Pamela Oliver
Tens of thousands of mostly Black people converged on Jena, Louisiana on September 20, 2007. Drawing on our cache of articles from Black newspapers and mainstream newswires, we examine how the rally was covered. The sample is 44 mainstream newswire articles and 84 Black newspaper articles that mentioned the big
Read moreA major part of the Jena 6 story I’m telling is the differences between what the original sources said happened and what later narratives said happened. These differences point to narrative impulses in telling stories and in movement building. This older blog narrates the story. The sources to be compared
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The last two posts gave details about trends in media coverage and Google searches about Jena. In this post, I put the two series together to see how they relate. First, we look at the close-up of coverage and trends in the 40 days around the big protest. The plots
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This is another post that is a supplement to the piece I’m revising about the Jena 6 protest in 2007. That piece will be published by the Cambridge Elements Contentious Politics series. The goal is to use Google Trends to see if I could determine whether any of the early
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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
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The Jena Six protest happened on September 20, 2007. The Jena Six had been charged after a December 2006 fight. In this blog I’ve collected links to some videos, images, and retrospectives about the case. I expect to return to this site to edit it to make it more organized.
Read moreI’ve just submitted the draft of my piece about the Jena 6 that is a substantial extension and revision of the blog post I wrote a couple of years ago. It will need a 20% cut before publication and responses of editors and reviewers may lead me to rethink my
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My research team just posted a working paper that compares Black newspapers and mainstream newswires in their coverage of Black American protest events. In this paper we are just trying to lay out the big patterns we see in the data so we can do more work to refine the
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Update: The latest version of this paper has a new title, updated numbers that include more events identified in the process of reviewing and cleaning the data, and a somewhat different emphasis, but the basic findings are much the same. The SocArXiv link will take you to the latest version
Read moreA sustained campaign throughout the 1990s and 2000s successfully opposed the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
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