ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes more than 75 editorials, columns, TV commentaries, and other national media in which journalists and media critics evaluated national news coverage of Baltimore during April and May 2015. In criticisms of Baltimore news coverage, explanations of what went wrong and assessments of what journalists should have done focused not just on individual stories but on cable TV news as a whole. Theorists are concerned with the discursive construction of place, who has the power to define places, and the inherent instability or contingency of place representations. The primary target of criticism by print journalists and media critics-but also on-camera commentators-was cable TV news. For journalists and critics evaluating Baltimore news coverage, "more context" was the primary prescription for repairing the poor journalism work detailed above. In reporting on the unrest in Baltimore, national journalists constructed places for readers, viewers, and listeners who had never been to Baltimore, much less talked to anyone from Freddie Gray's neighborhood.
