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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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
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In studying protest events using news sources, it is important to recognize the non-equivalence of events and articles about events. Social movement researchers usually code information about protest events in news sources with the goal of drawing conclusions about the frequency and size of the actual physical events that led
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