As the first volume of this two-part study established, major newspapers across the United States used framing and gatekeeping to shape the narratives of the tumultuous civil rights movement. Beginning with the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision and the subsequent battle over desegregating a Little Rock high school, and continuing through the 1960 lunch-counter sit-ins, the next year’s freedom rides, and the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations, these ...

Do African American lives matter to the nation’s press? And if they do, how does the press demonstrate this? These are the driving questions of this book, for which the author employed content analysis of eight U.S. newspapers with national or statewide readership to explore their coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement. More specifically the research examines how these newspapers covered police beatings and slayings of unarmed African Americans, beginning with the brutal beating of Ro...