nerd-ling/2020blmcoverage

Analysis of local and national press coverage of 2020 BLM protests

#2020BLMCoverage

Analysis of local and national press coverage of 2020 BLM protests related to the murder of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, KY.

After police murdered Breonna Taylor in her home on March 13, 2020, Black Lives Matter Louisville and other activist groups in Louisville, KY undertook a summer of daily protests coinciding with the international BLM protests largely associated with the police murder of George Floyd. The concurrence of these events attested to the ubiquity of police violence in America and fuelled an expanding discourse about race in the public sphere. It also arguably resulted in a loss of specificity in national press coverage, with protests around the country becoming largely synonymous. This project is an attempt to compare the local coverage of the Breonna Taylor protests in Louisville, KY to the national coverage which often coalesced with other national & international BLM protests that year.

By engaging with the specific language used to describe the protests, I hoped to place them in a larger history of discourse—journalistic, literary, etc.—about protest crowds. This would add depth to conversations about press double standards and reliance on spectacle, presumably at the expense of engaging with the actual demands of organizers. It would enrich our understanding of how political change is perceived in the public sphere and the efficacy of direct action at the level of culture. At a local level, this information could eventually be used by organizers and journalists that are already in conversation to change the nature of coverage at the level of conception.

DATA: Local coverage includes 430 articles from the Courier Journal newspaper. National coverage includes 54 combined articles from the New York Times and CNN. Both datasets span from May 1, 2020 through September 30, 2020 and feature the common search terms of Breonna Taylor’s name and the word “protest.” All articles were accessed through Emory University Library's ProQuest Database subscription.

CODE: The original Topic Modelling code for this project was written by Melanie Walsh and is available at the citation below.

Melanie Walsh, Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python, Version 1 (2021), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4411250.