mediaculture10eupdate

Step 1: Description

TWITTER can help spread news stories that might otherwise be overlooked. The Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum with its Twitter hashtag and users spreading videos and reports of police misconduct.

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

Given our research question, in the description phase you will need to research news media coverage of deadly police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Such shootings are certainly on the media agenda. In 2015, both the Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper developed sophisticated databases of police shootings. Either database is a good place to start. You can drill down your search and select filters to analyze only unarmed victims, and also analyze by race, gender, age, and location. You may wish to look at police shooting cases in just your state.

See:

Washington Post, Police Shootings: http://www. washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/
The Guardian, The Counted: People Killed by Police in the US: http://theguardian.com/thecounted/list

First, examine at least five cases of African Americans killed by police in 2015 in which video was available (e.g., Christian Taylor, Samuel DuBose, Walter Scott, Freddy Gray, and Eric Harris). Read the sample news media stories at the bottom of the profile of each of the five cases.

Then, select five more cases of unarmed African Americans killed by police without video footage of the incidents. Again, read the news stories linked for each case.

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