Worth a thousand words: Conducted energy devices, new media events, and narrative struggle

Between April 2003 and November 2008, 26 men died in Canada during events where a conductive energy device (commonly called Taser®) was deployed on them. The 2007 death of Robert Dziekanski, a Polish immigrant, at the Vancouver International Airport, was recorded on a mobile phone and its footage uploaded to YouTube. The internet video, which documented Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers deploying a Taser on Dziekanski, was viewed by thousands around the world and traditional media organizations incorporated it into their coverage of the event. Unlike previous Taser-related deaths, the recording of Dziekanski's death was an integral piece of the event's anatomy and granted members of the mass public, as scrutinizers if not legitimate bystanders, entry into how it unfolded. Following Fiske, we treat the recording, its dissemination via the internet and broader news media, and its mass consumption as a "new media event"—one that articulated competing narratives of the device's efficacy in print media coverage. Using a broad critical approach, we assess how groups like the RCMP, government officials, and victims made sense of the device pre- and post-recording via discourse analysis of published reports.