From Protest to Propaganda: A Raciolinguistic-CDA Analysis of Media's Role in Shaping Racial Justice

This study advances a raciolinguistic critical discourse analysis of how the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was constructed across media outlets with differing political orientations. Drawing on Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive framework and the raciolinguistic perspective of Rosa and Flores, the analysis interrogates how language mediates ideological positioning in coverage of the 2020 BLM protests. A corpus of media texts was compiled using AntConc, focusing on reports addressing systemic anti-Black racism in the aftermath of the George Floyd incident. The study examines patterns of lexical selection, syntactic structuring, and semantic representation to uncover how meaning is shaped across liberal, neutral, and conservative outlets. The findings indicate that media discourse is not merely reflective but actively constitutive: liberal outlets tend to foreground narratives of justice and reform, neutral sources privilege event-based reporting with limited interpretive engagement, and conservative outlets more frequently frame the protests in ways that may align with established sociopolitical hierarchies. By foregrounding the intersection of language and race, this study contributes to critical scholarship on media discourse and demonstrates how racialized meanings are produced, negotiated, and sustained within mainstream reporting. The findings further underscore the importance of critically interrogating ostensibly objective media narratives in contexts of racial justice.