American media can be really clumsy when it comes to telling stories about racism — at least if the way journalists handled the events in Ferguson, Missouri, a year ago is any indication.

The racial justice organization Race Forward studied coverage of black teen Michael Brown's death at the hands of white police officer Darren Wilson in August 2014. The event gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and has become shorthand for the country's ongoing problem with racialized police violence. But you wouldn't have known it from reading the news.

Race Forward's analysis, published in this 2014 report, found that half of the pieces about Ferguson published in the 10 days after Brown's death didn't even mention the word "race." And those that did weren't much better: They often stripped out the crucial context about patterns of racially skewed police violence that would have helped readers make sense of why this incident inspired protests across the country and became national news. Proposed solutions to the problems underlying the tragedy and fueling activism were practically ignored.

As protests and police-involved tragedies in Ferguson continue to make news, I spoke to Race Forward research director Dominique Apollon, the author of the report, about what happens when reporters covering this and similar events tiptoe around the topic of systemic racism, and how they can do better.

A lot of Ferguson coverage didn't even use the word "race"

In the first 10 days of coverage after Brown's death, Race Forward counted nearly 1,000 articles and cable news programs dedicated to the shooting and its aftermath across 19 print and cable news outlets.

Although the protests were inspired by despair over the idea that Brown's death was part of a pattern of law enforcement mistreatment of African Americans in Ferguson and across the country, terms such as "race," "racial," "racism," and "racist" were explicitly mentioned in fewer than half of the stories in mainstream media coverage — just 46.3 percent. And of those that used the terms, a mere 7 percent used them in the first few paragraphs of content.

This had consequences for readers' and viewers' understanding of what happened in Ferguson, and of other stories about racial injustice in America, Apollon said. They were reading and watching material that failed to address what he calls "the elephant in the room": the role of race in the event itself and in reactions to it.

"Certainly for people of color, they see that coverage and it doesn't mention race and automatically will question it. And for white readers, I think it provides some cover in the name of 'just examining facts' versus ‘injecting the race card,'" he said. "But if you look at the facts and statistics and the attitudes that people of color, in particular black people, feel about the police and how they're treated, then it's clear that there's a disconnect and that we need to address it."

Even when journalists did mention race, they often missed the big picture

It's one thing to mention the word race, but that isn't always enough to communicate to readers why a story matters. It's clear now, a year later, that Mike Brown's death in Ferguson launched a movement that had everything to do with a broader racial injustice. But in that first month, of the articles on Ferguson that did discuss race, Race Forward found that only half led with what the organization calls a "systemically aware" perspective.

Race Forward defines "systemically aware" content as coverage that "mentions or highlights policies and/or practices that lead to racial disparities; describes the root causes of disparities, including the history and compounding effects of institutions; and/or describes or challenges of the aforementioned."

"Systemically absent" content, on the other hand, "focuses attention solely on individual-level acts of racism; dismisses and/or negates the existence of systemic racism within institutions or society more broadly; and/or describes racism as a past-tense condition."

Only 34 of 994 articles identified by Race Forward led with even a minimally systemically aware perspective.

This wasn't surprising, said Apollon. "Because Americans generally have a very narrow definition of racism as something that's explicit, intentional, and overt," it's easy to gloss over an analysis of the role of institutional racism in policies and practices, and to couch stories in race-neutral language, he said.

One huge clue that coverage is missing a systemically aware perspective is when, like much of the coverage of Ferguson did, it focuses on "racial tension," Apollon said. Yes, tension often exists when a perceived racial injustice has a community's attention. But it's generally a symptom of the issues that make up the real story, not the story itself.

Solutions didn't get much coverage, either

Like systemically aware perspectives, proposals for and action toward specific solutions received little coverage in the wake of Michael Brown's death.

According to Race Forward's report, only a quarter of the 1,000 articles and cable television programs analyzed mentioned the demands of the Ferguson-based Organization for Black Struggle or other activists.

A search for terms that would have indicated reporting focused on proposed or planned solutions to racially biased policing in Ferguson yielded similarly few results: "data collection" (one article), "police oversight" (four articles or mentions in broadcast stories), "police training" (seven articles or mentions in broadcast stories), "video cameras" (12 articles or mentions in broadcast stories), and "incentives" (13 articles or mentions in broadcast stories).

Apollon suggests that the absence of solutions-focused coverage is partly the result of reporters' overreliance on institutional sources, like police reports or press releases from elected officials or government agencies. "I think they don't have as many contacts in communities, community organizations — or they're not doing their homework in terms of exploring what types of coalitions have formed," he said.

His advice to journalists: "The number one thing is for them to seek out people of color, voices, community organizations, particularly of young people, and of the people who are most heavily impacted. ... The other thing I'd say is to not take police accounts at face value." In 2015, Race Forward released a reporting guide with this and other guidelines for covering stories about race and racism.

The organization's report on Ferguson coverage suggests that many readers have supplemented mainstream media coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement with social media, where video and images of youth activism in particular have circulated faster and more often than they have via traditional outlets.

A year after Mike Brown's death and nearly a year after the his analysis of the initial coverage, Apollon says he's cautiously optimistic that coverage of racial justice won't be as inadequate — or "systemically absent," in Race Forward's language — as it has been in the past, "because the social movements and the social media movements will not allow it to be."

VIDEO: The roots of unrest in Ferguson, explained