Rodney King And The LA Riots Analysis

Many people have access to the internet. Because of how accessible social media is, it serves as a platform for people to communicate with their family, friends, and people near or across the globe. This platform is also used to update people on current events happening around them. The information provided to them depends on not only how the messages are played out, but also how the audience receives it. In the context of the CNN documentary and the LA riots, there were different interpretation and feelings that emerged from this depending on how it was narrated and its focus.
The CNN documentary on Rodney King and the LA Riots reflects on one of America’s worst riots of the century, and the racialization of black bodies. In 1992, King was chased by police officers because he was driving past the speed limit. Upon the police’s arrivals, they beat up King and made racial slurs. The beating was so horrific that King was hospitalized for quite sometimes. Initially, he couldn’t testify against the white police officers because …show more content…
When there is information involved, there is also a specific targeted audience. These are information that is often given in a form of codes for people to extract and interpret. Some of the encoding values are expressed through journalistic approaches that involve breaking news, news beats, live mode, etc. Other values include entertainment and socio-political climate. In the context of the CNN documentary and the LA riots, the focus was heavily on the violence and on the beating Rodney King, but there was lack of representation of voices of the people that experience the riots themselves. Therefore, the interpretation of these codes reflects the experience of King, and proves a Eurocentric generalization of black people as being “criminals”. However, there are different ways that people can interpret these meanings and information from the