On the night of Could 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by police exterior a grocery retailer in Minneapolis.
From the outset, the incident turned a battle of narratives. The native police initially reported Floyd was experiencing “distress” and died from a medical incident. A day later, bystander Darnella Frazier uploaded a video that confirmed the graphic particulars, together with the police’s extreme use of power main as much as Floyd’s dying.
Floyd’s homicide, and Frazier’s documentation of it, spawned what by some measures was the biggest protest motion in American historical past.
And that, too, turned a contest of narratives, this time within the media. A give attention to the aftermath of the occasions in Minneapolis, and elsewhere, have been shortly supplanted by tales of lawlessness and violence by protesters.
For nearly a decade, I’ve researched the media’s protection of protests, focusing extensively on the reporting of modern-day uprisings towards police brutality.
Protesters maintain up their illuminated telephones as they block a street beneath a freeway in Missouri in June 2020.
AP Picture/Jeff Roberson
In so doing, these narrative modifications present important alternatives to grasp the complexity of journalism and social actions seen from completely different moments in time.
Following flames
Shortly after Floyd’s homicide in 2020, it turned clear that topics such because the function of state violence, the sophistication of calls for for change and neighborhood grief have been much less prone to make headlines than issues reminiscent of rioting and lawlessness.
This sample is a part of what students name a “protest paradigm” that explores the connection between protests, media and the general public.
After Floyd’s dying, these carefully following the protection of conservative media have been extra prone to be uncovered to tales that depicted protests as “criminal mobs.”
But it surely wasn’t simply conservative media. On Could 31, 2020, the native paper, the Star Tribune, described the governor’s “show of strength” – a time period used to explain the large deployment of the Minnesota Nationwide Guard to assist quell the “days of lawless rampage.”
Most protection on the time match a well-recognized sample of delegitimizing the protest motion.
With time and area, the sample breaks
A portrait of George Floyd painted on the pavement is on the middle of a memorial surrounded by flowers, paintings and tributes exterior a storefront at George Floyd Sq. in Minneapolis, Minn., on Could 22, 2025.
Picture by Kerem Yucel/AFP by way of Getty Pictures
In fact, these are selective snapshots of the protection. And a few media might shrink back from masking the anniversary in any respect.
However from my standpoint as a media scholar, the protection that does exist has gone from being dominated by an preliminary give attention to the violent points of protest to, in the primary, a extra reflective have a look at the which means — slightly than the spectacle — of the unrest.
That legitimizing pattern over time isn’t an remoted phenomenon. My colleagues Rachel Mourão and George Sylvie and I discovered one thing related in earlier analysis wanting on the protests that adopted the killings of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012 and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
However we noticed a dramatic change by the third and fourth weeks of protection. With the passing of time, extra legitimizing frames emerged, describing the protest’s substance and calls for, and extra thematic and in-depth reporting turned obvious.
A query of journalism
The protest paradigm’s persistence could also be a perform of journalistic bias − the adage of “if it bleeds, it leads” talks to the quick reporting crucial of prioritizing violence and spectacle over points and which means. But it surely can be a consequence of how journalism operates to tell the general public.
George Floyd household lawyer Ben Crump addresses media together with different attorneys and members of Floyd’s household exterior the Hennepin County Authorities Middle on March 29, 2021, in Minneapolis the place the trial for former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin started.
AP Picture/Jim Mone
These preliminary reviews additionally are likely to characteristic data that might have the largest impression on wider communities − reminiscent of blocked highways and potential property destruction − than simply the aggrieved neighborhood.
This interprets to extra protection typically within the aftermath of a giant occasion − and that reporting is extra prone to delegitimize protests.
These are the primary drafts of historical past, and they’re usually incomplete.
However 5 years later within the case of George Floyd and protests of his dying, protection appears to be like extra full and complicated. That complexity brings extra steadiness, from my perspective.
What journalists write years later are now not the primary drafts of historical past reported with restricted views. In these subsequent drafts, journalists have just a little extra time to suppose, study and breathe. Immediacy takes a again burner, and journalists have had extra time to gather data.
And it’s in these collections of subsequent drafts that the protesters and social actions get a fairer shake.
