintentionally rendering them targets. Very few journalists or media ­organization professionals directly criticized Graham. Moreover, except for Zurawik (2015), journalists were predictably and consistently self-­ congratulatory in their pleasure at celebrating her. But Graham became collateral damage not merely in the sense of the unwanted and ultimately unhelpful (albeit positive in the very short term) attention from legacy and non-mainstream coverage, but also because she was drowned in a tidal wave of race and class rhetoric fueled by that media attention. ­Racism marked the way that audience members felt entitled by that attention to comment authoritatively and negatively on Graham’s body and life choices, and to mock her for taking seriously the promises of help. Journalists were not to blame, of course, for angry, racist responses to Graham that depicted her as manipulating the system for financial gain. Nor can journalists be held accountable for leading Graham to believe that her circumstances would change for the better. Asking journalists to take responsibility for the intense public attention would constitute a chilling effect. Nevertheless, having developed false hope, Graham was devastated when her situation did not improve. Journalists never publicly considered how opening her entire life to public scrutiny might result in painful disappointment. If they erred, they did so by simplifying Graham’s story to the point of caricature, instead of exploring how her maternal sensibility was complex, shaped by pain, and historically and racially situated. Indeed, whereas much research indicates that physical discipline is rarely beneficial, African Americans are more likely than other racial groups to believe that corporal punishment is appropriate and effective, on the theory that a beating from a parent is better than one from the police. Some research associates nonabusive discipline with better behavior for African-American youth (Horn, Joseph, and Cheng, 2004). But journalists—another example of not only a journalistic squeamishness but also a national inability to deal with race and ­racism—did not include research indicating the historical significance and continuing place of physical discipline in African American culture. Phillip Morris (2015), a Plain Dealer metro columnist, explicitly applauded Graham as a two-legged mother bear. “Her maternal instincts kicked in” after she sensed danger to her cub, Morris opined. Stories of the angry “mother bear” who would do anything to protect her cub appealed instantly to journalists looking to explain the chaos in Baltimore

“I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray”  251 and anoint a hero whose actions brought some humanity, or at least a compelling human-interest angle, to a harrowingly painful news story. The Poynter Institute, a meta-journalism site, for example, highlighted the (large) number of journalists who scored interviews with Graham, calling her “a commanding presence that captured national affection” (Tompkins 2015b). Yet, the trope of the “hero mom” fighting to save her son appears to have been too convenient. As Zurawik (2015) himself understood, the suggestion that Graham’s hands-on parenting could solve Baltimore’s underlying issues was the kind of formulaic answer TV likes, seeks out, and features. And although criticizing Graham’s violence Sun poster michaelastar agreed with Zurawik that the media wrongly require “a hero to every story.” Even the sympathetic portrayal of Graham was too readily adopted, its one-dimensionality aligned with both domi­ neering Sapphire and Mammy stereotypes applied to the black mother, as seen in comments by Fox News Channel’s Ben Stein, who compared Graham to Rosa Parks and celebrated Graham as “the woman of the hour”: “She is the woman, who, if her example were followed, could turn the tide for the whole underclass in the United States of America.… She is the kind of woman we need a great deal more of.” Some journalists focused on Graham as the embodiment of problems plaguing inner city black families, emphasizing her financial predicament and her struggles to support her children. Journalists presented the intimate details of Graham’s life, including the birth of her first child at age 14. The Washington Post, for example, described how the “most famous mom in Baltimore” developed a drug addiction; was once charged with assault;  and now faces eviction, since her minimum-wage job is inadequate (McCoy, 2015). In some cases, by repeating cheesy details, journalists could criticize other news outlets but pretend a professional distance. For example, the Post reported that the same day as an acti­ vist writer said on CNN that Graham symbolizes “incessant brutality, violence, desperation and systematic violence,” the Daily Mail divulged personal details obtained from Graham’s brother.  This approach led more than a few posters to comment that journalists exploited Graham while simultaneously evoking vitriolic and racist responses, such as Washington Post poster exqrsi’s (October 23, 2015) attack on Graham as a “hopeless” manipulator living off welfare checks from taxpayers. Indeed, race and class routinely over-determine responses to mothers who try to “save” their children. Rebecca Powell (2010) wisely notes that as soon as they give birth, women must navigate the good mother/bad mother discourse, “a discourse fraught with hidden ideologies of class, race, and hidden rules.” Furthermore, mothers must constantly guard against slipping into the “bad mother” category despite lack of any consensus on parenting’s major tenets. When a white, educated, upper-­middle-class mother designed an extreme diet for her overweight ­7-year-old daughter, critics called her approach abusive but never questioned her fitness for

252  Linda Steiner and Carolyn Bronstein motherhood. Similarly, anxious middle-class parents rushed to buy the book by a Yale law professor who explained how she used verbal and physical abuse to push her daughters to become high achievers (Steiner and Bronstein, 2016). In contrast, dozens of Sun posters l­ambasted Graham, accusing her of being the chief architect of her difficult circumstances. Graham’s private life became open for public comment. For example, Plantagenet (October 24, 2015) asked rhetorically: “[W]ould you advise a person with a GED and no skills to have 6 kids as a means of achieving self-sufficiency and control over your own life?” Graham became a singular focal point for debates over welfare, parenting, family size and personal responsibility. This approach, however, did not clarify solutions to the problems of institutional racism, police brutality, and the historic exploitation of communities of color. Unmistakable in her neon yellow shirt, Graham became an instant, albeit fleeting celebrity. Hypothetically, journalists could have used her “feelgood” story as entry point to structural issues affecting poor neighborhoods and to the ethno-cultural, economic, identity, political and sheer survival dimensions related to parenting and family interactions. Journalists could have followed up by discussing how Graham’s situation was both similar and different from normative white middle class families. Instead, journalists used her as an excuse to ignore structural issues and to put the onus on her for controlling her son. Indeed, in the midst of the 2016 violence that erupted in Milwaukee after police killed a young black man, Mayor Tom Barrett begged parents of anyone at the scene to “get them home right now”; he may have been echoing Baltimore Police Commissioner  Anthony Batts, who  had urged more parents—­presumably referring to lower-income parents of color —to assert authority over their children the way that Graham did. Some commenters shared this analysis of—and disappointment over—the coverage of Graham, recognizing that journalists were defaulting to incomplete storylines, both positive and negative, as a matter of convenience. Others confronted sanctimonious posters, speculating about the kinds opportunities that might or should come Graham’s way. Sun reader tibar (October 23, 2015) suggested, as did many others, that Graham should leave inner city Baltimore and “find new opportunities.” Some posters criticized Graham’s financial decisions or compared ­Graham to money-hungry celebrities, such as hem 2015, who posted on the Sun site (October 23, 2015): “[W]hy does everyone who gets 15 ­minutes of fame expect to make money off it? I’m sorry- I think the same of the Kardashians and the couple with 19+ children.” Political scientist Frances Henderson (2015) criticized the erasure of local black women in news coverage of the Baltimore story, just as women organizers at the forefront of protests are typically invisible in mainstream accounts and systematically denied “opportunity to speak truth to power through national media.” Black women experience multiple vectors of

“I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray”  253 discrimination in such instances, she argues, because “corporate media leans towards coverage of the sensational, spin-able and the sexy” and include black women in national discourse only when they fit preconceived notions of black womanhood. Complicating the analysis, rboylorn (2015) observed two very different kinds of images of and responses to black mothers who lost sons to police violence: The media honor mothers who are compliant, quiet mourners, God-fearing, well-dressed and “act” middle class. The opposite happens to mothers who bore children while young, are single or struggling, or act angry and refuse to keep silent. Although news coverage increasingly avoids monster-saint caricatures and the Sapphire, Jezebel, and Mammy stereotypes have changed, the representations of Graham show a continuing legacy of damaging tropes. To the City Paper (Goldblatt, 2015) the Graham coverage corrected journalists’ habitual focus on men’s actions, which exerts masculine “control over the narratives of marginalized individuals and communities.” But just as adding one woman to a corporate board does not change corporate culture, so including Graham in the ongoing narrative about Baltimore was insufficient. Indeed, the feelgood quality of the hero mom story was a detrimental smokescreen, blocking investigation and confrontation of the lived reality of poor black families. More complex and multi-dimensional accounts remain necessary.

References Afro Staff (2015, May 6). Mothers Stand Against Police Shootings of Blacks. The Afro-American. http://bit.ly/2bon0Hd. Ali, M. (2015, May 2). Toya Graham: Queen of the Baltimore riot baby mamas. VoicesForMen.com. http://bit.ly/2aZTvdD. Ball, C. (2015, October 20). If Toya Graham is a hero, why is she still struggling? Madame Noire. http://bit.ly/2eOoiZc. Banerjee, M., Rowley, S. J., and Johnson, D. J. (2015). Community violence and racial socialization: Their influence on the psychosocial well-being of African American college students. Journal of Black Psychology, 41(4), 358–83. Bannon, W. M., Jr., McKay, M. M., Chacko, A., Rodriguez, J. A., and Cavaleri, M., Jr. (2009). Cultural pride reinforcement as a dimension of racial ­socialization protective of urban African American child anxiety. Families in ­Society, 90, 79–86. 10.1606/1044-3894.3848. Bougie Black Girl (2015, May 1). Black mothers will always lose: In defense of Baltimore mom Toya Graham! Bougie Black Girl. http://bit.ly/1cblPHw. Britto, B. (2016, April 18). For Toya Graham, so much happened—and little has changed. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/2aNZnmQ. Burlij, T. (2015, April 30). Jeb Bush praises Baltimore mom who dragged son out of protest. CNN.com. http://cnn.it/2bmIiTH. Douglas, S. and Michaels, M. (2004). The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women. New York: Free Press.

254  Linda Steiner and Carolyn Bronstein D’Oyley, D. L. (2015, April 30). The hypocrisy of applauding the ­baltimore mom while condemning the protesters. The Root.com. http://bit.ly/2a NZ2Rd. Goldblatt, C. (2015, April 28), Many organizers at the forefront of protests are women, despite men taking center stage. The City Paper. http://bit.ly/2aPvFhd. Green, L. (1998–99). Stereotypes: Negative racial stereotypes and their effect on attitudes toward African-Americans. Perspectives on Multiculturalism and Cultural Diversity, X(1). http://bit.ly/1tWL0VS. Hancock, A-M. (2004). The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen. New York: NYU Press. Harris-Perry,  M. V. (2013). Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. New Haven: Yale University Press. Henderson, F. (2015, May 21). Highly visible invisibility: Black women and the politics of representation in Baltimore. NewBlackMan (in Exile). http://bit. ly/2bcgmn3. Henry, J. S., Lambert, S. F., and Bynum, M. S. (2015). The protective role of maternal racial  socialization for African American adolescents exposed to community violence. Journal of Family Psychology, 29, 548–557. Horn, I. B., Joseph, J. G. and Cheng, T. L. (2004). Nonabusive physical punish­ ment and child behavior among African-American children: A systematic review. Journal of the National Medical Association. 96(9), 1162–1168. PMCID: PMC2568462. Lansford, J. E. (2010). The special problem of cultural differences in effects of corporal punishment. Law and Contemporary Problems, 73: 89–106. McCoy, T. (2015, October 23). What happened to the “hero mom” of Baltimore’s riots? The Washington Post. http://wapo.st/1OWaCtD. McNamara, M. (2015, April 29). Baltimore mom smacked some sense into her son—and the rest of us too. Los Angeles Times. http://lat.ms/1ze3cwN. Morris, P. (2015, May 13). Mother bears and the lessons they can teach us. Plain Dealer. http://bit.ly/2fmGNYx. Murphy, C. (2015, Aug 11). Parenting while black. TalkingPointsMemo.com. http://bit.ly/1UAHFFc. Patton, S. (April 29, 2015). Why is America celebrating the beating of a black child? The Washington Post. http://wapo.st/2aSxr2V. Powell, R. (2010). Good Mothers, bad mothers and mommy bloggers: Rhetorical resistance and fluid subjectivities. MP: An Online Feminist Journal http:// bit.ly/2aSxmMB. Rboylorn (2015, Apr 28). A black mother’s love (or what love looks like in public). CrunkFeministCollective.com. http://bit.ly/2aZSPVz. Shropshire, T. (2015, Apr 30). What Oprah said to Baltimore “smackdown” mom about hitting her teen son. Chicago Defender: http://bit.ly/2aZSPVz. Spencer, E. (2015, nd). A letter to Toya Graham. ModernMom.com. http://bit. ly/2b4w16r. Smith-Bynum, M. A., Anderson, R. E., Franco, M. G., Davis, B. L., and ­English, D. (2016). Observed racial socialization and maternal positive emotions in African American mother–adolescent discussions about racial discrimination. Child Development. DOI: 10.1111/cdev.1256. Steiner, L. and Bronstein, C. B. (2016). When tiger mothers transgress: Amy Chua and Dara-Lynn Weiss and the cultural imperative of intensive mothering.

“I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray”  255 In Hundley, H. L, and Hayden, S. E. (Eds.), Mediated Moms: Contemporary Challenges to the Motherhood Myth (pp. 247–274). New York: Peter Lang. Thomas, W. C. (2015, May 4). Baltimore doesn’t need more mothers like Toya Graham. CommunityChange.org. http://bit.ly/1IaVRRF. TMZ STAFF (4/30/2015). Oprah gave me thumbs up for smackdown on my son. TMZ. http://bit.ly/2bcf4bu. Tompkins, A. (2015a, April 28). Journalists are looking for the Baltimore mother who stepped in last night. The Poynter Institute. http://bit.ly/2aZSpOZ. Tompkins, A. (2015b, April 28). Meet Toya Graham, the Baltimore mother who slapped her rioting son. The Poynter Institute. http://bit.ly/2aSweZo. Tyler, I. 2013. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. London: Zed Books. Walsh, J. (2015, Apr 29). The hideous white hypocrisy behind the Baltimore “Hero Mom” hype: How clueless media applause excuses police brutality. Salon. http://bit.ly/1HTeFTX. West, C. M. (2008). Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, and their homegirls: Developing an “oppositional gaze” towards the images of black women. In Chrisler, J., Golden, C., and Rozee, P. (Eds.), Lectures on the Psychology of Women (4th ed). New York: McGraw Hill. Williams, J-J. (2015, May 12). For Baltimore “hero mom,” video captures only part of her life’s struggle. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun.md/2aPvt1l. Young, D. (2015, April 29). Baltimore buzz: Viral mom who punished son speaks out; councilman says don’t call young protestors “thugs” and more. Hello­ Beautiful. http://bit.ly/2aIoYCp. Zurawik, D. (2015, April 29). Why Toya Graham is such a winning TV story line amid Freddie Gray conflict in Baltimore. The Baltimore Sun. http://bsun. md/1GHNw7A.

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Part IV

Conclusion

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14 Why Baltimore Matters Lessons for Journalism Studies Silvio Waisbord and Linda Steiner

The chapters demonstrate how news coverage and public discourse touched off by the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in April 2015 offers insights into how journalism covers difficult, sensitive issues at the core of US society—race, structural inequality, the historical legacy of institutional racism, police violence, citizen uprising, and urban renewal. As an analytical object, Baltimore condenses trends and dynamics in contemporary journalism and public expression. It throws in sharp relief the difficulties for journalism to tackle these subjects before, during, and after events that were both tragic and spectacular, following Conkin and Stromberg’s (1989) definition of an event as “a distinguishable happening, one with some pattern or theme that sets it off from others, and one that involves changes taking place within a delimited amount of time” (173). Baltimore was witness to novel forms of citizen expression and mobilization, the proliferation of news and public discourse, and ongoing debates over journalistic performance.

Themes In this conclusion, we summarize the main arguments presented in the book and propose questions for further exploration. We organize the analysis around the book’s three central themes: the relationship bet­ ween news and urban space; voice and visibility in the public sphere, and journalistic discourse and criticism. News and Urban Spaces Section I examines the connections between news and urban spaces, a classic theme in early journalism studies and the sociology of news. The chapters show that the ways journalism covers urban spaces matter even in the supposedly placeless life of the contemporary digital society, and that journalism continues to hold a preeminent position in the social apparatus that molds the cultural meanings of contemporary urban spaces. The sites at the center of the events in Baltimore are not virtual, but concrete spaces where people live, work, socialize, talk, and protest.

260  Silvio Waisbord and Linda Steiner As with other inner city communities in the United States, a long history of structural racism, policy decisions, and public neglect has molded present conditions in Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester. Neighborhoods are continuously (re)shaped by a conjunction of social forces and (re)imagined in the way they are represented in the news. Just as urban spaces are shaped by the sedimentation of historical processes and social forces, they are socially constructed in the public imagination. Places are not just the physical existence of concrete entities—streets, stores, parks, schools, houses. They have social and cultural meaning. Inner cities, suburbia, gentrified areas, and industrial zones are packed with cultural meanings that result from various forms of social representations, including news. Society gives cultural existence to spaces in the way it narrates, imagines, and interprets them (Gieryn, 2000). All space is political (Lefebvre, 1974), and journalism is part of political efforts that continuously shape space. Like other political institutions, journalism develops, maintains and shifts meanings by embedding spaces in issues and ideologies about class, business, race, gender, health, and safety. Journalism remains a critical sense-making institution that shapes and renews ideological constructions about urban spaces. The aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death offered journalists a unique opportunity to put the spotlight on historical and contemporary social forces underpinning life in Baltimore—the layers of processes and decisions that shaped a particular urban microcosm. Gray’s life stood at the point of confluence of social forces that are rarely in journalists’ radar— redlining and predatory lending, high rates of joblessness, the carceral state, policing tactics aimed at managing poor populations, environmental health hazards and so on. Reflecting deep structural social forces shaping life in the inner city, his death was both particular and similar to other cases when African Americans died at the hands of the police. Baltimore reflects the relation between a “happening” and “structures” in a specific social context. They were symptomatic of longstanding, deep-running social forces—what anthropologist Marshall Sahlins calls “the contingency of events, the recurrence of structures” (1985, xiii). The chapters also suggest that the news media paid limited, fleeting attention to historical forces and current social conditions in West ­Baltimore. The historical shaping of urban space remained largely obscured by the attention to event-centered news. Even as the national news turned attention to Sandtown-Winchester, it failed to peel off the social layers of the city. Little could be gleaned from the coverage about the conditions that shape life in Gray’s community—unemployment, policing tactics, housing conditions, failed development projects, social anger, and dysfunctional politics. The coverage failed to explain this complexity. Journalism largely stuck to events devoid of historical, contextualized portrayal. What burst into the news was another “news flashpoint” followed by a chain of events—Gray’s death and his funeral, protest

Why Baltimore Matters  261 and riots, official announcements, and the charging of police officers who took Gray in custody. A slew of social problems, “the hidden laws” of America in James Baldwin’s memorable phrase (1959/1998, p. 142), remained invisible. The chapters suggest that the tragic Gray’s death and its aftermath cannot be understood without a spatial sociology addressing racism, social inequality, urban poverty, and the justice system. Understanding the forces that historically shaped Baltimore could have helped news audiences to contextualize Gray’s life and death and to understand public anger and demand for justice. And so, journalists missed a chance to report on deep patterns of social injustice woven into the fabric of American urban life. Journalists largely ignored the social realities and histories of urban space that are generally invisible in the news. They reproduced conservative tropes about urban spaces and used the dyadic prism of “order/ disorder.” In their study of news coverage of Baltimore-related demonstrations held in nine US cities, Gutsche and Estrada find the persistence of racialized discourse in stories about urban space and policing that nurture white ideologies of power, control, and safety. By framing ­Baltimore as a site of racialized disorder, journalists renewed longstanding views of the need for white control and virtuous police. They conti­ nued a deep tradition in US journalism of naturalizing the police as the only legitimate authority able to manage seemingly “out-of-control” ­urban spaces. Zelizer similarly argues that journalism’s lack of attention to broad, structural issues was illustrated by formulaic references to space in stories about the events in Baltimore. Notions of place were used to contextualize the events within the neighborhood, the city, and the nation. Yet such references largely failed to challenge dominant narratives about racialized spaces and to delve into structural patterns of social inequalities. Zelizer argues that as it ignored the social factors that have shaped place, journalism provided a superficial, ahistorical view of the events. One central theme that emerges from both these chapters is that by trading on conventional notions of the inner city as dystopian space, news coverage echoed tropes in the white imaginary about black lives in the “dangerous” inner city. It fell back on the notion of “racialized disorder” and reinforced the ideology of the police as the virtuous controller of urban spaces. It praised stability—especially when the situation turned volatile during the riots. It relayed public officials’ demonization of angry demonstrators. Such narratives reinforce conventional law-and-order perspectives and solutions, leaving unexamined the social causes of problems as well as patterns of sociability and community in the inner city. This does little to help readers gain a nuanced understanding about why Gray died or why enraged and frustrated citizens went to the streets. As long as the focus remained on mobs and disorder, little could be grasped about

262  Silvio Waisbord and Linda Steiner critical issues, such as the implementation of policing tactics favored by city officials, the social control of the poor and unemployed marginalized by decades-old policies, the relationship between the carceral state and the justice system, and the frayed relationship between the police and communities. These limitations are unsurprising. The invisibility of social forces as well as the predominance of conservative narratives about the inner city has long been ubiquitous in the way mainstream journalism covers urban spaces populated by people marginalized by racism and capitalism. Such approach is also evident in the coverage of other recent deaths of African Americans by police officers as news largely presented incomplete and distorted portrayals of citizens and the inner city. This conclusion needs to be qualified: some news organizations did not stay firmly within the dominant narrative about the inner city, but instead made use of the opportunity to focus on social problems and engage with the social complexities of racism and urban spaces. As ­Waisbord, Saeed, and Tucker discuss, the Baltimore Sun offered a series of “sociological” stories that shed light onto the social conditions and their causes in West Baltimore. These stories took a look at the challenges of everyday life in Grey’s community and documented various expressions of structural inequality. By doing so, they situated the events in the context of a community ravaged by social problems that resulted from anti-poor policies and decades-old neglect. The stories neither used the language of “structural racism” nor examined the accumulation of historical processes that shaped present social conditions. Yet they produced insightful snapshots into appalling social conditions related to the lack of job opportunities, education performance, health conditions, and other issues. Attention to these issues was short-lived, however; it peaked at the height of news attention immediately after Gray’s death and faded out when the news cycle changed. Andrew Rojecki’s comparative study identifies several news narratives to explain social unrest in Baltimore, including “black criminality,” “poor leadership,” and “structural inequality.” Demonstrating that journalism as a whole may offer multiple “diagnostic” frame to understand certain phenomena, Rojecki argues that the choice of preferred frames varied according to segregation patterns in the cities where news organizations are based. Regardless of the percentage of the black popu­ lation, news organizations in cities with high dissimilarity indices were much more likely to focus frame black criminality as a principal cause of racial unrest. Instead, news organizations in cities with lower levels of segregation were more likely to use a structural inequality frame. Rojecki’s argument challenges journalism studies. It prods researchers to identify competing frames and understand the reasons why specific news organizations are more likely to use certain frames. It invites scholars to examine why certain frames are preferred and how journalistic

Why Baltimore Matters  263 choices are embedded in the relation between news organizations and citizens and social forces in specific locales. By doing so, Rojecki lays out an important argument that deserves further attention: just as “news constructs place,” as Section I demonstrates, social places (in this case, particular residential patterns) affect news frames. Editorial decisions reflect surrounding social conditions and, presumably, readers’ expectations. Prevalent attitudes about crime and African Americans, commonly identified with the “racial threat hypothesis” shaped by segregation, seep into the coverage which, arguably, further reinforces those beliefs. Voice and Visibility in the Public Sphere Section II situates news coverage of the events in Baltimore in the context of the dynamics of voice and visibility in the contemporary mediated public sphere, which attest to the maturation of forms of expression outside the legacy press. In an increasingly flattened news landscape, citizens can utilize digital and non-digital platforms to participate in public communication. An analysis of how Black Lives Matter (BLM) used online media in 2014 and 2015 spread the news of police killings of unarmed black men found that protesters and their supporters successfully and effectively circulated their own narratives on Twitter without relying on mainstream news outlets. Arguing that social media generally help level a media playing field dominated in the US by pro-­corporate, pro-government, and anti-black ideologies, Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark (2016) found that BLM’s high visibility and success in eliciting elite responses put it at the center of a national conversation on police misconduct. Examining the vital role of black journalism in the coverage of the events in Baltimore, Sarah J. Jackson shows how this follows in the tradition of the African-American press, whose mission has long been to nurture the black public sphere and diversify public discourse by putting African-American perspectives at the center and challenging mainstream white news. Black journalism, Jackson argues, remains the catalyst for counterpublics that contest dominant news narratives and news values. Although it follows some journalistic practices and norms identified with the mainstream news, black journalism, as a form of advocacy journalism, foregrounds frames of injustice and systemic racism. It criticizes mainstream news for ignoring longstanding social inequalities and black voices. It regularly expresses the voices of black activists by referencing Twitter hashtags and social media sources even as it also challenges ­A frican-American official sources who fail to recognize structural problems and demonize black activists. Jackson shows the relevance of both traditional news organizations and digital activism in the black public sphere; legacy news organizations remain important even as black digital activism gain visibility. Legacy and digital news are intertwined

264  Silvio Waisbord and Linda Steiner expressive resources enabling the black community to openly challenge dominant narratives and push the boundaries of public discourse. Ashley Howard examines a different dimension of the black public sphere—how activists used social media to foster the critical politics of voice and visibility. Howard shows the versatility of social media for collective action in the context of the affirmation of new forms of black activism in Baltimore. Social media activism reflected the interest and awareness among mobilized publics who deliberately aimed to produce narratives that challenge dominant news and public discourse, and to coordinate mobilization tactics and goals, and to document police abuses and conditions. Social media offer opportunities to contest frames about black lives by offering a counter-diagnostic narrative to standard views perpetuated by power. Also, social media are valuable instruments to plan and execute street protests and other forms of collective action. They ease communication among participants and allow for quick coordination and changes as events unfold. Finally, black activists have used social media to monitor and be witness of abuses. Activists are clearly aware of the strategic value of social media. They are also cognizant of the critical importance of the politics of narrative and counternarrative in the contemporary public sphere. Their actions show that communication struggles are central to the politics of social justice. Disputing and reframing accounts by the police and other actors in power are central to social change. Social media are valuable instruments to make abuses visible and to engage in constant competition with dominant narratives. Howard offers no giddy paean to digital technologies. Instead, she provides a sober examination of the complex uses of technologies in the context of the dynamic relationship between power and counterpower. Efforts to use technology to contest power are flip side of the continuous deployment of surveillance actions to monitor and control activism. Just as innovative uses of social media show the possibilities of digital platforms for empowerment and social justice, police utilization of drones and other technologies attest to trends in the other direction. Power does not sit idly when confronted but integrates new technological developments to police dissent. A dynamic process of adjustment and readjustment of utilizing technologies for various social and political goals takes place. Stuart Allan and Lina Dencik examine different forms of digital witnessing during the events—from Sandtown resident Kevin Moore’s r­ ecording of Gray’s capture in his smartphone to countless images (re)produced and distributed by citizens during the funeral and demonstrations. Grassroots forms of media participation empower citizens in multiple ways. Citizens document events and layer down other voices to conventional journalistic and official accounts. Citizens engage in sousveillance to monitor police officers (“copwatching”) and other govern­ment agencies and officials in hopes of holding them accountable and setting the record straight, especially when the facts are ignored or distorted by official narratives.

Why Baltimore Matters  265 Like Howard, Allan and Dencik show the tension between two opposite and concurrent forces: citizens’ use of digital media to monitor power and government’s evolving, sophisticated forms of citizen surveillance. These developments go hand in hand in a vicious cycle: surveillance begets public distrust which feeds suspicion and activism, actions that, in turn, prompt the intensification of control. Notably, those actions are not simply the product of the availability of digital technologies. More importantly, they reflect skeptical and negative public sentiments about the government amid the intensification of surveillance and harsh policing tactics. In the context of frayed relationships between the police and the community, suspicion is not uncommon. Also, citizens distrust media (mis)representation of the events involving African Americans and the police. These sentiments explain why residents are motivated to reach out to smartphones to record events and to dispute official narratives. Kadijah Costley White examines how young activists react and contest negative portrayals of black youth in the news coverage of the events. She provides valuable insights to understand why they are deeply concerned about the problems of news that lack context and analysis and virtually devoid of the voices of the people portrayed. Her analysis also reveals how young demonstrators discussed and reframed the news, often in social media and interpersonal conversation. Altogether, Section II makes three important arguments. First, seismic transformations in public expression mean that legacy journalism has been demoted from its once privileged position atop the pyramidal system of news and information. It no longer can monopolize large-scale dissemination and curation of news; it is now located in a constantly shifting, chaotic communication environment. Journalism is not the unified, homogeneous institution it once was or was hoped to be. It includes a vast array of forms for producing and sharing news that flout the conventional norms of “professional” journalism (Waisbord, 2013). Today’s hybrid news ecology includes a disparate set of actors with different logics and purposes. Traditional news co-exists with news and commentary that disintermediate and remediate public expression. Moreover, the division of news labor is not as simple as it once was—when journalists reported and citizens read and watched. Neither journalism nor, for that matter, any other social institution, can command, let alone control, the ongoing open discursive struggle. An important consequence of this process is that professional journalists cannot prevent citizens from reformulating news narratives or presenting very different interpretations of “facts.” Because new forms of voice and visibility are not bound by the codes of mainstream journalism, they are able to present a multilayered rendition of events, causes, and consequences. Citizens are not required to adopt the norms of objecti­vity, evenhandedness, and fairness or pay similar attention to

266  Silvio Waisbord and Linda Steiner multiple sources. They can introduce perspectives and facts that do not always pass through the filters of mainstream newsrooms. With citizens and activists constantly adding and juxtaposing voices and fact to news discourse, journalists can no longer claim to provide a complete representation of events. Even less plausible is journalists’ claim to cover multiple social realities in their complexity when the public sphere is awash with various forms of expression about competing realities, some of which barely seem to intersect. Multiple, jumbled, and open-ended news narratives compete for attention and persuasion. Sometimes, journalists listen to, incorporate, and collaborate with citizens. Other times, they carefully sift through the bottomless volume of information, including citizen news, and provide relatively straightforward accounts. Therefore, the “news” about Baltimore included scattered and disorganized information and narratives that juxtapose “professional” news with citizens’ recordings, comments, and discussion. Third, it is misguided to attribute the consolidation of new forms of voice and visibility only to the availability of digital technologies. The events in Baltimore reflected a rising tide of African-American activism in the context of high-prolife cases of police abuses, best represented by Black Lives Matter and growing public consciousness about persistent social inequalities and racial discrimination. These developments are symptomatic of forms of collective action interested in enlarging communicative spaces, denouncing police abuses and demanding justice but also intended to revolutionize visibility and foster transparency and ­accountability. Mobilized citizens assume that the opacity of the behaviors of public officials, in this case the police, remains a central problem. Documenting abuses is seen as a critical action within a broad strategy to shed light on everyday forms of racism, inform the public, and hold government accountable. This is a form of political engagement that intends to change public narratives. By doing so, black activism conti­ nues the tradition of other human rights movements that recognize the unmatched power of visuals and sounds to document misconduct and transform the public into a witness of abuses and crimes committed by authorities. Journalistic Discourse and Criticism Section III shows that Baltimore sparked public conversation about important issues in both legacy journalism and digital platforms. ­Baltimore became both the focus of social commentary and the springboard for debates about a range of matters—from policing tactics to the role of journalists in covering violence and protests. The discourses and ­counter-discourses were not simply about specific events, about what happened. These raised questions about the meaning of events in the

Why Baltimore Matters  267 context of US society. Baltimore dramatized nearly existential problems over the politics of naming, exposing sharp, and often racialized, divides over who has the authority to label what is deviant and what is acceptable. Consider the coverage of Toya Graham, the Baltimore woman who became the touchstone of an intense public debate about a cornucopia of topics—motherhood, morality, race, violence, health, jobs, family. Steiner and Bronstein show that Graham became the focal point of discourse and counter-discourse. Graham’s slapping and berating her son turned into the central motif in the news and public discussion. Not only did she become, albeit briefly, a media celebrity. The praise and criticism heaped on her also reflected the mobilization of ideological discourses in the coverage and the national debate anchored by Gray’s death. The episode activated long-standing tropes and stereotypes in US culture about African American women. It also triggered a rush of commentary about parenting, the use of violence to discipline children, and work and mother­hood embedded in matters of class and race. In catapulting Graham to the center of debate, journalists unwillingly turned her life into a matter of public conversation driven by ideological concerns and frameworks. Portrayals of Graham as a “hero” channeled racialized narratives about individual responsibility and family morality that wholly disregarded social conditions and structural inequality. Those narratives found proof in Graham of an apparently unassailable conviction that Gray’s fate as well as the situation in the neighborhood were symptomatic of problematic morals and flawed parenting. The making of Graham into a hero implicitly vilified other mothers and community members who supposedly did not embrace the same values. As  Steiner and Bronstein discuss, this lacked an understanding of the social grounding and nuances of motherhood, parenting, children, and work in West Baltimore and American society. The dynamics of discourse and counter-discourse are also central to Bonnie Brennen’s examination of changes and continuities in news ­coverage of urban issues between the Watts riots in 1965 and Baltimore and Ferguson in 2015. Brennen explores the ideological premises embedded in news language, thereby analyzing the transformation of US public discourse over half a century. News discourse shapes the way societies come to know, apprehend, and address urban problems. She finds that the ostensibly racist language common in 1965 news reports is absent. Gone is the unmistakably offensive, racialized speech casually used by public officials. The language used to explain problems and frame solutions is different. Racist language has become more inferential than overt, more implicit and subtle than obvious. Still, the limited references to systematic, structural factors underpinning the problems or a deeper understanding of why people protest and riot reflect the

268  Silvio Waisbord and Linda Steiner stickiness of racialized visions of society. The fact that white and blacks describe the situation, the causes, and the solutions in different terms is indicative of deep rifts about how society comes to terms with enduring urban problems. Katy June-Friesen calls attention to journalism’s chronic difficulties in approaching Baltimore as a social space shaped by the sedimentation of historical layers. Social conditions in Baltimore often appeared as background in the coverage rather than what had to be covered and explained. What was missing was an understanding of Gray’s death and subsequent events as the condensation of long simmering social issues and trends. The coverage followed well-worn tropes, including blaming local residents, obsessing with the violence of the riots, and delivering a superficial understanding of long-term forces. It confirmed journalism’s notorious difficulties for paying attention to history, social complexity and the particularities of each case. Drive-by, parachute reporting perpetuates stereotypes and simplistic views of the inner city. No question, all news organizations, most notably cable television news, are not equally guilty of making such egregious mistakes. What is remarkable is that, as June-Friesen discusses, this criticism of journalism was voiced as events unfolded. Op-ed writers, bloggers, and social media users offered pointed, sharp views about journalistic performance. News criticism and meta-analysis were abundant, and published as the coverage was happening. The debates about press coverage of the Baltimore events put in evidence the instability of the traditional journalistic paradigm. As Matt Carlson shows, the position of journalists in the coverage was contested. Ambiguities and tensions came to the surface as journalists, observers, and citizens debated the coverage. Should reporters be impartial observers? Can reporters be evenhanded? Can they remain above the fray when they are victims of violence by rioters and the police? Does news coverage affect the events? What should journalism do to serve communities better? During crises, conventional norms may not be feasible or applicable. Carlson urges journalists to take up public responsibilities by rethinking their roles in such difficult circumstances. Old solutions do not apply in a radically new communication environment, and amid volatile political and social conditions. The evidence presented in this section suggests that journalism may no longer be a cohesive “interpretive community” (Zelizer, 1993) with clear and unified principles, as it once was, or with a shared paradigm to defend. The fact that cable news approached Baltimore differently than many legacy metropolitan news organizations suggests that cano­nical notions about journalistic practice are contested rather than unanimously shared. The wide diversity of views expressed demonstrates that neither journalists nor the public hold uniform views about journalism.

Why Baltimore Matters  269

Conclusion This book makes several contributions to journalism studies. By focusing on news about a particular set of events in Baltimore 2015, it offers a multi­dimensional analysis of the strengths and the limitations of legacy news coverage of structural racism, police violence, and urban ­social problems. It captures the fluid dynamics of the contemporary news landscape with multiple layers of information and public expression and forms of citizens’ voice and visibility. The book demonstrates that the debate about journalism is no longer confined to journalists and experts. The public now plays an important role by constantly producing and sharing “news criticism” through a range of digital platforms and also engaging with the process of news-making by documenting events (from police abuses to street mobilization), sharing information, and contesting frames. These complicated dynamics do not, however, point in a single direction or represent a simple vector. Several chapters collected here emphasize how digital forms of voice and visibility blend journalism and activism. Like other forms of journalism, they embody hybrid forms of news activism that challenge mainstream news (Russell, 2016). ­Social ­media offer opportunities to contest frames and offering counter-­ diagnostic narratives to standard views perpetuated by power. They spark acti­vism and mobilize political communities into action. Social media are valuable in planning and executing street protests and other forms of collective action, allowing for revisions and quick coordination among participants as events unfold. Nonetheless, just as black activists used social media to testify to abuses, so law enforcement institutions monitor activists. These are fl ­ exible tools that can be used, sometimes simultaneously, for control and contestation, surveillance and sousveillance. Just as social media connect citizens in communities sharing content, even advocates for a specific cause may access different sites offering divergent sets of facts and thus may produce contradictory interpretations. Many parties openly engage in discursive struggles to deconstruct the ideological assumptions embedded in the language used by official sources and journalists to characterize events and actors (Adamson, 2016). And black activists’ cop-watching continues a tradition among human rights organizations of exploiting technological innovations to produce visual and audio evidence of abuses and atrocities. This cuts in several directions. The video cameras increasingly installed in police cars might seem able to produce authoritative documents that ought to determine legal proceedings. One danger, however, is that lack of police car videos will be taken as lack of proof of police abuse. Meanwhile, the fragmentary, scratchy videos from police cars that need to be interpreted, and sometimes turn out to be problematic, might serve to remind us that citizens’ cell phone pictures and videos can  likewise be partial and shaky and thus would not lead to

270  Silvio Waisbord and Linda Steiner unanimous assessments. (In the case of Alfred Olango, the family’s lawyer accused El Cajon, CA police of “litigating the case in the media” by choosing to “cherry pick” a still image that supported their action (Winton, Parvini, Knoll, 2016).) Video documentation of police abuses are powerful testimonies and renditions of facts. They put in evidence the experiences and abuses of black bodies and spark attention and action. However, their interpretations are uncertain particularly in the context of polarized politics in the United States. Their consequences in terms of the search for justice are not obvious. What are self-evident truths to some people may not sway others or influence legal processes and judicial decisions. The questions these actions raise about the relationships among opinion formation, collective action and social justice go beyond the scope of this book. Public perceptions and the law do not follow identical procedures and conclusions. This is evident when public beliefs shaped by citizens witnessing differ from legal findings and jury decisions. These divergences emerged with the acquittal of OJ Simpson and the acquittals of the B ­ altimore police officers charged with the death of Freddie Gray. Constant tensions exist between witnessing and justice, evidence and legal facts, public opinion and legal decisions. Just with other forms of human rights violations, witnessing actions are not sufficient to bring social-­political justice to the victims. In particular contexts such as ­Baltimore’s inner city, that disjuncture between witnessing and law foments outrage, if not expressions of rage. The proliferation of visual texts showing police misconduct puts in evidence the political engagement of media activists and exposes realities that authorities prefer to keep away from public view. Yet they might be insufficient to achieve justice and indeed, may thus reinforce perceptions of injustice and institutional bias in the legal system. Finally, for all the attention here to citizen activity and activism in producing narrative and counter-narratives across a variety of digital platforms, professional journalism still matters. In complaining about journalism’s blind-spots, citizens and activists as well as scholars acknowledge that mainstream news accounts are not merely widely debated but widely shared, and also widely believed. Journalists have been criticized for their laziness and cowardice. But they have also gone to great lengths to amass data, even when this is costly in terms of time and energy, sometimes because police or municipal or state agencies stonewalled requests for information, sometimes because the records are disparate and dispersed. More to the point, instances of journalists’ extraordinary persistence and courage in the face of both institutional barriers and citizen apathy are also evident. What the scholarly and audience critiques of the Baltimore coverage show may be less the flaws of the accounts and more the fractured and fraught role of news in daily life, with some communities (by place, by generation, by race and class) increasingly suspicious  of mainstream

Why Baltimore Matters  271 journalists, if they are not downright distrustful and disdainful. As a result, even with respect to the local news media, although perhaps especially for non-local outlets, news organizations were not regarded as reservoirs of trust or resources that communities could use to address and solve local and larger problems about democratic participation and engagement. The reasons not merely for a continuing history of problematic coverage of Baltimore and for the distance between journalists and the communities or cities in which they live undoubtedly reflects a variety of dynamics coming into play. This includes race and class, the economic and technological challenges creating crisis conditions for news media, and relationships between urban centers and suburbs or exurbs, and even wholesale shifts in the underlying structures of the economy. There is the central figure of the police—in a self-perpetuating downward spiral both scared and scary. Meanwhile, on the one hand, the conventions of professionalism and news, behind a façade of objectivity and distance, insist on stories of conflict and violence. Professional cynicism not only produces a steady diet of stories about urban social pathologies among minority communities but also offers no hope that political institutions can do better or promote justice. One critic explains the ­political consequences of the drumbeat of negativism: “Many ­A mericans have concluded that problems such as poverty and crime may be intractable. Media coverage of our cities contributes to public cynicism about government in gene­ ral and about society’s capacity to solve urban problems” (Dreier, 2005, p. 194). The job of this book is not to point the finger at some first or original cause. All of these factors play out in the problems of and in ­Baltimore and Freddie Gray’s neighborhood, and thus in how Freddie Gray’s life, arrest, and death came to the foreground in April 2015. These findings and argument have implications for journalism edu­ cation. As journalism educators, we should continue to discuss and raise awareness about the social responsibilities in covering longstanding ­social problems, particularly affecting minority populations. Parachute and event-centered reporting result in superficial, fleeting, and literally episodic treatment of social inequalities. Such reporting poorly serves the information needs of multiple publics. On-and-off news attention to deep seated social problems is hardly conducive to the central missions of journalism in democracy—providing facts, encouraging curiosity about the diversity of social life, and contributing to public understanding. Even in the absence of immediate events and apparent crises, journalism should cover structural social problems. How this is possible, or what would inspire this, when journalism remains overwhelmingly focused on news events and amid unprecedented transformations in the news industry demands further attention. The events in Baltimore should prod scholars and educators to rethink the conventional journalistic paradigm, both theoretically and practically, if journalism is to remain relevant in a changing communication landscape and able to investigate persistent social inequalities and divisions in US society.

272  Silvio Waisbord and Linda Steiner Another implication is that research and teaching need to contextualize journalism within changing conditions for public expression. It is increasingly wrongheaded to treat journalism as if it were separate from multiple forms of information flows. Even if legacy news retains arguably considerable presence, journalism is not a closed institution; it is embedded in a chaotic, dynamic communication environment. That said, educators have a responsibility to help students understand the new status of journalism in this environment. The news of Baltimore suggests the importance of engagement among citizens and journalists, of journalists seeing themselves as not separate from but as part of the communities where they work, of journalists participating with others rather than isolating them from ­“others.” Journalists, like police and teachers and politicians, are citizens, too. Educators can offer students ideas for partnering and networking with different citizen formations, encourage them to support citizen engagement, as well as teach students to aspire to produce deeper, more complex, more serious reportage of significant social issues. This book shows that this can be done, it should be done, and that it matters.

References Adamson, B. L (2016). “Thugs,” “crooks,” “rebellious negroes” and “black saviors”: Racist and racialized distortions in media coverage of Michael Brown and the Ferguson demonstrations. Harvard Journal on Racial & Ethnic Justice, 32. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2756083. Baldwin, J. (1959/1998). The Discovery of What It Means To Be an American. Collected Essays. New York: Library of America. Conkin, P., and Stromberg, R. N. (1989). Heritage and Challenge: The History and Theory of History. Arlington Heights, IL: Forum. Dreier, P. (2005). How the media compound urban problems. Journal of ­Urban Affairs, 27(2), 193–201. Freelon, D. G., McIlwain, C. D., and Clark, M. D. (2016). Beyond the hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the online struggle for offline justice. ­C enter for Media & Social Impact. http://bit.ly/2fNty1I. Gieryn, T. (2000). A space for place in sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 463–496. Lefebvre, H. (1974 [1991]). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Russell, A. (2016). Journalism as Activism: Recoding Media Power. Cambridge: Polity. Sahlins, M. D. (1985). Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Waisbord, S. (2013). Reinventing Professionalism: Journalism and News in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Polity. Winton, R., Parvini, S., and Knoll, C. (2016, Sept. 30). The battle for footage after the El Cajon shooting: “The country is begging for a video.” LA Times. html http://lat.ms/2diGs6W. Zelizer, B. (1993). Journalists as interpretive communities. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 10, 219–237.

Contributors

Stuart Allan is Professor and Head of the School of Journalism, M ­ edia and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, UK. He is the author of Citizen Witnessing: Revisioning Journalism in Times of Crisis (2013), among other publications. Current research includes examining news organizations’ uses of citizen-generated eyewitness imagery in war, conflict and crisis journalism, as well as a project investigating the role of NGOs in the photo-reportage of human rights abuses in conflict zones. His research has been supported by several national funding councils, and he currently serves on the editorial boards of 15 international peer-reviewed journals. Bonnie Brennen is the Nieman Professor of Journalism in the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University. She received her PhD after working in journalism and corporate communication. Her research focuses on relationships between media, culture and society and often considers the intersection between labor and journalism history. She is the author and/or editor of six academic books and one novel and her work has been published in edited books and scholarly journals. In 2015 she was inducted into Hall of Fame at the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication.​ Carolyn Bronstein is the Vincent de Paul Professor of Media Studies in the College of Communication at DePaul University. She is the a­ uthor of Battling Pornography: The American Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement, 1976–1986 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which received the 2012 Emily Toth Award of the Popular Culture Association for the Best Single Work in Women’s Studies. Bronstein is co-editor of  Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation  in the 1970s (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017). Her work on feminism, pornography, contemporary media culture and representation of women appears in a wide range of academic journals and popular venues, including The Atlantic. Matt Carlson is Associate Professor of Communication at Saint Louis University. His research investigates changing ideas of what

274 Contributors journalism is and what it should be within the emerging digital media environment. He is author of  Journalistic Authority  (Columbia University Press) and On the Condition of Anonymity (University of Illinois Press), co-editor with Seth C. Lewis of Boundaries of Journalism (Routledge) and Journalist, Sources, and Credibility (Routledge) with Bob Franklin, and dozens of journal articles and book chapters. Carlson received his PhD from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Lina Dencik is Senior Lecturer and Director for the MA in Journalism, Media and Communication at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, UK. Her research concerns the interplay between media developments and social and political change, with a particular focus on globalization and resistance. She is currently working on issues relating to surveillance and the politics of data as well as a project on the role of NGOs in visualizing ignored conflicts. She recently co-edited Critical Perspectives on Social ­Media and Protest: Between Control and Emancipation (Rowman & ­Littlefield International, 2015). Carolina Estrada is an undergraduate journalism major in the College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts at Florida International University in Miami. Her research interests include intersections of women’s studies, gender identities, and media production. Robert E. Gutsche, Jr., is an Assistant Professor in the College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts at Florida International University in Miami. He is the author of more than a dozen articles and several books, including  Media Control,  A Transplanted ­Chicago, and News, Neoliberalism, and Miami’s Fragmented Urban Space. His research focuses on place-making in the news and social control through v­ isual and press communication. Ashley Howard is an Assistant Professor at Loyola University in New Orleans. Her research centers on African Americans in the Midwest; the intersection between race, class and gender; and the global history of racial violence. Her current book project Prairie Fires: Race, Class, Gender, and the Midwest in the 1960s Urban Rebellions will analyze how race, class, gender, and region played critical and overlapping roles in defining resistance to racialized oppression. Sarah J. Jackson is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. She researches how national debates about race, gender, and social movements evolve in the public sphere. Her book Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press: Framing ­Dissent (Routledge, 2014), considers the cultural significance of black and mainstream press coverage of African American celebrity protest.

Contributors  275 Her current work examines counterpublics’ social media activism and journalists’ role in shaping collective memory of contemporary black activism. Katy June-Friesen is a Ph.D. student at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses on how news media represent the identities of places and the people who live there, as well as whose voices are included in those constructions. She is particularly interested in narratives of neighborhood change and gentrification in the Washington, D.C., metro area. Jane Rhodes is Professor and Head of the Department of African ­A merican Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has been a scholar, teacher and administrator at Macalester College and at the University of California, San Diego. A second edition of her book Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon appears in 2017; her current research investigates radical activism and the black public sphere. Andrew Rojecki is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is author of Silencing the Opposition  (University of Illinois Press, 1999) and co-author of the  Black Image in the White Mind  (University of Chicago Press, 2001). His most recent book,  America and the Politics of Insecurity  (Johns ­Hopkins University Press, 2016), studies the influence of globalization on American politics. Eissa Saeed is a graduate student in strategic communication at the School of Media Public Affairs at the George Washington University. He received a BA in media studies and public action from Bennington College. He is a Graduate Assistant at SMPA, where he is exploring the intersections between media, politics, and culture and how the three interact with each other, especially in art. He is from Islamabad, Pakistan and spent his early childhood in Nepal. Linda Steiner is a Professor in the College of Journalism at the University of Maryland and the editor of Journalism & Communication Monographs. Her co-authored or co-edited books include Women and Journalism (2004); Key Concepts in Critical-Cultural Studies (2010), Routledge Companion to Media and Gender (2013) and The Handbook of Gender and War (2016), as well as 100 book chapters and refereed journal articles. Steiner served as president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Tina Tucker is a graduate student in political communication at the George Washington University’s School of Media and Public A ­ ffairs. Raised in Oxford, UK she earned a BA in communications and ­political science at UCLA. She is the current editorial assistant for

276 Contributors the Journal of Communication. Her research interests include partisan media environments, determinants of news consumer choice, and ­political information exposure and effects. Silvio Waisbord is Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Communication and former Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Press/Politics. His more recent books are Media Movements: Civil Society and Media Policy Reform in Latin America (with Soledad Segura, Zed, 2016), Media Sociology: A Reappraisal (editor, Polity, 2014), and Reinventing Professionalism: Journalism and News in Global Perspective (Polity, 2013). He has lectured and worked in more than 30 countries, has written or edited 10 books, and published more than 100 journal articles, book chapters, and newspaper columns. Khadijah Costley White  is an Assistant Professor in Journalism and ­Media Studies at Rutgers University - New Brunswick. Previously, she worked as a journalist on an Emmy-nominated team at NOW on PBS and served as a White House intern on President Obama’s Broadcast Media team. White researches race, gender, and politics in media and news. Her current book project, Raising the Volume: How the News Media Created the Tea Party, examines the rise of the Tea Party in online, print, broadcast, and cable news. Barbie Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Professor of ­Communication and Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and ­Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for ­Communication. Zelizer is known for her work on journalism, culture, memory and images, particularly in times of crisis. She has published fourteen books and over a hundred articles and essays. Recipient of multiple fellowships, Zelizer is also a media critic and co-editor of  Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism. She is a recent President of the Inter­national Communication Association. Her newest book is What Journalism Could Be.

Index

#BaltimoreRiots—12, 113 #FreddieGray 107, 112, 117, 131, 147–8, 15 #iftheygunnedmedown 124–5 #OneBaltimore 93 #Palestine2Ferguson 125 #ThisIsBaltimore 93 ABC 17, 90, 158, 235–7, 240, 246 African Americans 122, 141, 189, 192; and integration 47–8, 57; and poverty 3; and segregation 43, 182, 193, 263; and unemployment 181 Al-Jazeera America 16, 197 Allen, Devin 104, 106–9, 116, 131 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 131, 149 Anthony, Carmelo 128 Atlanta Daily World 236–7 Atlanta Journal Constitution 180, 190 Baldwin, James xv, 1, 261 Baltimore 68, 86–9, 91–3, 95–6, 127–9, 132–3, 190; history of 83–5, 191, 260; incarceration rate, murder rate 5, 10, 65, 149; Neighborhood Health Profile 4; nickname “Charm City” 4, 94; racial segregation in 3–4, 6, 68, 226 Baltimore Afro-American 142, 144–5, 147–8, 151, 219, 236, 240 Baltimore City Paper 88–9, 103, 108, 204, 219, 230, 253 Baltimore Sun 12, 66–9, 73–6, 207, 214, 224; history 11; suspends paywall 64, 89 Barnicle, Mike 214 Baton Rouge LA 8–9, 131–2 Batts, Anthony 8, 92, 151, 252 Bay State Banner 144, 146–7, 149

Beal, Joshua xv–xvi Black Freedom Movement 120 Black Lives Matter 41, 58–9, 111, 120, 126–7, 263, 266; #BlackLivesMatter 12, 112, 114, 123–4, 147, 165 Black Panther Party xvii–xviii, 120 black press 139–49, 152–4, 247; see also by individual name Black Twitter 124–5 Blitzer, Wolf 90, 214, 222 Blow, Charles New York Times columnist 226–7 Brisbon, Rumain 6 Brown, Governor Edmund G. 182–3, 185 Brown, Michael 6, 66, 124–6, 130, 202–3, 208, 210 Campaign Zero 114 Castile, Philando 8, 132 Cellphone/mobile phone 103–5, 110, 112, 114, 116, 129–30, 162 Center for American Progress 2 Charleston Post and Courier 28, 30, 32 Charlotte, North Carolina 9, 21–2 Charlotte Observer 21–2 Chicago Daily News Service 184, 186 Chicago Defender 141, 144, 146, 243 Chicago, IL xv, 6, 42, 44–5, 85 Chicago school of sociology 1 Chicago Tribune 183–4, 187, 190 citizen journalism xv, 15, 116, 120, 145, 147 Civil rights movement 43, 111, 113, 142–3, 161, 182 Clark, Jamar 7 Cleveland Advocate 141 Cleveland Plain Dealer 28, 30–3, 49, 52, 250

278 Index CNN 12, 90, 207–9, 214, 220–4, 226–7, 231 Cobb, Jeleni 4 ColorOfChange.org 2 contact hypothesis 14, 43 Cooper, Anderson 207 Cornish, Samuel 139–40 counterpublics 140, 147–8; & black public sphere; 139–41, 144, 146, 153–4 Crawford, John 6 Crisis 144, 149, 151 Crunk Feminist Collective 240–2 Crutcher, Terence 9 Cullors, Patrisse Marie 123, 128 cultural myth 23, 25 Daily Beast 146 Daily Caller 204 Department of Homeland Security 113 discourse 24, 58, 112, 116, 218, 227, 266–7; metajournalistic 199–200; and vocabulary of assets 219; “wilding” metaphors 161 Dowell, Denzil xvii Dvorak, Petula 204 Ebony 143–4, 146–7, 149, 151–2, 230 Elzie, Johnetta 126 Equiveillance 115 Essence 143–5, 147–8, 240 Exelon 128 Facebook 9, 116, 123–4, 128, 133, 147, 167 Farmer, Paul 4 Ferguson, Missouri 31–4, 125–7, 130, 132, 197–9, 201–6, 208–11 First Amendment 108–9, 194, 205 Flickr 109, 133 Ford, Ezell 6 Fox News 12, 207–9, 216, 223, 251 Fradkin, Philip 187 Frame analysis 47, 49 Freedom’s Journal 140 Frye, Marquette xvii, 181–2 Gaines, Korryn 9, 133 Galtung, Johan 4 Garner, Eric 6, 124, 131–2, 151, 165–6 Garza, Alicia 123 Geofeedia 133 Giordano, J.M. 103, 108, 204

Goodson, Caesar 7 Graham, Toya 31, 238–42, 243, 247–53, 267; as heroic 89, 235–6; as welfare queen, as emasculating 237, 244–6, 252 Grant, Oscar 129 Gray, Freddie 64–71, 76, 145–7, 149–50, 167–8, 228, 260; funeral 74, 103, 109, 113–14; lead poisoning, arrest of, death 7, 10, 21–2, 81, 86–7, 169, 189–90; mother 90; twin sister 5, 8; video of arrest 105, 110, 115–16, 132, 162–3, 165, 170–1 Gray, Fredricka 5, 8 Gurbuz, Sait Serkan 108, 205 Gurley, Akai 6 Harris, Eric 7 HelloBeautiful 147, 243 Hogan, Larry 8 Huffington Post 94, 202 Instagram 9, 104, 106–7, 109, 111, 128, 131 Intercept 113 Islamophobia 24 Jet 144, 147, 150, 230 Johnson, Matthew xvii Johnson, President Lyndon B. 121, 184–5, 189 Jones, Tawanda 129 Journalists/journalism 149–54, 250–2, 269–72; “boundary work” and paradigm repair 24, 221–231; crime news 161; criticisms of 95–6, 139–46, 197–211, 261–7; history 11; as interpretive and epistemic community 24–5, 71–2, 86–90, 217, 220, 268; professional standards, spatial bias 25, 70, 73, 81–3, 220; and the city 65, 84, 91; “sociological” stories 62–4, 67, 69, 74–6 Kerner Report (Report of the National Commission on Civil Disorders) 1968 85, 122, 225 Kerner, Gov. Otto 121, 189 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 3, 111, 152, 182, 184, 191–2 King, Rodney 115, 143, 162, 170, 191

Index  279 Lead poisoning 5, 9, 67 Lewis, Ray 128 Los Angeles 85, 179–80, 183, 185–7, 191; LA Police Department, SouthCentral LA xvii, 181–2, 188–90; see also Watts Riots Los Angeles Sentinel 144, 146, 149 Los Angeles Times 180–1, 183–7, 190–1, 228 Lowery, Wesley 202–3 Lynch, Loretta 152 MadameNoire 247 Malcolm X 41 Mann, Steve 104, 110, 115 Martin, Trayvon 23–4, 26, 34, 123, 125–6, 165 McDonald, Laquan 6, 202 Mckesson, DeRay 112, 114, 126, 130–1 Media accountability 200, 210–11 Mencken, H. L. 11 Mills, C. Wright 63 Milwaukee, Wisconsin 9, 33, 252 Minikus, Lee 181–2 Mondawmin Mall 90, 127 Moore, Kevin 103–5, 116, 264 Mosby, Marilyn 28, 93, 152; brings charges 27, 52; suit against 10 MSNBC 12, 88–9, 91, 95, 214, 222, 228 Murphy, John Henry, Sr. 142 Murphy, William H. ‘Billy’ 103, 116, 192 National Press Photographers Association 108 New York Amsterdam News 143–4, 146, 154 New York Daily News 204 New York Times 27–30, 104, 115, 130, 185–7, 190–1, 225–6 News organizations 54–5, 58, 65, 106, 113, 262–3, 271; see also by individual name Newsweek 93, 95 Newton, Huey xvii Obama, Barack 1–2, 151–2, 192–3, 206–8, 227 Olango, Alfred 9, 270 Orlando, FL 24, 34, 194 Orta, Ramsey 131 Orlando Sentinel 27, 30, 34, 193–4

paradigm repair 216–17, 220, 229, 231 Park, Robert 62, 65 Parker, Police Chief William H. 183, 187 Periscope 111, 129, 131 Philadephia Tribune 143 Pittsburgh Courier 141, 144, 146, 150 place-frames 14, 81–3, 86, 93–4, 96 Police 6–10, 21–2, 25, 128–30, 132–3, 172, 186; & brutality and/ or misconduct 66–7, 89, 120, 149, 170, 181–5, 188–91; Copwatching 68, 110–12; rogue cops 50–7 Portland, OR 49, 54–5, 57, 114 PostBourgie 144 Prison Policy Initiative 5, 86 race riots 33, 85, 141, 184, 186 racism 24, 41, 143, 180, 191–2; racial threat 13–14, 42–8, 54, 57–9, 263; structural 53, 62, 65–6, 70–1, 73, 260, 262 Raleigh, NC 49, 55–6, 58 Raspberry, William J. 188 Rawlings-Blake, Stephanie 7–8, 10, 93, 147, 151, 158, 227 redlining 3, 65, 85, 247, 260 Reilly, Ryan J. 202–3 Reuters 108, 147, 190, 204–5 Rice, Brian 7 Rice, Tamir 6, 28, 33, 124, 165 Richmond, VA 49, 55–6, 58 Riots/rioters 15–17, 88, 179–82, 185–6, 188, 190–1, 193; called thugs 12, 27, 52, 150–1, 158, 183–4, 227–8 Rivera, Geraldo 207, 216 Robinson, Rashad 2, 94, 96, 126 Robinson, Tony 6, 124 Root 94, 219, 227, 240–1, 243–4, 247 Russworm, John 139 Sandoval, Edgar 204 Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park (SWH) 4–5, 65–6, 190, 226, 230, 260 Say Her Name 9 Scott, Keith 9 Scott, Walter 7, 32–3, 124, 165 Seale, Bobby xvii Selma, Alabama 111 Simulmatics Corporation 121 Singh, Linda National Guard Major Gen. 236

280 Index Singleton, Michael 235–6, 240, 243–4 Slate 88, 90, 94, 96, 215, 219, 222 Smith, Sylville 9 social capital 64 Social media 93, 104, 109, 112–16, 131, 164–7, 216; & activism 15, 111, 124, 147, 263–4, 269; as tactical tool 110, 120–3, 125–30, 132–4, 168; see also individual platforms by name Sousveillance 14, 104, 110–12, 115–16, 264, 269 space vs place 13, 23, 82, 215, 218, 231, 259–61 St. Louis Post-Dispatch 31, 33, 203 stereotypes 46, 58, 236, 239, 246; Jezebel 253; Mammy 238; Sapphire 237, 251 Sterling, Alton 8, 132 structural inequality 4, 50–8, 262 structural violence 4–5 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 120 Stuever, Hank Washington Post TV critic 220–1, 224 Surveillance 25, 53, 104, 110, 114–15, 132, 265 technologies, digital 110–12, 116, 144, 153–4, 264–6 Till, Emmett 24 Tometi, Opal 123 Trump, Donald xvi, 41, 43 TruthOut 146

Tulsa World 27, 29–30 Twitter 12, 111, 114, 116, 124–6, 130, 263 Van Dyke, Jason 6 Voice for Men, A 240, 246 Vox 146 Waco, Texas “brawl” 11, 226–7 Wall Street Journal 90, 228 Washington Post 5, 10, 27–30, 91, 106, 185–8, 190–2, 202–4 Watts Riots of 1965 xvii, 180–1, 183–7, 193; Violence in The City: An End or a Beginning. Report by Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, 1965 179, 182, 188–9 welfare queens 237–9, 244–5 Wells, Ida B. xv–xvi, 120, 141 West Baltimore 65–6, 69–71, 73–4, 87–9, 91–3, 230 West, Tyrone 129 White, Phillip 6–7 Wilmore, Larry 209 Wilson, Darren 126, 203 Wisconsin State Journal 28, 33 Yorty, Mayor Samuel W. 183, 186 YouTube 89, 105–6, 131, 133, 162, 235, 239 Zimmerman, George 123, 126, 165 Zucker, Jeff CNN president 223 Zurawik, David 12, 207–8, 221, 247–51