Verbs Take Sides in George Floyd Demonstration Coverage

Public trust in the media has tanked in the last four years. Police have become increasingly hostile to media, lately arresting or hectoring reporters covering demonstrations of George Floyd’s killing by one of their own. Yet, media tend to gravitate to milquetoast verbs writing about police behavior in riots. Police “deploy” anti-riot tactics or “disperse” crowds in news coverage, but protesters “trash,” “hurl” or “destroy.” Why do police always seems to get anodyne verb treatment in news coverage of violent demonstrations? As Mike Laws explains in Columbia Journalism Review, the answer may lie in the wooden wording of generations of press releases.

Protest Periphrasis: How the words used to describe the actions of police hide their violence

OVER THE PAST WEEK, in news coverage of the nationwide protests against police brutality, breezy, anodyne words like deploy, disperse, and engage have served as a gloss on state-licensed aggression, papering over municipal forces’ and National Guardsmen’s frequently appalling crowd-control tactics. Conversely, protesters—or “rioters”—are said to have hurled or thrown or fired objects at police: bottles of water, rocks, whatever is close at hand. When the authorities retaliate, making happy use of the heavier tools they brought to play with (rubber bullets, explosive paint canisters, tear gas), they are treated to extenuating phrasing, merely returning fire or defending themselves, even though it has not always been the case that they had anything to defend against or were retaliating at all. In some cities it has been abundantly clear, from eyewitness cellphone videos if not from local outlets’ coverage, that the cops were the instigators; not for nothing did Slate headline an article “Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide.”

But Slate ain’t everyone, and thus we wound up with a post early Wednesday morning on the website of KRMG, a Tulsa news-and-talk station, offering that local police had “used tear gas and pepper balls to disperse crowds.” Even in liberal Oakland, KCBS Radio began a May 30 dispatch: “Amid protests, demonstrators blocked Interstate 880, set fires, and trashed much of the downtown area before police dispersed them with tear gas and rubber bullets.” A chyron on CNN over the weekend read protesters launch objects as police release tear gas in Minneapolis. And a recent New York Times tweet had it that, also in Minneapolis, “a photographer was shot in the eye,” while in DC “protesters struck a journalist with his own microphone.”

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