Framing Police Brutality

We often hear of the word "framing" but do we truly know what it means? Framing by definition is “selecting some aspects of a perceived reality and making them more salient in a communicating text.” Framing does 4 things

1.      Promotes a particular problem

2.      Causal Interpretation

3.      Moral Evaluation

4.      Treatment Commendation

This is identifying a problem, seeing who is responsible for the problem identified, seeing how media is telling you how to feel, and how to react and fix the problem identified. In this video you can see that the media text I have selected makes certain parts of information more salient, which essentially leads the audience to one perception of reality.

This video is showing two men with the same views on police brutality but difference of opinion when Black Lives Matter subject is brought up. The homicide detective and the police officer agreed that people are over reacting to the police brutality and basically saying it does not exists. The police man on the right agreed. They had the same views when it came to police brutality but when the conversation went to Black Lives Matter occurred the detective on the left said that he thinks that is appropriate to fight or black lives matter but the way they are going about the situation he did not agree with. He also said that he was for "All Lives Matter" instead of "Black Lives Matter" but when bringing that up to the cop you can see the frustration in his voice that he disagreed with anything the detective had to say about Black Lives Matter and said that he was only contributing to the problem. One frame in this video is: Police Brutalty and Black Lives Matter within the community. 

1.      The problem with this media text is Police Brutality and Black Lives Matter

2.      The person responsible are Police Officers around the country

3.      Misuse of weapons, and also knowing what is legal v what is not legal for cops to do.

4.      In order to fix this problem, we protest until the unlawful killings are put to a stop.

This media text is a prime example that the media will only show us only a piece of information that they make more noticeable and meaningful to make us think or feel a certain way. I think that it is great that they showed to differences of opinion on the subject, and also but they barely showed any representation of the other opinions out there on black lives matter. They only showed the people who have authority on society and although they were people of color but still only showed what they want the public to think. If you look at who holds power in society it is typically white, able-bodied, males. These people run the corporations are ran by those people, therefore they can say what get aired and what does not which can control how we think of police brutality. If they show a black man that is against police brutality, and thinks Black Lives Matter is just a joke that can affect how someone sees it. Being an African American women myself, hearing someone of my race expressing their ideas that this is bogus, I may not be persuaded to think differently but it can definitely have some effect on how I view the situation because of how they feel, which is what the media wants us to do. They want us to question what we believe, and persuade us to think the way that they want us to think.

Another frame that we can look at is the detective:

1. The problem the detective sees is how the community goes about spreading the word of Black Lives Matter.
2. The community who are doing rally's and protest are seen as the people responsible for the problem
3. Media is telling people watching to go about the situation and feel different. 
4. In order to fix this problem we must find a different and more efficient way of handling things more efficiently. 

This is problematic because we need people to be on the same page in order to make change in society, This matters because this is a national issue that has yet to see change.