Date of Award
Spring 2016
First Advisor
Dr. Carrie Buchanan
Abstract
This content analysis centers on a comparison of reporting content between mainstream print media and citizen journalism, pertaining to high-publicity deaths of African American individuals caused by police officers. The deaths focused upon in this paper include Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York; Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio; and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland. For the purposes of this paper, the mainstream print outlets examined are The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Advanced Twitter searches using the Topsy search engine have been utilized to document citizen journalism reports. Through constructed week sampling and the examination of 51 articles and 1302 tweets, it was found that mainstream media generally reports on incidents before citizen journalists, and that the interaction between citizen journalists using Twitter and the mainstream media is extremely sparse.
Recommended Citation
DeBaun, Katelyn, "Content, Interaction and Media Portrayal of Violence against African Americans in Mainstream and Citizen Journalism" (2016). Senior Honors Projects. 89.
https://collected.jcu.edu/honorspapers/89
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