ABSTRACT
On 4 August 2011, Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old Tottenham resident, was shot dead by a police officer. Two days later, a peaceful protest arranged outside Tottenham police station to try and get information for Duggan’s family turned violent; the violence spread and culminated in several days of rioting in London and across England. On 9 August, hundreds of citizens gathered in the streets of Salford, predominately in the precinct area around Salford Shopping City. Violence escalated as commercial and domestic properties were set on fire and people were engaged in widespread looting. Simultaneously, riots continued to take place in London and had begun in other cities such as Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool. These events were covered extensively by national and local media. In order to understand what sort of discourses
and Caroline Jonesb
and interpretative frames the media offer the public regarding these violent outbursts, an analysis of media coverage of such events is vital. Indeed, the extensive literature on media framing (Entman, 1993; Nelson, Clawson, & Oxley, 1997) suggests that the way that the media reports an issue can affect readers’ perceptions, although the relationship between media framing and public’s beliefs and attitudes need not be conceived as a simple unidirectional influence of the media, but as part of a complex set of relationships between members of the public, journalists, authorities and policy-makers (Schaufele, 1999).
