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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Commun.
Sec. Media Governance and the Public Sphere
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2024.1467411
This article is part of the Research Topic Media, Racism, Speciesism: Issues and Solutions for Creaturely Racism in the Anthropocene View all 4 articles

Where Injustices (Fail to) Meet: Newspaper Coverage of Speciesism, Animal Rights, and Racism

Provisionally accepted
Etsuko Kinefuchi Etsuko Kinefuchi *
  • University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This study examines the ways widely circulated U.S. newspapers have articulated the idea of "speciesism" and its associated idea "animal rights" in relation to "racism" to understand how powerful news media helps to shape the public understanding of the interlocking systems of oppression that cuts across the human and the more-than-human world. The archives (1987 to 2023) of three U.S. newspapers -The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post -were analyzed, using qualitative content analysis. The ideas of articulation, symbolic annihilation, erasure, and discursive closure served as the analytical guides for the analysis. The analysis shows that there is gross underrepresentation of speciesism and even far less representation of the relationship between speciesism and racism and between animal rights and anti-racism. When represented, the articulations showed problematic patterns of erasure of those concepts and relationships. The paper ends with the implications of the findings.

    Keywords: speciesism, Racism, Animal Rights, Newspaper, Print Media, articulation, Symbolic annihilation, Erasure

    Received: 19 Jul 2024; Accepted: 27 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Kinefuchi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Etsuko Kinefuchi, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, United States

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