Police Brutality in Canada: A Framing Analysis

Abstract

This thesis examines the framing of police brutality in Canadian news media within the context of the social moment created by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The BLM movement has been integral in the mainstreaming of police brutality discourse and, in partnership with increasingly publicized incidents of police brutality, has served as a catalyst for discourse reignition around the issue. Within the context of social movements and cultural transformations, news media is an essential artifact to examine social problem construction and discourse shifts. But discussions of and literature examining media representation and police brutality focus primarily on the American context. By examining news articles from mainstream Canadian outlets with an orientation toward the Canadian cultural context, this research aims to fill a Canadian content gap in the literature. The analysis relies on framing as both theory and method in conjunction with critical race theory (CRT) to examine news produced during two critical junctures in the history of the BLM movement: 2013, when the movement began, and 2020, when it experienced a global resurgence. My examination finds clear problematization of police brutality in both time frames but with a stronger emphasis on race in the 2020 articles, which enhances the problem identification. In addition to theorizing cultural and journalistic barriers to the integration of racial discourse in the 2013 content, I argue that our current social climate supports more effective problematization of police brutality in Canadian news media but that even recent 2020 coverage fails to provide solutions or examine the nuances of modern police brutality beyond its often racial character.