Fatal Racial Encounters in the US in the Media Representation

Discussions of such interrelated notions as identity, citizenship, ethnicity, and race are usually formulated in reference to the present trends of immigration and/or globalisation. However, when dealing with cultural dis–encounters in the US, such issues dramatically emerge at the intra–national level and do not refer to migration flows, but to the historically problematic relationship between Black and White populations. In the contemporary US scenario, we witness violent nationwide racial confrontations, as well as thought–provoking debates on such issues. Notable examples of violent racially–biased interactions can be found in the frequent killings of unarmed African–American men by white police officers in the US. Among recent front–page cases are the deaths of Eric Garner in New York City (July 17, 2014) and Mike Brown (August 9, 2014) in Ferguson (MO), which can be seen as two instances of the same tragedy, on both the personal and social levels. Those killings were followed by months of nationwide protests and rioting, calls for justice and voluminous news–media coverage, all of which constitute the focus of this study. A key issue at stake in these stories is racial profiling: these deaths are a stern reminder that race still plays a critical role in how the law is enforced in the US. Apparently, a persistent identity and empathy gap is still generating conflictual mixed socio–cultural interactions. The fact that no police officers in these cases have been brought to trial has had a disruptive impact on societal values and belief systems, which in our web–wired arena is still resonating beyond socio–geographical boundaries. The role of the media in this chain of events cannot easily be overvalued, owing to their ever–growing potential to intersect the plurality of the existing communication channels, and to rapidly engage with (news media) audiences. In particular, through the fluid and virtually global semiosphere of the Worldwide Web, many (old and new) newspapers increasingly disseminate and amplify their news by utilising both real–time, cross–media communication and hyper–textual links to additional sources (which, in turn, lead to other sources, and so on). Moreover, on many newspaper websites different genres share contiguous spaces, such as more traditional articles alongside freer ‘voices’, blogs, forums, tweets, social media, as in the case of The Huffington Post (the liberal– oriented American online news aggregator), featuring Black Voices, Gay Voices, etc. The aim of this study is to analyse both qualitative and quantitative data from the news coverage of the protests following these killings. Samples extracted from the HuffPost website, both from the articles and from the Black Voices bloggers’ posts will be comparatively analysed along the evaluative dimension, by utilising some of the Appraisal Framework categories, with a special focus on «Attribution» (White 2012), with its evaluative implications. The main difference between the journalists’ and bloggers’ voices can be found in their degree of personalisation/impersonalisation, as will be shown and discussed in this study.