Protest Photography and Consideration of Privacy

A qualitative analysis of BLM protest photos published by The Star Tribune, The Minnesota Daily, The Oregonian and the PSU Vanguard

By Ella Banken

Methods

This study will use a qualitative content analysis to analyze images posted and shared by The Minnesota Daily, PSU Vanguard, The Star Tribune and The Oregonian. The study will specifically examine photographs of protests relating to Black Lives Matter. The study will examine protest photos associated with BLM starting with the initial protests of George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020. 

I will be coding photographs posted on the website of each publication. In the search engine of each website, I will search for “‘Black Lives Matter’ ‘protest’” to curate my sample. Caption information will also be relevant to the study. I will be calculating the percentage of times that the names of protestors were included in the caption. 

I will be qualitatively examining the images for different features. I coded the images for 3 different factors. The first was the type of event that was pictured, including march, vigil, event, graffiti/property damage, and trespass. The second was the type of photo, including group, individual, individual obscured, police and public figure. The third was whether or not the names of individuals pictured were included in the caption. 

For each publication, I analyzed 30 photos. Due to the highly varying amounts of content produced by student publications and larger daily papers, the dates that I examined vary. For the Minnesota Daily and the PSU Vanguard, I coded the total number of relevant images that fell in the date range of May 25 through November 17. I wanted to code the same number of images from both student publications, so I extended my date range. 

For the two larger publications, I utilized a random date generator to select 30 dates between May 25 and September 30. For both publications, I coded photos from all relevant articles within the date range. I coded one photo from each date; if the article published on that date included more than one photo, I analyzed the first in the series. If the publication did not publish a relevant photo on that date, I selected an article as close as possible to that date.