ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a history of the robust relationship between media content, audiences, and the continuation of racial oppression. It also discusses the relationship between new media content such as online news and the way that audiences make meaning of that media content has essential consequences for contemporary society. In this chapter, I draw upon online comments on news articles to analyze how people participate in public debates in the digital sphere. In comment sections, people communicate responses to media content and other audience members, and in doing so, express, clarify, and construct identities. Many of the frames and themes within these comments mirrored those that emerged in our previous examination of newspapers. However, there were also frames and themes unique to internet comments. Participants used distinctions between racial groups that implied essential traits to construct identities within the War on Drugs debate. For example, associations between racial groups and ideas of security and threat often accompanied such group distinctions. A significant frame within comment sections but not the debate in newspapers on the War on Drugs (even among its proponents) was racialized victim-blaming. Commenters also came to the defense of the War on Drugs in ways that were not, on the surface at least, about racial meanings. I call this the Colorblind Defense Frame. The unique frames that only appeared in comment sections and not newspapers suggest that the effects of framing and agenda-setting from mass media on how people talk and think about contested social issues are not unidirectional.
