Race and Ethnicity Commons^™

Racial Media Framing Of Riots And Protests: A Constructionist View, Vanessa Pruitt

Undergraduate Research Journal

Protests are one way in which minority groups, lacking representation or access to policy making to change their situation, bring attention to social justice issues deeply affecting them. However, although protests are generally an attempt to gain media attention, the media are often unsympathetic to the causes underlying the protests which they support. To the contrary, media tend to discredit these social movements and apply their own agenda to their reporting through a process called framing. Framing is rooted in the theory of social constructionism, wherein the media play a role in constructing our shared social reality. The way most …