Commemorating the Kent State Tragedy Through Victims' Trauma in Television News Coverage, 1990–2000

Abstract

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd at Kent State University and killed four students. This essay critically interprets mainstream television journalism that commemorated the shootings in the past 18 years. Throughout this coverage, predominant framing devices depoliticized the Kent State tragedy by characterizing both former students and guard members as trauma victims. The emphasis on eyewitnesses as victims provided the basis for a therapeutic frame that promoted reconciliation rather than political redress as a rationale for commemorating the shootings. This dominant news frame tacitly advanced a model of commemorative journalism that promoted reconciliation at the expense of articulating political critique, thus deflecting attention from public controversy over how citizens should respond to tragedies that occur when state agencies repress contentious dissent.

An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the National Communication Association, Miami, Florida, November 2003.

Notes

1. Although it is the most widely remembered, Kent State was not the only campus that experienced violence against student protesters. Ten days after the shootings at Kent State, police opened fire on a group of student protesters at a predominantly African-American Jackson State College in Tougaloo, MI, killing two students and injuring 12 others. The dearth of media coverage of these shootings illuminates the racism implicit in mainstream media practices.

2. See also Phillips' (2004) edited collection of essays on public memory for further discussion about public memory as a process and product of contemporary culture.

3. Although Lexis-Nexis is one of the most comprehensive and accessible databases for news archives, the availability of transcripts from major network news programs is uneven. Transcripts from NBC newscasts are not available until 1997, and transcripts from CBS are not available until 1990. Further, transcripts of some ABC news programs on particular dates have been removed from the database. Although I cannot attest to a complete reading of all television news coverage of the shootings, I argue that a critical interpretation of available texts is valuable nonetheless. Recurring themes across available texts lead me to an interpretation that has important implications for democratic life, even if these themes are not the only messages that news media provided about the Kent State shootings in the decades after they occurred.

4. Although the university has received the lion's share of credit for the campus commemorations, they are the result of a more than decade's long movement by the May 4 Task Force, a group of former and current Kent State students formed to commemorate the shootings and raise awareness of the tragedy as an act of political injustice. The 1990 commemoration has drawn some criticism by observers who have noted that the memorial itself did not actually mention the shooting victims (Gordon, 1995, p. 17).

5. Other newscasts that referenced Kent State as a context for understanding current events were significantly shorter, and offered limited explanatory detail about who was involved in the shootings and the implications of the shootings for contemporary public life. Typically, these references appeared as simple assertions that highlighted the date of May 4th as the anniversary of the Kent State tragedy. For these reasons, I chose to exclude them from analysis.

6. In an effort to access footage of the reports, I cross-referenced the list of transcripts available in Lexis-Nexis with the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. Only the 1990 Nightline news segment was available. In order to explain how visual, audio, and verbal devices functioned to ascribe meaning to the shootings for public memory, I relied primarily on Lexis-Nexis's descriptions of the sounds and images in the transcript. In my discussion of the Nightline segment, my analysis is augmented by visual images from the footage of the newscast itself.

7. Patterns across television broadcast coverage commemorating the Kent State shootings share many similarities to news devices that have framed more recent protest movements as well. News content has discredited oppositional social movements by routinely framing them as disruptive, irrational, and outside of the bounds of legitimate forms of civic engagement (Cloud, 1998; Husting; 2006; Kellner, 1992; Reese & Buckalew, 1995).

8. For a different example of how therapeutic framing techniques discourage the public from thinking critically about instances of political violence, see Hoerl, Cloud, and Jarvis (2009).