Black Lives Matter and the Press: How Major U.S. Newspapers Covered Police Brutality Against African Americans, from Rodney King to George Floyd

Do African-American lives matter to the nation’s press? And if they do, how does the press demonstrate this? These are the driving questions of this book, for which the author employed content analysis of eight U.S. newspapers with national or state-wide readership to explore their coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Steve Hallock is a professor of journalism at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A longtime daily newspaper reporter, columnist and editor for nearly three decades, he earned a Ph.D. in journalism from Ohio University in 2005 and embarked on a second career in academia. His most recent books are a two-volume analysis of newspaper coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, A History of the American Civil Rights Movement Through Newspaper Coverage: The Race Agenda, Volumes 1 and 2, published in 2018 and 2020 by Peter Lang. He has published three other academic books analyzing journalistic histories and reportage. He also has published research papers in media journals and numerous op-ed commentaries in newspapers that include The New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Denver Post. He and his wife, Joanne, live in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania.