This is a summary of the article “The Battle for ‘Trayvon
Martin’: Mapping a Media Controversy Online and Offline,” co-authored by
Erhardt Graeff, Matt Stempeck, and Ethan Zuckerman and appearing as the lead
article in the February 2014 issue of First Monday: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4947.
News coverage about the killing of Trayvon Martin started as a short-lived, local
Florida news piece, but through strategic activation of traditional broadcast media and
participatory online activism, eventually became
the most-widely covered story about race in the last five years. The story drew
immense coverage from professional journalists and active public engagement online and
offline, offering a potent case study for examining the role and influence of
participatory media on media agendas.
To make this research possible, we’ve been building Media Cloud with colleagues at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and
Society. It’s a toolset for rigorous, quantitative studies of media agendas
and frames. Media Cloud collects stories from a corpus of more than 27,000 mainstream
media and blog sources, and uses a link-following methodology to expand the corpus to
other relevant sources.
The first major
analysis to use Media Cloud’s tools for the purposes of “controversy
mapping” considered the emergence in nontraditional, online media of opposition
to proposed SOPA-PIPA legislation. In contrast to SOPA-PIPA, the Trayvon Martin story
occurred and unfolded substantially offline: the shooting of a black teenager
eventually sparked a national debate across multiple media channels, in rallies and
marches, and in the speeches and actions of major political figures. Initially, the
story passed with little notice, but the efforts of a small pro bono team of
lawyers and publicists attracted the national limelight. From there, the Trayvon Martin
story spread to broader audiences through a widely signed online petition, 24×7 cable
news coverage, multiple activist campaigns including competing political agendas pushed
by participatory media, a deeply emotional response from President Obama, and a widely
televised criminal trial.
break
HOW WE DID IT
To understand the full arc of the Trayvon Martin story, we extended and refined the
SOPA-PIPA study’s website-focused methodology. First, we collected data from a
diverse range of social and professional media sources to analyze the story, looking at
the volume of references to the story: in hashtags and individual tweets on Twitter; on
television news’s closed caption transcripts (using
Archive.org’s TVNews archive); in
Google searches for the two main subjects; in front page coverage in national
newspapers (using PageOneX); and through online
actions by the public in the form of Change.org petition signatures. Conceiving of the
media ecosystem as a network demanded a network analysis approach to influence, for
which we used Gephi and the PageRank algorithm. We complemented and
informed the direction of our quantitative analysis by interviewing media activists
involved in the early stages of the Trayvon Martin controversy.
Summary of Data Collected for Period of February 26–April 30,
2012
| Medium |
Total Period |
|
|
| Media Cloud Articles/Posts | 8,643 |
490 (23 Mar) |
|
| Front Page Newspaper Coverage (%) |
1.91 (average) |
27.25 (12 Apr) |
|
| Broadcast Television Mentions | 2,764 |
117 (10 Apr) |
|
| Google Searches for ‘Trayvon Martin’ (%) |
18.2 (average relative to peak) |
100 (24 Mar) |
|
| Google Searches for ‘George Zimmerman’ (%) |
6.4 (average relative to ‘Trayvon Martin’ peak) |
39 (11 Apr) |
|
| Tweets | 374,690 |
74,247 (24 Mar) |
|
| Change.org Petition Signatures | 2,038,557 |
457,775 (22 Mar) |
|
| bitly Clicks | 1,233,899 |
101,879 (23 Mar) |
|
In order to directly compare volumes of attention to each other and appreciate the
general ebbs and flows in attention paid to the story, we normalized the volumes of
each media type per day according to their own peak, and then graphed them along a
timeline.
Figure 1: Normalized Histogram of Collected Data
We broke this timeline into five “acts” based on pivotal events that
served as catalysts of major events, as well as content of the most heavily cited
stories in our Media Cloud corpus.
THE BIGGEST STORY OF THE YEAR, IN 5 ACTS
Act I: Not a Story (February 26–March 6)
The day after Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman, February 27th, the
shooting death was covered, like many crime stories, by a local television news
channel. It appeared on Fox 35 Orlando’s news program. On February 29th, the
Orlando Sentinel ran a story. On March 2nd,
The Miami Herald picked up the story. After that, nearly a week passed
without any additional press mentions. After this small amount of local coverage, we
would expect the story to be over, as the news cycle had moved on.
Act II: Building Pressure (March 7–15)
Figure 2: Network of Interlinked Media during Act II
The second “act” of the story begins on March 7th and 8th, ten days
after Martin’s death, when the story received a new wave of media attention from two of
the national media’s largest outlets: the Reuters newswire and the CBS program This
Morning. This resurgence in interest was the direct result of efforts to publicize
the story: Martin’s family was able to enlist the legal services of civil rights
attorney Benjamin Crump on a pro bono basis. Crump brought on local lawyer
Natalie Jackson and publicist Ryan Julison.
Within a day of joining the effort, Julison began reaching out to the largest
national media sources (as measured by audience reach) and worked his way down until he
found interest from Reuters and CBS This Morning. This mainstream media
coverage helped Julison and Crump generate more stories, but also brought the story to
the attention of an online audience. One reader,
Kevin Cunningham, saw the Reuters piece shared on a Howard University email
listserv. Frustrated by the relative paucity of media coverage and incensed by the lack
of justice, he began
a Change.org petition on March 8th.
Our graphs show that alongside local coverage of the now national story—most
prominently NBC affiliate
WESH—Race-based media led by
Global Grind, and to a lesser extent activist outlets ColorOfChange and the Black Youth
Project, played key roles during this act. ‘Trayvon Martin’ appeared on
Google Trends on March 8th for the first time. The Change.org petition (the most
prominent gray node in the graph above) gained a significant increase in signatures
following this continued interest for the story (indicated by the searches), making it
an early leader in relative media attention according to our normalized histogram.
On March 14th, while other media channels were still relatively quiet on the story,
there was a strong increase in signatures on the Change.org petition (116,391). The
surge continued on March 15th. Using Change.org’s petition traffic data, we were
able to link this surge of interest back to supportive tweets from a number of
celebrities. Specifically, Change.org employee Timothy Newman elicited supportive
tweets from celebrities such as Talib Kweli, Wyclef Jean, Spike Lee, Mia Farrow, and
Chad Ochocinco, creating a 900 percent spike in social media traffic to the petition
between March 12th and 15th.
Figure 3: Celebrity-driven surge in Change.org signatures (dark blue) while the
story begins to gain traction in other media
Act III: National Exposure (March 16–22)
Figure 4: Network of Interlinked Media during Act III
In Act III, the mainstream media strengthened their positions as the predominant
authorities. The energy building around the story accelerated sharply on March 16th,
when Crump was successful in his quest to secure the public release of the audio of the
911 call Zimmerman placed while he pursued Martin with a gun. The audio of the call
established that the 911 operator asked Zimmerman not to pursue Martin.
This explosive evidence increased the story’s reach across the Web. We see
upticks in Media Cloud stories and Google Searches for both Martin and Zimmerman. While
television had helped spread the Trayvon story in Act II, Broadcast Television took up
the story in earnest after the release of the 911 tapes. The audio may have been
especially important for broadcast media, as it gave radio and television an
“actuality” to build a story around.
Figure 5: Effect of 911 Tapes on Media Attention—general rise on all media
channels on 17 March, with notable spikes in Media Cloud stories (light blue) and
Television coverage (green) on March 18th
This strong televised coverage preceded a second wave of sharp growth in Change.org
petition signatures and mentions in online news article and blog posts. The Change.org
petition surpassed a million signatures, and civil rights leaders and activists began
holding rallies and marches in Sanford, New York
City, London, and elsewhere starting March 21st. The most notable of these marches
was the Million Hoodie March
in New York City, initiated by digital strategist
Daniel Maree.
Act IV: Political Agenda Wars (March 23–April 10)
Figure 7: Network of Interlinked Media during Act IV
Nearly a month after Martin was shot, a reporter asked President Obama about the
case during an unrelated press conference in the White House Rose Garden. The President
alluded to the potential of racial profiling by saying that if he had a son, he would
“look a lot like
Trayvon.”
The day following Obama’s statement brought hundreds of blog posts, tens of
thousands of tweets, continued strong TV coverage, front page stories in national
newspapers, and shortly afterwards, the Change.org petition passed the two million
signatures mark. On March 25th, Howard University students released their video
campaign entitled “Am I
Suspicious?” which garnered hundreds of thousands of online views and
additional media attention. On March 26th, the Change.org petition signatures were
delivered to the Florida Attorney General, Sanford Police Chief, US Attorney General,
and Florida’s 4th District State’s Attorney.
The actions taken online and offline, incendiary comments by pundit Geraldo
Rivera, and the President’s statement broadened the story beyond the focus on
the events of February 26th.
The Pew Research Center reported that the Trayvon Martin story “received the
highest level of sustained coverage of any other story with a racial component”
they had seen in the past five years of weekly media tracking. Given the broad media
attention paid to the case, what started as a battle for justice around a singular
event became a political battle, with both sides harnessing the attention trained on
the story for political gain.
We used subgraphs of the linked Media Cloud network to understand different media
framings of the story. This allowed us to identify which actors were important in
introducing the frames. In this act, we see evidence that actors on the political right
worked to establish a narrative that undercut our understanding of Martin as an
innocent victim.
On March 25th, Dan Linehan, lead author of the Wagist blog,
asserted that Trayvon was a drug dealer. This reframing of Trayvon as dangerous,
not innocent, was then amplified by a number of right wing blogs. Although there was no
solid evidence to support the Wagist’s claim that Martin was a drug dealer, the
narrative was effective in that it ended up being echoed by those in the mainstream
media, if only to report that there was no credible evidence that the claim is
accurate. This strategy of introducing a new story framing worked, at least as
determined by volume of mainstream media mentions of the argument that Trayvon
wasn’t an innocent teen.
Figure 9: Network of Interlinked Media mentioning ‘Drug Dealer’ during
Act IV
The influence of Wagist is visible in ‘drug dealer’ sub-graphs in Figure
9. We even see Left-leaning blogs and organizations like Think Progress repeating the
framing, if only to chime in and debunk the assertions. Activist on the Right were able
to gain mainstream coverage for their framing, causing opponents to respond,
perpetuating a debate that features the desired framing.
We also identified concerted efforts to use the attention the story had attracted to
connect the public to broader national issues behind the events. The Center for Media
and Democracy, a progressive group concerned about the influence of the American
Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) proved very effective in propagating their own
original reporting, published on their website PRWatch.org and through their campaign microsite ALEC Exposed. The organization had begun an anti-ALEC
campaign seven months before Trayvon Martin was shot, and
successfully made the connection between the shoot-first Stand Your Ground law used
to justify Zimmerman’s actions and ALEC’s behind-the-scenes influence in passing
these laws in 24 states.
Figure 11: Network of Interlinked Media mentioning ‘American Legislative
Exchange Council’ or ‘ALEC’ during Act IV
Huffington Post contributors wrote pieces connecting ALEC, Trayvon, and
Stand Your Ground. These pieces made arguments that were soon echoed elsewhere in the
liberal blogosphere. From March 21st on, ALEC can be seen as a sustained frame in our
Media Cloud data.
The Left
successfully pressured several of the target ALEC sponsor companies to end their
relationship with the lobbying council. The public attention to the Trayvon Martin
story drove the pressure that eventually resulted in the campaign’s victory. On
17 April,
ALEC announced plans to shut down the Task Force behind the controversial Stand
Your Ground laws.
Act V: Tabloid Court Case (April 11–30)
Figure 12: Network of Interlinked Media during Act V
Six weeks after Martin was shot, Zimmerman was taken into police custody. Google
searches for ‘George Zimmerman’ peaked, alongside a final, smaller spike in
searches for ‘Trayvon Martin.’ Front page newspaper coverage peaked the day
after the arrest, again suggesting a need for actualities as “news hooks”
for newspaper stories.
Figure 13: Tabloid court case patterns of media attention during Act V: Broadcast
Television News (green) stays focused on the story as other channels significantly
decrease—April 19th sees peak of 117 mentions in TV news, well after other media
have peaked; Shift in Google Trends volume toward “George Zimmerman”
(orange) vs. “Trayvon Martin” (turquoise) mirrors the shift in the story to
focus on Zimmerman’s legal battle
In this final act of the narrative, news outlets played up a human drama angle,
giving a tabloid tone to the stories. TV coverage was consistently middle-to-high and
spiking regularly up to and around its peak, while the attention spikes in Google
searches, newspaper front pages, and Media Cloud mentions dissipated shortly after
Zimmerman’s arrest.
BITLY DATA AND THE ROLE OF RACE-SPECIFIC MEDIA
We looked closely at clicks on the link-shortening service bitly and found that
non-race-specific mainstream media still dominates the lists of most clicked on
stories, just like they do in the network maps. However, we also see across our data
and different methods that blogs and niche media, including race-specific media, can
direct attention to their own accounts of the story with profound effects on the
overall media ecosystem.
Table 5: Top 25 Most Clicked Media Sources across All Acts according to bitly
| Media Source | Stories | Total Clicks | Twitter Clicks | Facebook Clicks | Other Clicks |
| Think Progress | 80 | 156716 | 91264 | 24244 | 41208 |
| yahoo.com | 166 | 144100 | 7154 | 55027 | 81919 |
| MSNBC | 141 | 61856 | 20138 | 28948 | 12770 |
| Washington Post | 66 | 56532 | 25190 | 13836 | 17506 |
| The Huffington Post | 154 | 53517 | 9152 | 31926 | 12439 |
| globalgrind.com | 4 | 46705 | 5511 | 34855 | 6339 |
| The Orlando Sentinel | 68 | 45189 | 26419 | 6770 | 12000 |
| CBS News | 153 | 34778 | 14964 | 8722 | 11092 |
| The Miami Herald | 38 | 30869 | 12053 | 10451 | 8365 |
| change.org | 6 | 28648 | 3490 | 20846 | 4312 |
| TIME.com | 20 | 26354 | 13399 | 3163 | 9792 |
| FOX News | 55 | 24708 | 11124 | 4248 | 9336 |
| abcnews.go.com | 20 | 21339 | 10879 | 4868 | 5592 |
| BBC | 83 | 20383 | 14449 | 747 | 5187 |
| The New Yorker | 6 | 19580 | 6559 | 9673 | 3348 |
| dailycaller.com | 15 | 19459 | 12349 | 972 | 6138 |
| The Daily News New York | 98 | 15776 | 7529 | 4185 | 4062 |
| Reuters: Top News | 58 | 15690 | 10916 | 281 | 4493 |
| BuzzFeed – Latest | 41 | 14629 | 3550 | 7899 | 3180 |
| thesmokinggun.com | 2 | 14448 | 4542 | 670 | 9236 |
| hollywoodreporter.com | 10 | 13714 | 9777 | 784 | 3153 |
| bet.com | 1 | 13680 | 698 | 11396 | 1586 |
| USA Today | 61 | 12976 | 1429 | 7602 | 3945 |
| The Onion | 10 | 12949 | 8273 | 1638 | 3038 |
| Slate Magazine | 16 | 12680 | 120 | 11375 | 1185 |
Table 6: Top 10 Most Clicked Media Sources during Act II according to bitly
| Media Source | Stories | Total Clicks | Twitter Clicks | Facebook Clicks | Other Clicks |
| bet.com | 1 | 13232 | 532 | 11228 | 1472 |
| The Huffington Post | 8 | 5421 | 598 | 3642 | 1181 |
| CBS News | 5 | 2081 | 88 | 1362 | 631 |
| blackyouthproject.com | 1 | 52 | 21 | 19 | 12 |
| change.org | 1 | 38 | 17 | 0 | 21 |
| globalgrind.com | 1 | 24 | 18 | 0 | 6 |
| The Atlantic Monthly | 1 | 18 | 13 | 2 | 3 |
| CNN | 1 | 12 | 10 | 0 | 2 |
| The Miami Herald | 1 | 6 | 4 | 0 | 2 |
| theimmoralminority.blogspot.com | 1 | 6 | 6 | 0 | 0 |
Table 7: Top 10 Most Clicked Media Sources during Act III according to bitly
| Media Source | Stories | Total Clicks | Twitter Clicks | Facebook Clicks | Other Clicks |
| Think Progress | 14 | 63486 | 30753 | 16277 | 16456 |
| yahoo.com | 14 | 28981 | 884 | 23171 | 4926 |
| The Huffington Post | 19 | 27514 | 4747 | 17269 | 5498 |
| change.org | 3 | 21421 | 2055 | 16731 | 2635 |
| MSNBC | 19 | 14634 | 8813 | 2691 | 3130 |
| The Miami Herald | 13 | 14253 | 8666 | 832 | 4755 |
| TIME.com | 3 | 11536 | 6837 | 2014 | 2685 |
| globalgrind.com | 1 | 11494 | 95 | 10465 | 934 |
| CBS News | 25 | 9911 | 1923 | 3768 | 4220 |
| The New Yorker | 2 | 8620 | 2150 | 5258 | 1212 |
The bitly data suggests that the link economy and ensuing network of media sources
is only a partial proxy for actual authority and influence in the attention economy of
news media. Clicks are a better proxy for readership than simply the existence of links
to stories.
As noted in Act II and III of the Chronological analysis, alongside Change.org,
Race-specific Media were key to the early mobilization that built up the pressure and
helped make the story a national one. However, their lack of incoming links may mean
that they were “gated” by mainstream media sources when it comes to the
link economy. Yet outside of that context, they enjoyed huge success on platforms like
Facebook, where related events like the Million Hoodie March in NYC were organized.
CONCLUSIONS
Our key finding is that broadcast media is still important as an amplifier
and gatekeeper, but that it is susceptible to media activists working through
participatory media to co-create the news and influence the framing of major
controversies. Benjamin Crump’s strategy to focus PR efforts on
broadcast media brought national attention to the story, which allowed groups like the
Black Youth Project to amplify stories to their online communities, and informed actors
like Cunningham who launched campaigns like the Change.org petition. Without the
initial coverage on newswires and television, it is unclear that online communities
would have known about the Trayvon Martin case and been able to mobilize around it.
In the work of conservative and liberal commentators during “Act IV” in
our analysis, we find that television and newspapers are sensitive to new developments
in stories they have already begun to cover. This openness to new developments may make
some news outlets unwitting amplifiers of outside political agendas, while other news
outlets may intentionally amplify partisan messages when convenient, both products of
networked framing.
Some
debates about the relationship between professional and nonprofessional media
suggest a parasitic relationship between professional and social media, where
professionals report stories and social media argues about them, creating little
additional value. Our research suggests the narrative is far more complicated. In
unearthing content from social networks about Trayvon’s past, conservative bloggers
attempted to contribute original reporting to the dialog, while
Think Progress and others took on a verification role, challenging the facts
unearthed and their interpretation.
In some cases, members of the public using social media present interpretations of
events which themselves become newsworthy, as in the case of newspapers amplifying the
framing of Martin as blameworthy. In other cases, social media becomes a tool to
organize responses to events reported in professional media. Responses like the Million
Hoodie March and the “Am I Suspicious?” video became news stories in and of
themselves, leading to additional coverage and extending the lifespan of the story.
Finally, this study demonstrates the complexity of contemporary media ecosystems and
the need for tools, techniques, and data sources that allow us to empirically study the
spread of ideas between media, examining influences of participatory media on
professional media and vice versa. Work like Memetracker’s ability to analyze quote
propagation and manipulation across news media, Stuart Soroka’s use of
automated coding and sentiment analysis to study newsroom bias and gatekeeping, and
emerging uses of Media Cloud for controversy mapping should be continued and augmented
with “real world” data and broader sources of media online and offline.
Read the complete case study at http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4947/3821.