Breibart News and Salon.com Reporting of Robert E. Lee Statue Removal Essay

Analysis of Reporting of the Removal of the Robert E. Lee Statue by the Breibart News Newtwork and Salon.com

With the proliferation of the internet, social media, and mobile technology, access to information today is far much easier than it has ever been in human history. From any corner of the globe, information can now be received and disseminated on a real time basis. Nonetheless, identifying the truth from lies has increasingly become difficult in the wake of the digital revolution. With a plethora of online platforms offering news as events happen, propagating falsehoods has become as simple as retweeting a tweet or sharing a Facebook post. The removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia is one of the events that have been the subject of reporting in online news platforms. Based on three articles from the Breibart News Network and three articles from Salon.com relating to the removal of the statue, this paper analyzes how the event has been reported. Attention is specifically paid to when the event occurred and why it was newsworthy, how the two sites reported the event, as well as the influence of cultural background on the interpretation of the story.

The Robert E. Lee statue is located in Emancipation Park, Charlottesville, Virginia. Proposals to remove the statue date back to 2016. The initial proposal was followed by a series of divisions between city leaders, protests, lawsuits, and court injunctions, until it was vandalized on July 7, 2017. All through, the Breibart News Newtwork and Salon.com have published a series of stories relating to the event. Events surrounding the removal of the statue have attracted the attention of not only the Breibart News Newtwork and Salon.com, but also national and international media. The removal of the statue has come against the backdrop of the “Black Lives Matter” campaign – a campaign that has gained increased momentum in recent months advocating for respect for the African American community. The statues of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate soldiers honored throughout America have been interpreted by advocates of the Black Lives Matter campaign as embodiments of hate and racism. For these advocates, honoring people like Robert E. Lee is tantamount to celebrating the inhumane treatment they subjected African Americans to during their existence. Given that racism is a matter that has polarized America for decades, the newsworthy nature of the event is understandable.

The Breibart News Newtwork and Salon.com have extensively covered the event. This analysis, however, focuses on three selected articles from each site. The three articles selected from the Breibart News Network include “Virginia City Removes Nearly 100-Year-Old Statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee” by Warner Todd Huston, “Dem Sen Kaine: We Should Replace Robert E. Lee With Pocahotans” by Pam Key, and “CNN’s Lemon: Robert E Lee Statues are Like Naming a School After Osama bin Laden” by Pam Key. In the three articles, it is quite evident that supporters of the Black Lives Matter campaign or the opponents of White supremacy are the main subjects of the stories. The authors fairly provide the social context surrounding the event. As evident in the three articles, the removal of the statue is mainly informed by the oppression suffered by African Americans during the Civil War, with Robert E. Lee being a major perpetrator. From this context, the reader gets the sense that the removal of the statue is about erasing Confederate history and dignifying the African American community. This somehow eliminates reportorial bias, though the stories appear to lean towards the African American audience. Generally, there is little use of official or expert sources in the three articles. The authors mainly incorporate the opinions of commentators, such as Senator Tim Kaine in one of Key’s article and Charlottesville’s Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy in Huston’s article.

The three articles…