News Media and the Positioning of the Dakota Access Pipeline: Representing Protest

(Hardback)

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In this book, Aubrey M. Crosby examines the structural and institutional forces which largely govern the socialized practices of news production often a byproduct of deeply-rooted institutional standards and discourse conventions to provide a constructive critique of how events and participants are framed and represented in news coverage of protests.

This work examines mainstream news reporting of the Dakota Access Pipeline Protest (2016) from a Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspective. Despite being a years-long campaign of resistance, mainstream news media significantly reduced the scope of the movement through its fixation on key events occurring on September 3, October 27, and November 20, 2016. This work explores the way that media selective (re)framed the reality of the #NoDAPL events for their readers and represented participants and issues. Media came to represent protest participants only through the collective, protesters, a functional term highlighting their civil disobedience and erasing their individual identities.

Members were often depicted in negative rolessetting fires, abusing or defying officers, engaging in property destruction, and morewith rationales for these activities being linked to their overly emotive and destructive intent. Law enforcement, on the other hand, were generally shown to be more reactive to the protesters. Their actions often were those aligned with occupational expectationsclearing protesters, arresting them, engaging in methods of crowd control, etc. More intense or ethically ambiguous actions were reframed in line with their intent to maintain law and order. Though journalists had both the platform and the opportunity to engage more critically in existing dialogues around issues of Tribal and Indigenous sovereignty (as well as the chance to confront, even if minimally, the contentious colonial history of injustice inflicted on the Tribes), reports made little effort to. Findings are compared to alternative press and pressed against the backdrop of the Protest Paradigm framework.

Ultimately, by identifying and drawing attention to both problematic and productive practices of coverage, this book promotes constructive change in the ways that power is "wielded, maintained, and produced in organizations and in the social realm."

Author Bio

Aubrey Crosby is Assistant Professor at Regis College, USA.