An Analysis of Protest Paradigm in News Media and Contention in 2020 Racial Injustice and Policing Protests in North Carolina

Abstract

In 2020, there was a wave of racial injustice and policing protests that occurred across the globe after the murder of George Floyd. Although racial injustice and policing protests are not a new phenomenon, sociologists have not yet systematically examined either the empirical patterns of contentiousness of protests or adequately applied theories of media coverage to the racial injustice and policing protests of 2020. Using a sample of protest events from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, a team of sociologists gathered a sample of protest news articles from the NewsBank USA news archive database. Using this data, I conduct Protest Event Analysis (PEA) using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to measure the contentiousness of the protests and the sentiment of the news coverage of these protests during this time period. The thesis tests theories of contention and media coverage of protest by modeling the effects of a variety of community characteristics on these outcomes. The research results provide limited support for community measures expected to be associated with protest contention and protest media coverage.