Patrol car headlights pierced the clouds of tear gas, illuminating toddlers sitting on their fathersâ shoulders. The children squinted into the glare, raising their small arms to say, âHands up, donât shoot.â Protesters poured milk into their eyes to quench the sting of pepper spray. Officers crouched on tanks, guns pointed at the crowd. Police in riot gear stuffed handcuffed journalists into vans. These images dominated the news for days after unarmed African American teen Michael Brown, Jr., was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Months, and even years, after the television satellite trucks caravanned away to cover other tragedies, Brownâs killing continued to make national headlines. Journalistsâ attention to Ferguson stretched beyond Canfield Drive, where Brownâs body had lain in the street for hours, and past West Florissant Avenue, where protesters faced rows of police riot shields. News coverage began to interrogate systems and institutions in new ways.
Journalists across the country voted âpolice killings of blacksâ1 as the top news story of 2014, marking the first time in more than 25 years that an issue of racial violence had appeared anywhere on the Associated Press Top Ten Stories of the Year list.2 Although undeniably tragic, Brownâs death was not unique. He was not famous. Brown was at least the 16th unarmed African American killed by police in 2014. At least five such deaths were documented in 2013 and at least ten were documented in 2012.3 Brownâs death was not deviant among the killings that had preceded it. Those deaths had also generated public outrage that flashed big in headlines, then disappeared. One month before Brown was killed, 43-year-old Eric Garner was choked to death by a Staten Island police officer. Garnerâs last words, âI canât breathe,â became a trending Twitter hashtag, but his death did not make national news until after protests erupted in Ferguson. One year before, the acquittal of the neighborhood watch volunteer who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, spawned the Black Lives Matter movement4 and earned the attention of legislators and professional athletes.5 Five years earlier, Oscar Grant, 22, was shot and killed by an Oakland transit cop while handcuffed on the floor of a metro train. The award-winning film Fruitvale Station chronicled his death.6 Journalism recorded these deaths as singular momentsâas surprising news absent larger context. Then came Ferguson. The coverage of Ferguson persisted longer and went deeper. It began to connect events to show trends.
Journalists selecting the killings of African American men by police as the top news story of 2014 marked a profound shift from a decades-old pattern of racial issues being among the most underreported issues in US news coverage.7 In 2015, journalists selected two stories about racialized violence for the APâs Top Ten poll. âBlack deaths in encounters with policeââdescribed as a trend rather than a series of discrete eventsâin Baltimore, Chicago, Tulsa, and North Charleston, South Carolina, ranked as the fifth most important story of the year.8 Ranked ninth was the murder of nine African Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina, church, a crime that was notably deviant but ranked less importantly than the police killings. White supremacist Dylann Roof was sentenced to death for the murders. In 2016, journalists ranked âBlack men killed by policeâ as the third most important story in the AP poll. The election of US President Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in the UK ranked first and second.9 The Associated Press description of the third-place vote read, âOne day apart, police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, fatally shot Alton Sterling after pinning him to the ground, and a white police officer shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop in a suburb of Minneapolis. Coming after several similar cases in recent years, the killings rekindled debate over policing practices and the Black Lives Matter movement.â10 This description linked cases of police killings in ways not seen in pre-Ferguson coverage. Although the three men named represented less than 1 percent of the 963 documented fatal police shootings of civilians in 2016,11 their deaths were presented as part of a larger issue.
After the protests in Ferguson, news coverage began to tie Brownâs death not only to other police killings but to larger systems of power. For example, on April 5, 2017, more than two years after the shooting, The New York Times covered the election of a new city council in Ferguson, a city of 20,846.12 On August 10, 2018, nearly three years to the day after the killing, The Washington Post reported that Brownâs mother, Lezley McSpadden, was running for Ferguson City Council.13 Following a small cityâs election was not typical for the nationâs largest and most prestigious newspapers. Nor was covering municipal government in relation to a local shooting, especially one that by news standards was not deviant or novel. Yet, the news coverage of Ferguson began to connect to larger narratives of policy and government structures. In 2015, a team of Washington Post journalists created an online database to monitor civilian deaths at the hands of police. The following year, the âFatal Forceâ database won the professionâs most coveted award, the Pulitzer Prize, for national reporting. The database continues to be updated, including using information submitted by the audience and verified by Post staff, to chronicle hundreds of police killings each year. The project began because Wesley Lowery, a young African American reporter who was covering Ferguson, saw a systemic problem rather than a singular incident.14 That the project has continued acknowledges that the problem has continued too.
In the consistently problematic history of US news coverage of racial issues, the events in Ferguson came to stand out as different not only for the amount of news attention they received but for the depth of the news narratives, the systemic exploration of racism in those narratives, and the way technology enabled the audience to become part of the news narratives and to speak back to them. In a Washington Post op-ed printed days after Brownâs death, Columbia University Political Science Professor Fredrick Harris wrote, âSome believed that the beating of Rodney King and the riots that followed would lead to improved policing in black communities. But energy went toward rebuilding, not reforming. Ferguson presents an opportunity to pursue a different course. Letâs turn this tragedy into a tipping point.â15 Understanding whether Ferguson represented a moment or a movement in journalism about racial issues requires exploring the confluence of phenomena that crystalized there. It requires widening the lens to capture emerging types of journalism that leverage technology to give the audience a larger role. It means turning that lens to examine coverage of the racial inflection points that came before and talking to the journalists who were there. This book attempts to start a...