Screening the Los Angeles 'Riots' Race, Seeing, and Resistance

Examines TV coverage of Los Angeles riots and responses of viewers of different ethnicity.

On April 29 1992, the 'worst riots of the century' (Los Angeles Times) erupted. Television news-workers tried frantically to keep up with what was happening on the streets while, around the city, nation and globe, viewers watched intently as leaders, participants and fires flashed across their television screens. Screening the Los Angeles 'Riots' zeros in on the first night of these events, exploring in detail the meanings one news organisation found in them, as well as those made by fifteen groups of viewers in the events' aftermath. Combining ethnographic and quasi-experimental methods, Darnell M. Hunt's account reveals how race shapes both television's construction of news and viewers' understandings of it. He engages with the long-standing debates about the power of television to shape our thoughts versus our ability to resist, and concludes with implications for progressive change.

List of figures; List of tables; Preface; 1. Introduction; Part I. Context and Text: 2. Media, race and resistance; 3. Establishing a meaningful benchmark: the KTTV text and its assumptions; Part II. Audience: 4. Stigmatized by association: Latino-raced informants and the KTTV text; 5. Ambivalent insiders: black-raced informants and the KTTV text; 6. Innocent bystanders: white-raced informants and the KTTV text; Part III. Analysis and Conclusions: 7. Raced ways of seeing; 8. Meaning-making and resistance; Postscript; Appendices; Notes; References; Index.

Darnell M. Hunt explores how race shapes the construction of news and viewers' understandings of it, by examining televised coverage of the Los Angeles 'riots' and viewers' responses to it. A major contribution to the debates about the power of television and our power to resist it.