No Such Thing As Bad Press

I am very interested in examining the media coverage of race relations in the 1960’s as written about by Jane Rhodes in the selections from Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon. It seems to me that the example of “ the press customarily framed stories about the civil rights movement within binary oppositions that reproduced the standard values of American journalism: good versus evil, justice versus lawlessness, and North versus South” (p. 64) and Life Magazine’s series “fuel[ing] national anxieties about black protest and establish[ing]… new frames for media discourse” (p. 65) illustrates one major complexity about joining journalism and conflict.

In the first case, journalism (both in the 1960’s and today) used such tactics as “fuel[ing] national anxieties” (p. 65) in order to sell their stories. Race conflicts in the 1960’s and various conflicts today do something for this technology by providing them with information to make a popular story. However, on the other hand, technology does something for race as illustrated when the Oakland Tribune attacked the Black Panthers declaring that they “‘pretend they’re just as grown up and honorable as the man who wears a badge and is paid to carry a gun to preserve law and order’” (p. 74) illustrates their negative attitude towards the press, while at the same time getting the name of the Black Panthers out in the public sphere, blowing it up so that it is a topic that everyone needs to know about. To take this point further, in their attack they actually end up getting the Black Panther message out there by illustrating that they pretend to wear the badge partially because the Oakland police force makes it very hard for them, as Black men, to join the ranks.