The Rhetoric of Protests in Los Angeles Local News 1965-2014

This paper seeks to analyze the rhetoric of two localLos Angeles newspapers: the Los Angeles Times, a widely circulated newspaper, and the Los Angeles Sentinel, a smaller newspaper with a targeted African American readership. In this analysis, I will look at the language used to characterize protesters and the framing of the articles during three major LA uprisings: the 1965 Watts rebellion, the 1992 uprising, and the recent 2014 protests. By analyzing the rhetoric used in the three protest movements, I aim to better understand the underlying ideology of each newspaper.