BLM Within the News
Black Lives Matter is a social movement that was founded back in 2013 and has since then gained massive media attention through the concepts of racism and police brutality within the past couple of years. It can be said that this social movement has become prevalent as of the year 2020, especially after the murder of George Floyd. And, since the incident back in May of this year, more news outlets have seemingly been supportive of the movement while maintaining one of the essential elements of journalism, that being objective yet still applying facts to their articles. On top of that, it’s invigorating to see news publications seemingly be in support of this important movement yet still maintain a certain distance from it as well in order to educate the public. For example, one NBC news article discussed how a teacher started wearing masks that had to do with the Black Lives Matter movement, and how she ultimately was out of her job after not complying with the school’s apparent dress code. This article was effective in the sense of trying to garner together different points of view and the logic behind those differing perspectives, although the Assistant Headmaster of the school had decided to not make any comments in regards to the situation. It showed the back-and-forth between the two sides to the story, which is also an important aspect when it comes to journalism. Additionally, it was interesting to see that the apparent dress code had not been enforced until after a whole week went by with the teacher wearing her masks. In this article, one can easily tell which side is more incompetent than the other. In another article with the New York Times, it discussed how effective and important this social movement has become for America and for other countries as well. It incorporated an interactive map of data collected to show how many protestors were accounted for in the different states and what cities they fell under. It also included statistics in how many people protested in general within the 50 states, supporting the statement that the protests that happened back in June have considerably made history in being the largest movement for justice of all time and even goes into explaining how this movement is considerably different from the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the Women’s March back in 2017. The data that this news source provides just further shows that readers can come to their own conclusion on how to feel about this movement as a whole without shoving certain biases or opinions in their faces. Facts are facts. On top of that, the article also continues on with showing more data and visuals on the protestor amounts as well. Furthermore, one other article written by the Pew Research Center delved into how support of the Black Lives Matter movement has either decreased or remained stagnant since June. What’s interesting to see here is how the article does talk about support of the movement between both political parties, those being Democrats versus Republicans, but only among the different racial groups as well. It doesn’t talk about the sociological reasoning as to why this is, but it allows those who come across to take the information at hand and come to their own conclusions. In addition, different institutions have also thrown together clips of the marches and protests in support of the movement as well, as seen with ‘Great Big Story’, which is a global media company.
Links to articles:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html
Link to Multi-media element: