Narrating Jackson State: An Examination Of Power Relations And Mississippi Newspaper Coverage Of The 1970 Shootings At Jackson State College

The following thesis examines media coverage of a 1970 campus shooting at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi, during which two black students were killed and several others were injured. Over forty years after the shootings, the incident remains largely absent from the dominant historical narrative. This study posits that the contradictory accounts published by various Jackson-area news outlets blurred the lines between facts and subjective perspectives and as a consequence limited the resources used by historians to construct a narrative of the shootings. Consequently, Mississippi media outlets contributed to the incident\u27s absence from the dominant historical narrative and American popular memory. The thesis considers history and journalism theories and methodologies in an interdisciplinary approach that allows for an examination of reports from Jackson newspaper outlets, as well as the social and political environments that shaped the media coverage that emerged from Jackson in the weeks following the incident