Worth a Thousand Words

Abstract

Between April 2003 and November 2008, 26 men died in Canada during events where a conductive energy device (commonly called Taser®) was deployed on them. The 2007 death of Robert Dziekanski, a Polish immigrant, at the Vancouver International Airport, was recorded on a mobile phone and its footage uploaded to YouTube. The internet video, which documented Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers deploying a Taser on Dziekanski, was viewed by thousands around the world and traditional media organizations incorporated it into their coverage of the event. Unlike previous Taser-related deaths, the recording of Dziekanski’s death was an integral piece of the event’s anatomy and granted members of the mass public, as scrutinizers if not legitimate bystanders, entry into how it unfolded. Following Fiske, we treat the recording, its dissemination via the internet and broader news media, and its mass consumption as a “new media event”—one that articulated competing narratives of the device’s efficacy in print media coverage. Using a broad critical approach, we assess how groups like the RCMP, government officials, and victims made sense of the device pre- and post-recording via discourse analysis of published reports.

KEYWORDS:

• discourse analysis
• media representation
• new media event
• policing
• Taser®

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions for improving the manuscript. The authors also extend their thanks to Lydia Cordie for her research assistance.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 On June 17, 2014, it was confirmed that Constable James Forcillo would stand trial on second-degree murder for the death of Yatim. In January 2016, Forcillo was found guilty of attempted murder in the case. He was subsequently sentenced to six years in prison—a conviction under appeal at the time of this paper’s final submission.

2 Beginning in New York and surrounding areas, and rippling to other US and Canadian cities, protests were organized by ordinary citizens to voice concern and outrage over experiences of injustice and systemic racism meted out by a legal system that has historically privileged White American and Canadian lives and credibility over those of Black and other marginalized citizens.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 430–2012-0545].