A Twice-Told Story: Comparing Accounts of Capital Punishment in the Radical and Mainstream Press

Abstract

This paper examines coverage of America’s death penalty in “mainstream” and “radical” newspapers in the 1970s. That decade was a crucial period for capital punishment, and newspapers during that time helped set the trajectory of the public’s awareness and understanding for the remainder of the twentieth century. While scholars have recognized the role played by newspaper framing of capital punishment, most have limited their consideration to the mainstream press. We broaden the consideration to the radical press and note similarities in the treatment of the moral status of the death penalty across newspapers of different types. We find that the radical press was more likely to portray it as an instrument of racial and class oppression. In addition, long before mainstream papers attended to questions about the reliability of the death penalty system, radical papers were calling attention to the number of innocent people who were erroneously sentenced to death. Like dissenting opinions in judicial decisions, the radical press highlighted issues not emphasized in mainstream papers and foresaw concerns that would become important in the death penalty debate a decade or two later.

Citation

Sarat, A., Ellis-Moore, K., Kanter, A., Won, C. and Xu, A. (2016), "A Twice-Told Story: Comparing Accounts of Capital Punishment in the Radical and Mainstream Press", Studies in Law, Politics, and Society (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 70), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 1-32. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-433720160000070001