Media coverage asymmetrically brands property damage as violence while normalizing police violence

Evidence

What we actually see are mounted police horse charges and some property damage; what we hear about — as bravely narrated by a helmeted reporter from behind the police lines — is the “violence” of the student protestors. (It’s of course not accidental that Paul Mason’s report came from inside the kettle.) One of the most notable features of the media coverage since Day X has been the persistent equivalence it has made between violence and property damage. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1548

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates Barthes’s concept of anchorage — verbal text steering how the image is read.
• XREF: Resonates with later blue-on-blue and police-brutality coverage debates and with the Black Lives Matter-era critique of equating property damage with violence. — connects to: Media coverage persistently equated protest property damage with police violence — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1548; Media framing of hate crimes as individual acts obscures state and media complicity — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 103; Journalists being caught in police violence shapes how protest history gets written — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 38 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Media coverage persistently equated protest property damage with police violence #corroborates (0.95) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1548
• Media framing of hate crimes as individual acts obscures state and media complicity #expands (0.80) — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 103