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Representing Byron De La Beckwith In Film And Journalism: Popular Memories Of Mississippi And The Murder Of Medgar Evers, Kristen Hoerl

Kristen Hoerl

On June 12 1963, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was shot to death in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Nine days later, police arrested avowed white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith for Evers's murder.

Public Argument As Self-Preservation: A Critique Of Argumentation Theory As A Democratic Practice, Kristen Hoerl

Kristen Hoerl

The article presents a critical analysis on the argumentation theory of self-preservation as a democratic practice in the U.S. It focuses on public controversy instances following the World Trade Center and the Pentagon attacks on September 11, 2001. The democratic deliberation attempts to equalize power relationships structuring argumentative practice through self-risking argument. It presents the distinction between the public sphere and public controversy to prevent the collapse of the public with news media.

Commemorating The Kent State Tragedy Through Victims’ Trauma In Television News Coverage, 1990 - 2000., Kristen Hoerl

Kristen Hoerl

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd at Kent State University and killed four students. This essay critically interprets mainstream television journalism that commemorated the shootings in the past eighteen years. Throughout this coverage, predominant framing devices depoliticized the Kent State tragedy by characterizing both former students and guard members as trauma victims. The emphasis on eyewitnesses as victims provided the basis for a therapeutic frame that promoted reconciliation as a rationale for commemorating the shootings. This dominant news frame tacitly advanced a model of commemorative journalism at the expense of articulating political critique, thus …

Cinematic Jujitsu: Resisting White Hegemony Through The American Dream In Spike Lee’S Malcolm X, Kristen Hoerl

Kristen Hoerl

Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X (1992) presented Malcolm X’s life story using the narrative framework of the American Dream myth central to liberal ideology. Working from Gramsci’s notion of common sense in the process of hegemony, I explain how Lee appealed to this mythic structure underlying American popular culture to give a platform to Malcolm X’s controversial ideas. By adopting a common sense narrative to tell Malcolm X’s life story, this movie functioned as a form of cinematic jujitsu that invited critical consciousness about the contradictions between liberal ideology and the life experiences of racially excluded groups. Other formal devices …

Mississippi’S Social Transformation In Public Memories Of The Trial Against Byron De La Beckwith For The Murder Of Medgar Evers, Kristen Hoerl

Kristen Hoerl

In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted for the 1963 murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Journalism coverage of the trial and the 1996 docudrama Ghosts of Mississippi crafted a social values transformation myth that depicted Beckwith as the primary villain of civil rights past and cast his conviction as a sign that racism had been cleansed from Mississippi. Popular media naturalized this myth intertextually though narrative repetition and through symbolic cues that established the film as a source of historic understanding. These cues deflected critical attention from contemporary social conditions that have maintained racial inequity and continue …

Burning Mississippi Into Memory? Cinematic Amnesia As A Resource For Remembering Civil Rights, Kristen Hoerl

Kristen Hoerl

The 1988 film Mississippi Burning drew extensive criticism for its misleading portrayal of the FBI’s investigation of three murdered civil rights activists in 1964. As critics noted, the film ignored the role of black activists who struggled for racial justice even as it graphically depicted the violence that activists and other blacks faced during the civil rights era. This movie’s selective depiction of events surrounding the activists’ deaths constituted the film as a site of cinematic amnesia, a form of public remembrance that provokes controversy over how events ought to be remembered. An analysis of the film and its ensuing …

Deranged Loners And Demented Outsiders? Therapeutic News Frames Of Presidential Assassination Attempts, 1973-2001, Kristen Hoerl, D. L. Cloud, S. E. Jarvis

Kristen Hoerl

There were 7 assassination attempts on U.S. presidents between 1973 and 2001. In this article, we critically examine coverage of each attack in The New York Times and The Washington Post, describing how the coverage employs therapeutic discourse frames that position the president as vulnerable and portray the attackers as lonely and demented outsiders. Noticing contradictions in this pattern, we also identify counterframes, including those acknowledging the political motivations of the assassins, the diminished public sphere that is a context for those actions, and the contradictions in a legal system that denies the insanity pleas of those framed so extensively …