Guerras culturais, polarização e mídias digitais: a alteridade na repercussão dos protestos por brutalidade policial de 1992 e 2020 nos EUA

Abstract

While tolerance is a basic principle of a democratic society, in recent years the notion of a polarized society has become more prominent. This research aims to understand whether the characterization of culture wars and political polarization is reflected in the media coverage of CNN, Fox News and The Washington Post of the 1992 Los Angeles Protests and the George Floyd protests in 2020 in the USA. This requires conceptualizing the phenomena of political polarization and culture wars within the context of the North American debate, and understanding how digital media changed the functioning of newspapers between 1992 and 2020, and also contribute to a more conflictive scenario. This discussion allows us to launch a comparative qualitative content analysis of the media repercussion of the 1992 Los Angeles Protests and the 2020 George Floyd Protests, which begins with a historical resumption of these episodes, which is contrasted with the coverage of these events among select traditional communication vehicles, chosen because they are highlighted as important bastions of the disputed ideologies: CNN, Fox News and The Washington Post as the great traditional newspapers. The conclusion is that there is a greater influence exerted by the elements of the culture wars within recent media coverage as opposed to that of 1992, especially in terms of the deep division in assumptions about the US social reality.