More than Football: Analyzing Journalistic Coverage and Reader Comments of Colin Kaepernick

Quarterback Colin Kaepernick started protesting the national anthem during National Football League games in 2016 to bring awareness to racial oppression in America. His protest was impossible to ignore because of the stage it was set on and the media saturation that came with it. Through Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, journalistic articles and commentaries from 11 online newspapers along with social media comments from espn.com were analyzed to ascertain a sense of the country’s ideology. These somewhat differing corpuses allow for the media to be analyzed in various stages of the coverage of Kaepernick and also provide contrasting perspectives from journalists to readers to get a better overview of this country’s Weltanschauung. It was found that racist ideologies still exist in the language that is used, but mainly by the audience. The ideology of the ruling class was also exhibited through their online comments.