Published five years after the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, Darnell M. Hunt’s study examines how race structured both what was shown and how viewers interpreted it.

The book moves through broadcast footage, interviews and audience responses to trace the production of competing narratives: criminality versus protest, disorder versus political grievance, individual violence versus structural racism. Different racial groups did not simply receive the same television images and arrive at different “opinions”; they brought distinct histories, experiences and expectations to what they saw. Coverage of Rodney King, the uprising and its aftermath therefore becomes a case study in how media images acquire political meaning.

Written before social media shattered the monopoly of broadcast television, it also reads now as an unusually clear prehistory of the contemporary argument over viral footage, citizen recording and who gets to define what an image proves.

Cambridge University Press, 1997. First edition paperback. Light shelf wear and rubbing to covers; minor edge wear, internally clean and sound.