{"id":620,"date":"2014-11-07T20:29:10","date_gmt":"2014-11-07T20:29:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/?p=620"},"modified":"2015-10-13T19:01:52","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T19:01:52","slug":"pointergate-moral-panic-and-online-protest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/2014\/11\/07\/pointergate-moral-panic-and-online-protest\/","title":{"rendered":"#pointergate, Moral Panic, and Online Protest"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Thursday, November 6, Minneapolis-Saint Paul ABC affiliate KSTP ran a story claiming Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges had \u201cflashed a gang sign\u201d with a \u201cknown felon\u201d during a get out the vote drive in North Minneapolis. The photo shows Hodges embracing and pointing at a young black man, and him pointing back. To support the headline that law enforcement officials were \u201coutraged\u201d by Hodges\u2019s interactions with this man, KSTP reporter Jay Kolls quoted retired Minneapolis police officer Michael Quinn, who accused Hodges of \u201clegitimizing gangs who are killing our children.\u201d The story drew an immediate backlash in other press outlets and on social media. Writing in the Star Tribune, University of St. Thomas law professor Nekima Levy-Pounds criticized<\/span><\/a> the media\u2019s routine portrayal of black men as dangerous criminals and argued that such stories desensitize people to institutional racism. Twitter users deployed the hashtag #pointergate to criticize KSTP and Kolls for their inflammatory reporting, and by mid-day Friday, #pointergate was the top non-sponsored hashtag in the U.S. What might KSTP have expected to gain from running a story like this? Should it have anticipated the furious backlash? And should we be surprised that the reaction on Twitter is as big a story as the original report? Playing on fear has long been a media tactic for drawing attention to stories, but the fear of crime and gangs is a special case.<\/p>\n

News media organizations construct their stories as secular morality plays that deploy a \u201cdiscourse of fear,\u201d which transforms news consumers into victims of the problems that the stories construct. The use of these “problem frames” has increased during the 2000s, and the media\u00a0applies them much more frequently to stories about race, drugs and gangs.<\/h5>\n