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Media Coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots

This study will examine the media coverage of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of the police officers charged with beating Rodney King. The thesis of the study will be that the media was biased in its coverage of the riots, and that that bias was based on racial stereotyping.

The sources consulted for this study indicate clearly that there was substantial bias in the coverage of the rioting. That bias involved reporters' assignments, the power over who wrote the words of the stories filed, the description of the rioting and its participants, and, most importantly, an almost total absence of meaningful analysis of the deeper socioeconomic issues which gave rise to the rioting.

Ishmael Reed, in Airing Dirty Laundry, posits the theory that the media is rife with subtle and not-so-subtle racial bias in general, and that this bias emerged blatantly during the riots:

My comments about the Los Angeles riots . . . include observations that were not made by the number of op-ed pieces that blamed the whole thing on blacks (Joe Klein's Newsweek carried the incendiary cover BLACK VS. WHITES). Very few media outlets commented about white participation in the riots. The media successfully squeezed this complex social catastrophe into their flat and lazy White Hats/Black Hats perspective (Reed xiii).

Reed's argument is supported by the other sources consulted for this study. Reed argues in the paragraph above and elsewhere that much such stereotyping is indeed a result of laziness and habit. In other words, the readership of major metropolitan media outlets have expectations which are based on race (i.e., that blacks are responsible for much if not most crime and were therefore responsible for most of the rioting--along, of course, with Mexican-Americans). However, Reed also notes that the media at times expressed a deeper, more insidious racist approach to the trial that led up to riots:

A professional media o...

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Media Coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:02, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690642.html