Framing Peace as Violence : TV Coverage of L.A.'s May Day 2007
Ana, Otto Santa
NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS mala on Latin aMerica www.mediaaccuracy.org Framing Peace as Violence: TV Coverage of L.A.’s May Day 2007 Otto Santa Ana, an empirical...
...Our results were disheartening...
...In contrast, consider how journalists regularly report on casualties in disasters like earthquakes or floods...
...Our research team found no police source for La Jeunesse’s report, no evidence of a shoplifting arrest, no late-arriving group (much less one that could be identified as a gang), or any group that incited the violence...
...The day began with a peaceful march of about 25,000 people in downtown Los Angeles, followed by a smaller afternoon march to Mac-Arthur Park...
...For example, during CNN’s May 1 edition of The Situation Room, correspondent Thelma Gutierrez stood in a crowd of about 100 marchers, most of them wearing white T-shirts and waving U.S...
...was given in either English or Spanish,” it states, add son, while marchers were shown as ing that “this failure likely resulted undifferentiated masses...
...But her positive a 100, came to the illegal immigrants’ comments toward the marchers were rally here demonstrating and inciting NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS mala the crowd...
...Our officer gave a legal dispersal order and were met with the violence...
...2 Like all journalistic narrative frames, the riot-suppression narrative features a set of stock characters— villains, victims, and heroes...
...Nor did the other network or local news stories confirm any of these embellishments...
...3 Later on the same day, La saying: “Many of these people are Jeunesse offered Fox News viewers a wearing white T-shirts . . . as a sym-more detailed (and more error-filled) bol of peace...
...In half an hour, more than 450 police officers forcibly broke up the rally of 6,000 to 7,000 people, according to the Los Angeles Police Department’s own report...
...On that day, 5 million people marched in more than 100 cities across the country...
...How did the TV newsrooms represent this important event to the public at a time when the nation’s attention was focused on immigration policy...
...That’s when protesters began throwing personnel, bottles and rocks at police, many of whom knocking one officer off his were caught up motorcycle...
...She mentioned the sparked hours earlier when a man was diversity of the demonstration and arrested for shoplifting...
...But a review of all the video broadcast showed only one brief video clip of such an action...
...flags...
...The LAPD report contra enumerate, dicts La Jeunesse’s claims: the injured “No complete dispersal order demonstrators...
...and rejecting free trade treaties and structural adjustment policies that displace people and force them to leave home...
...for three years progressive immigrant rights activists have fought proposals in Congress that would eliminate those changes in immigration policy that were won in 1964–5 by the Chicano civil rights movement—establishing family reunification as the centerpiece for immigration policy, ending the bracero program, and moving away from contract labor...
...Allow me to quote it here...
...Moreover, the networks limited the airtime allotted to interviews with demonstrators, while giving significantly more time to anchors, correspondents, journalists, and police personnel...
...60, (May 2008): 27...
...the sentence should have read: “david Bacon posits that the crackdown is purposefully meant to trigger a political crisis that will pressure Congress to approve the migration policy the government has been pushing for all along: a temporary guest-worker program...
...In 2007, however, when the news media effectively cast these marchers as agents of violence, the peaceful nature and message of the demonstrators was lost on the nation...
...With such a framing, the nation passed over the political issue of immigrant rights and depreciated the moral legitimacy of the peaceful marchers...
...If casualty figures are unavailable, they pointedly men-tion their absence and promise to relay them when they become available...
...JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2009 mala The riot-suppression narrative, undercut by the camera, which conwhich we detected in all three of our tinued to visually portray the demonanalyses, did not become dominant strators as a faceless mass...
...It did not bring the marchers into focus, rendering them part of the background with no individual subjectivity...
...to justify this, these advocates (including many democrats) claim employers face vast labor shortages if they don’t get the labor they want at a price they want to pay...
...For example, took pains to on the morning of May 2, correspondent report the Fox News William La Jeunesse broad number of cast reports saying: “Police injured police ordered the stragglers to disperse first by helicopter officers and and siren, then loudspeaker news media and bullhorn...
...The LAPD reported that no marcher was arrested for fomenting this violence...
...The marchers in this narrative are cast as violent (hence criminal) agitators, while the police are law-abiding government agents charged with disciplining disorderly civilians...
...Reporters or anchors described the immigrants as criminals, as aliens, or otherwise inhumanely 63% of the time, while they depicted them as workers, as undocumented, or with otherwise humane metaphors 32% of the time.5 The media depicted the demonstration itself as peaceful 34% of the time and as violent 59% of the time...
...When anchors verbally described the police as violent (as occurred 87% of the time), we noted mitigating on-screen captions like “Excessive Force...
...subsequent TV news reports but they failed from CNN Newsroom, FOX News Special Report With Brit to mention, Hume, and FOX News Report much less With Shepard Smith...
...On the other hand, we found ample broadcast visual evidence that police officers violently attacked defenseless, peaceable marchers...
...stations...
...Consequently, a striking feature of the May 2 reports were the many disclaimers that reporters made regarding the judgment that the viewers at home should withhold...
...Note that this broad generalization mixes different reports (for example, local versus network and FOX versus MSNBC) and combines the reports on May 1 before and after the attack with reports aired on May 2. Subgroups of the stories revealed the same patterning...
...Beyond the Four Freedoms 1. See the group’s self-published document, “Strategic Leadership: Framework for a 21st Century National Security Strategy,” available at cnas.org...
...notes (continued from page 2) Bush is simply implementing that program on the ground...
...lovato argues that the sole economic motivation of enforcement is giving fat contracts to administration cronies like Halliburton...
...Our study combined three independent approaches: fact-checking (we evaluated the accuracy of the reporting by comparing it to the LAPD account...
...4. Tony Phillips, “The Bolivian Crisis, the OAS, and UNASUR,” Americas Policy Program Discussion Paper, September 30, 2008, americas.irconline.org/am/5567...
...After the attack, local news accounts rendered demonstrators as violent 94% of the time...
...He never mentions the bills...
...and visual semiotics analysis (we interpreted how the newsrooms visually represented the events...
...However, following the police attack, immigrant as criminal metaphors shot to 75%, reflecting the riot-suppression narrative that falsely indicts the victims...
...For example, they were careful to include statements of officials like Chief of Police William Bratton, who assured the public that only some police officers got out of hand, while a few anchors and correspondents repeatedly blamed demonstrators for instigating the violence by throwing rocks and bottles at police officers...
...She also noted that the report: “Police Department sources demonstrators called for immigration tell me that this incident actually policy reform...
...this was wholly my own editing blunder, not lovato’s...
...See also Kathryn Ledebur and Coletta A. Youngers, “ONDCP Reports No Increase in Coca Cultivation in Bolivia in 2006,” May 23, 2007: available at wola.org...
...this gives a free pass to the backers of the corporate reform of immigration policy, and drops out any connection to displacement caused by trade and economic policies abroad...
...available at cfr.org...
...Its sheer size took the nation by surprise, and its political impact could not be denied...
...In sum, the news media verbally depicted both the marchers and the police as equally violent, in contrast to the LAPD’s version of events...
...The police actions fit the definition of “political violence...
...that’s like saying the iraq war was fought to profit Halliburton...
...expanding ways for people to come to the united states with rights (not as guest workers...
...Our study shows a contradiction between what network television news presented and what the actual footage showed...
...While metaphor analysis of verbal reports provides important information, visual semiotic analysis of a subset of nine stories reveals a more complete picture...
...KTTV-FOX Ten O’Clock News aired a similar report...
...In coming days, it will become clear what transpired...
...we are already seeing the resurrection of the corporate “comprehensive reform” proposals...
...4. See Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphoric Representations of Latinos in Contemporary Public Discourse (University of Texas, 2002), chapters 2 and 3. 5. These latter figures do not add up to the overall totals since we do not refer to so-called minor metaphors (which rarely occur) and metaphors that are neither violent nor peaceful...
...Using constitutive metaphors that construct social roles and set up narratives that interpret actions as normative behaviors, the television news did not depict the LAPD’s unprovoked actions in ways that represented the police as the perpetrators of violence, as the police commission did in its report...
...The immigrant rights social movement had galvanized the nation’s attention with the Great May Day Marches of 2006...
...That is important...
...For this May Day news event, however, television news omissions and inaccuracies were always at the expense of the marchers...
...Sadly, violent police misconduct abruptly ended this second rally...
...But they failed to mention, much less enumerate, the injured demonstrators...
...President-Elect Barack Obama,” Santander de Quilichao, Cauca, Colombia, November 10, 2008...
...The marchers were characterized as peaceful or in otherwise humane terms 8% of the time, and violent, criminal, or in otherwise inhumane terms 83% of the time...
...A longer, more detailed version of this article is being reviewed for publication by Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies...
...3. Council on Foreign Relations, “U.S.–Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality,” Independent Task Force Report no...
...victim roles...
...there’s more to the war than that, and there’s more to immigration enforcement than contracts and the growth of a repressive bureaucracy...
...Democracy Promotion’ in Bolivia,” Americas Policy Program column, October 31, 2008, americas.irconline.org/am/5638...
...Until then there should be no rush to judgment.’ ” KNBC Channel 4 News at 5 p.m...
...Later, memdescribed the ICE deportation raids bers of his group or gang, about 50 to that separate families...
...until the news broadcasts of May 2. Even after the LAPD attack, a hand-Before the LAPD attack, news sto-ful of reporters at the scene reported ries from the morning of May 1 were the peaceful nature of the marchers, framed in terms of two oppositions: making statements like “We did not the Immigration and Customs En-hear any order to disperse...
...Indeed, most of the images of demonstrators in most of the stories we analyzed were distant or aerial shots...
...Yet the newsrooms sought to mitigate this direct visual evidence of police culpability...
...it is not enough to criticize the repression of the raids while ignoring the broad program they are intended to advance, or alternatives to it...
...the news media also made peaceful marchers out to be the instigators of the violent police response...
...JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2009 mala If we focus only on local news stations, they initially spoke about immigrants in a balanced manner: 48% criminal or mass versus 50% human or worker...
...2. Shira Gordon, “Bolivia: Beyond the Rhetoric,” Columbia Political Review 7, no...
...2. See “Andes 2020: A New Strategy for the Challenges of Colombia and the Region (A Center for Preventive Action Report)” (January 2004...
...citizens to reconsider the place of the formerly invisible immigrant workers in our society...
...At the same time, it accepted responsibility for having injured 246 people with “more than 100 baton strikes” and at least 146 “less-than-lethal impact munitions” (i.e., hard rubber bullets).1 The LAPD report stated that the police attack was “unprovoked” and blamed the violence on, among other things, a failure of the police command structure and inadequate planning...
...These false claims were then echoed in in the chaos...
...1 (November 2007...
...As they put it, ‘Sometimes policing isn’t pretty.’ ” O ur three analyses allow us characterize the televi sion news reporting of the violent events of MacArthur Park as a journalistic debacle...
...The camera was positioned so that only Gutierrez was granted journalistic authority...
...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS mala on Latin aMerica www.mediaaccuracy.org Framing Peace as Violence: TV Coverage of L.A.’s May Day 2007 Otto Santa Ana, an empirical sociolinguist and critical discourse analyst, is Associate Professor in UCLA’s César E. Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies...
...available at mama radio.blogspot.com...
...in a number of people who had no Gutierrez framed the story as a idea that they were being ordered to march of peaceful demonstrators by disperse...
...When demonstrators were interviewed, they were shown enraged or injured and remained nameless...
...Factual inaccuracies, we Such a framing allowed, at least on the noted, became numerous as the riot verbal, if not the visual level, humane depictions of immigrants...
...These metaphors are particularly powerful ways to construct mental images for viewers to make sense of news events and the people involved.4 To this end, we found 1,342 spoken metaphors in the 51 news stories...
...progressive immigrant-rights organizations and most of the labor movement today advocate alternatives that focus on ending employer sanctions, raids, and the criminalization of work and migration...
...6. The Andean Information Network, “Bolivian Coca Growers Cut Ties With USAID,” June 27, 2008: available at ain-bolivia.org...
...MALA: Framing Peace as Violence 1. The full report, titled “An Examination of May Day 2007 MacArthur Park,” was issued in October 2007 and can be downloaded at lapd online.org/assets/pdf/final_report.pdf...
...7. Ibid...
...Aerial coverage remained the most popular camera technique, which kept viewers symbolically detached from the demonstrators, who were rendered as faceless masses...
...8. Hillel Nossek, Annabelle Sreberny, and Prasun Sonwalkar, “Introduction,” in Media and Political Violence (Hampton Press, 2007), 1–22...
...It effectively forced many previously unconcerned U.S...
...The clash at MacArthur Park started when officers tried to disperse demonstrators that moved off the sidewalk into the street threw rocks and bottles at officers.’ They go to say: ‘The officers gave a legal dispersal order...
...3 (1999): 3–23...
...Moreover, the report found that the police officers did not properly declare the assembly to be unlawful, so when they forcibly dispersed the marchers, they violated the marchers’ First Amendment rights...
...To find out, my research team and I examined 51 stories about the day’s events, broadcast by three national networks and five local L.A...
...9. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Collective Action, Social Movements and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1994...
...lovato will reply in the next issue...
...guaranteeing real legal status (permanent residence visas) for the undocumented...
...Treating Bolivia as a Sovereign Partner 1. Author interview, October 2008...
...See Douglas McLeod and Benjamin H. Detenber, “Framing Effects of Television News Coverage of Social Protest,” Journal of Communication 49, no...
...2. We base our riot-suppression narrative on McLeod and Detenber’s “protest paradigm...
...Using the riot suppression frame, on May 2 newsrooms took pains to report the number of injured police officers and news media personnel, many of whom were caught up in the chaos...
...despite the regrettable error, the disagreement between lovato and Bacon—on how to interpret the immigrant deportation raids—stands...
...6 Local newsrooms also made serious efforts to get statements from official spokespeople for the police associations...
...3. Roger Burbach, “The Rise of Food Fascism: Allied to Global Agribusiness, Agrarian Elite Fomenting Coup in Bolivia,” Global Alternatives News, June 30, 2008, globalalternatives.org/node/87...
...These statements were aired without a concomitant response from the rally organizers.7 For example, KABC Eyewitness News told its viewers: “The police union has issued a statement asking the community not to rush to judgment...
...In this way the correspondent was portrayed as a unique per suppression frame became newsrooms dominant...
...those who have advocated the corporate “comprehensive” bills have claimed that legalization for the undocumented was possible only if we agreed to move backward, transforming immigration policy into a much more overt labor-supply system...
...8 The media coverage of such events likewise needs critical oversight...
...Research assistance: Layza López, Edgar Munguía, Omar Torres, and Martín Vallejo...
...and KCBS 2 News at 5, both on May 2. 7. As in: “The president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League released this statement earlier today...
...When television news media falsely and repeatedly depict peaceable marchers as violent instigators, the political ramifications are substantial...
...David Bacon Berkeley, California Editor Pablo Morales replies: the sentence that Bacon quotes from lovato’s article does indeed misstate Bacon’s view, as expressed in the Dollars & Sense article that lovato cited (“the real political purpose of the iCe raids,” January/february 2007...
...3. LAPD report, 9, 50...
...critical discourse analysis (we focused on the metaphors that anchors and reporters used when they spoke about the social agents involved...
...The folforcement (ICE) agency versus im-lowing day, however, the framing migrants, and peaceful demonstrators of the stories swapped the perp and versus anti-immigration advocates...
...migration is a human right, but people should have alternatives for economic development that make migration voluntary, and not the sole means of survival...
...by otto Santa ana O n may 1, 2007, thousands of los Angeles residents took to the streets to reprise the massive immigrant rights march that captured the nation’s attention a year earlier...
...We found that local and network television newsrooms presented the events of May 1 using a conventional frame that we call the “riot-suppression narrative...
...available at cfr.org...
...O ur research (which is based on cognitive sci ence), focuses attention on the metaphors used by journalists to portray the people involved in a news event...
...5. Laura Carlsen, “The Failure of U.S...
...Such newsroom skepticism, however, was strained in the face of the abundant videotaped evidence from numerous professional and amateur sources of the unprovoked LAPD attack on families, ambulant vendors, and well-seasoned and remonstrate journalists and their camera crews...
...Since the portrayal of moral legitimacy to a national audience is a key element of an effective social movement, on May 2 the television news media undertook a political role that reduced the public estimation and support of this movement.9 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2009 The Minga of Resistance 1. “An Open Letter From the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca, ACIN, to U.S...
...And for this particular news event, the role of victim was reserved for news media personnel caught up in the police attack—not families with children in strollers, innocent marchers, or even the hapless street vendors—because the riot-suppression narrative always indicts demonstrators as the violent perpetrators...
...For example, two local newscasts shared a video clip showing “media attorney Royal Oaks [who says] by looking at images it appears that police may have abused their authority, but he stresses that until a thorough investigation is conducted, no one should rush to judgment...
...Visually, the shift to the riot-suppression frame was accomplished by replacing images of peaceful marchers with those of the LAPD in full riot gear striking demonstrators (and journalists) with batons and shooting them with rubber bullets...
...6. KCAL 9 News at 4 p.m...
...what is disturbing about lovato’s misstatement of my work is that he uses it to dismiss the idea that the raids advance any political program beyond the growth of the enforcement bureaucracy itself...
...The news media worked the standard framing of an alleged confrontation...
Vol. 42 • January 2009 • No. 1
