On September 20, 2007, tens of thousands of Black people converged on the small rural town of Jena, Louisiana to protest charging six boys with attempted murder after a school fight in which the victim, while knocked unconscious and injured, had been able to attend an event that evening. The broader context was racial conflict in a community where nooses had been hung on a tree at the high school where White students generally sat after a Black student asked in assembly whether anyone could sit there. The boys were charged with attempted murder in December 2006, and we pick up coverage of the case in January 2007. The big Jena 6 rally triggered a huge media cascade. The graph shows the counts of articles returned in searches of three databases. ProQuest Ethnic NewsWatch, which indexes Black newspapers and other “ethnic” news sources, US NewsStream, which indexes regional and national US newspapers, and Factiva, which indexes both US and international English-language news sources including television and radio shows. As the graph shows, there was little coverage of the case before May 2007, more coverage during the summer of 2007, then an explosion of news coverage around September 20, followed by ongoing coverage after the big rally. (Ethnic NewsWatch in particular shows weekly cycles for dates due to the fact that Black newspapers generally publish weekly; these weekly cycles can also be seen in Factiva and to a lesser extent in US NewsStream. ) There was extensive discussion at the time about the failure of mainstream media to cover the case until just before the big protest. The New York Times did not cover the case until just before the big rally. However, it is not true that there was “no” mainstream news coverage before the explosion of coverage.
Search strings. For Ethnic NewsWatch, the search term “Jena” returns very few false hits. The US NewsStream database includes the Alexandria, Louisiana newspaper Town Talk, which began covering the Jena 6 case in May 2007, as well as other regional Louisiana newspapers. There are many irrelevant hits for “Jena” in this database, including people’s names, the city in Germany and the pharmaceutical company there, and the Jena band of the Choctaw, as well as sports scores for Jena High School. The keywords Jena + noose or “Jena Six” or “Jena 6” capture nearly all the relevant stories with only a few false hits in US NewsStream and Factiva.
Another display of the same data separates the three sources. May 20 is the date of publication of the widely-read “outside” news stories about the case by Tom Mangold of the BBC and Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune. There is a tiny impact of these stories in the Factiva database. Mychal Bell’s trial was at the end of June and there is a little flurry of news coverage in US NewsStream and Factiva around that date. There was a protest in Jena on July 31 and Al Sharpton visited Jena in the first week of August. Again, there are little flurries of coverage around those dates. News coverage really picks up in September and then there is a lot of discussion of it after the big rally before the media cycle dies down again.
These flurries of early coverage can be seen more clearly if we restrict attention to the period before September 15. For US NewsStream, we also distinguish between coverage by Louisiana news sources and sources outside Louisiana. Louisiana newspapers, especially the Alexandria Town Talk, were covering the case as the boys were arraigned for trial in January, as the case proceeded during the spring, and in May after the May 2 rally and the approaching trial date. May 9 is the publication date for Jordan Flaherty’s reports, May 20 for Howard Witt’s Chicago Tribune piece, and Mangold’s BBC documentary was broadcast on May 24 with a blog post dated May 19 that was reprinted in the Guardian on May 20. Late June is the Mychal Bell trial, July 31 is the protest in Jena and Al Sharpton visited Jena in the first week of August. The call to protest on September 20 begins circulating in mid-August. The Black newspapers captured by Ethnic NewsWatch begin covering the case in July.
Comparing to Genarlow Wilson
How should we think about the volume of mainstream news coverage of the Jena 6 case? It did get some mainstream news coverage, although not much relative to the later explosion. But in 2007 another case of unjust prosecution of a young Black man was in the news. In December 2006, Genarlow Wilson had been sentenced to ten years in prison for being the recipient of consensual oral sex from a 15-year-old girl when he was 17 at a drunken teenage party in a motel room. The Wilson case received mainstream media coverage and national-level support from the NAACP, Al Sharpton, and ColorOfChange.org. As the graphs show, the Genarlow Wilson case received more attention than the Jena case until August and the general level of coverage for the Genarlow Wilson case and then Jena case were comparable through the summer. It is possible that the Wilson case competed with the Jena case for media and movement attention during most of the year, with attention turning to Jena in August.
