A New Protest Paradigm: Toward a Critical Approach to Protest News Analyses

In recent years, we’ve seen record numbers of people take to the streets to demand racial justice, gender rights, equitable and living wages, protection of the environment, and an end to violence, corruption, and state repression and oppression. At the same time, though, a rise in authoritarianism, declines in democracy, and a reinvigoration of overt racism and bigotry are threatening human rights at extraordinary rates, and putting citizens’ right to protest at risk globally. Around the world, protest movements have been met with force, surveillance, restrictive new laws, and censorship, all in authority-led efforts to inhibit collective dissent.

The rights to organize and participate in protests are pillars of democracy, playing crucial roles in societies by contributing to new understandings of worldviews, solutions to societal problems, and positive social change. Protected as a form of democratic political participation, protests provide an outlet for citizens to signal their dismay and grievances with societal conditions outside of the formal voting system. With such an essential right of democratic society at risk of restriction, political communication and journalism scholarship have a responsibility and opportunity to explore the relationships among media, communication, and citizen involvement in democracy through protests in ways that can help society better understand how—and why—to protect the right to protest.

Scholars have shown time and again that the intersecting power systems woven into the structures and foundations of society—including media systems—have thwarted marginalized groups’ and social movements’ efforts for social change. Decades of research going back to the 1960s U.S. civil rights and student movements suggest that news media's coverage of protests can affect a movement's ability to mobilize supporters and gain legitimacy in the eye of the public—both of which are fundamental for achieving policy and cultural changes. This research often relies on what has come to be referred to as the “protest paradigm,” which explores the routinized use of news frames, official sources, and public opinion to delegitimize protests and demonize protesters and maintain the status quo. Over time, much of this research has been replicative, returning to the paradigm's original conclusions rather than building on new factors to advance more nuanced understandings of protest coverage. This is not to say that this work is not valuable, but rather to suggest that the increased importance of protest amid political, social, and technological upheavals warrants new approaches that critically interrogate protest news coverage and its relation to power hierarchies. Through paradigm shifts and publicly engaged research, we have an opportunity to build knowledge that can be utilized by those dedicated to protecting the human right to protest.

Initially, the protest paradigm was empirically tested through analyses of media content. As such, scholarship developed in a way that privileges content produced over an understanding of the producers and consumers of that content. Many content analyses are based on the assumption that journalistic routines influence protest coverage and that media narratives influence public opinion, yet studies often produce results that defy those core assumptions. Still, decades after the paradigm's development, scholarship continues to question the applicability of the paradigm under different circumstances, rather than pushing forward a more holistic theory that more adequately addresses the roles of producers, consumers, and media products. In this introduction to the special issue on news and protest, we argue that the relevance and any potential future advances of the protest paradigm depend on the (re)incorporation of its critical foundations, making explicit analyses of power hierarchies, and offering solutions for better journalistic coverage of protests.

Acknowledging the media's place in and contribution to power hierarchies allows us to move beyond the paradigm's origins and contribute to a more holistic understanding of journalists’ role in the legitimization (or not) of social struggles. In doing so, we advocate for scholars to reimagine what news coverage should look like when it comes to social protests struggling against historic and systemic inequities and injustices.

The Places We’ve Gone

The protest paradigm stems from research nearly forty years ago, when Chan and Lee (1984) identified an ideologically influenced pattern of news coverage that was antagonistic toward civil protests. Based on Hong Kong's 1977 Golden Jubilee School radical civil protest led by teachers and students, Chan and Lee concluded that negative coverage that characterized the protest as “defying traditional morality” (1984: 196) politicized the protest and ultimately upheld the status quo and government suppression of protest. McLeod and Hertog (1992, 1999) built on this concept, referring to a journalistic “protest paradigm” that used frames, sources, and public opinion to marginalize protests that challenge dominant power structures.

The problem, though, is that the paradigm alone simplifies the makings and patterns of protest coverage and its consequences on society. Amid the global increase in protest frequency and the rise of social media and the hybrid media environment (Chadwick 2013), protest coverage research has surged over the last decade. Much of the work treats the protest paradigm as a variable and tests how adherence to the paradigm varies according to characteristics of the media outlets, journalists, and the protests. Most of this research considers the paradigm through just one of three lenses: the producers, the content, or the effects and consequences of the content. These results have given us limited and time-dependent understandings of the paradigm.

In addition, content perspectives are most often prioritized. This type of research is dominated by content analyses that examine framing and sourcing. Paradigm content research relies heavily on four main frames with mutually exclusive consequences: riot, confrontation, spectacle (or circus), and debate (or protest) (e.g., McLeod and Hertog 1999). The riot frame focuses on the violence and destruction of protests, portraying protesters as disruptive and harmful to society, and placing an outsized emphasis on looting or property damage. The confrontation frame highlights clashes between police and protesters, such as the number of protesters arrested, or conflicts between the government and protesters, or even protesters and counter-protesters. The spectacle frame emphasizes the oddity, drama, size, or sensationalism of protests. These three frames typically are treated in scholarship as delegitimizing or negative, and research shows they tend to favor officials over protesters as sources. Work also points to the riot, confrontation and spectacle frames as appearing most often in mainstream media coverage (e.g., Harlow et al. 2020). In contrast, the debate frame, while appearing less often, gives weight to protesters’ voices, focusing on their grievances and goals, and portraying protesters as legitimate political actors, rather than criminals or irrational actors.

Protests, however, do not occur in a vacuum, and a framing approach cannot fully account for the social, historical, cultural, and political contexts that influence journalistic production of protest news stories as well as audiences’ receptiveness to protest coverage and the movements themselves, underscoring a major limitation of the paradigm. An analysis based on a recognition of power dynamics, however, offers alternative, more nuanced understandings of the paradigm's frames.

Reimagining a More Critical Paradigm

In the original conceptualization of the paradigm, the riot frame associates protesters with violence by collapsing violence against people with the destruction of property, and no real distinction is made between violence by protesters and violence against protesters. As a result, mentions of violence within the paradigm treat protesters as at fault, even if police were the perpetrators of the violence. Narratives of police violence during protests have, in the past, been limited, but some scholars have begun to disentangle the representation of violence (e.g., Jimenez-Martinez 2021; Mourão 2021). These are important advances, as the traditional paradigm framing seems to assume that all violence and destruction is negative, thereby negating any possibility of violence as a strategic protest tactic and minimizing the importance of the “logic of damage” (Della Porta and Diani 2006) in protesters’ repertoire of contentious actions. Protest coverage research needs to move beyond the dichotomous positive versus negative framing to account for the ways in which violence can in fact be a legitimate way to attract media attention and legitimize protesters’ grievances and tactics (Cammaerts 2013; Drury and Reicher 2018; Saavedra and Drury 2019). This is important because pre-existing attitudes are known to affect how individuals interpret protests. For example, research shows that conservatives perceive violence and destruction differently depending on who is committing it (Hsiao and Radnitz 2021). Protesters employing violent or destructive tactics in reaction to aggressive or violent police actions, or in response to societal violence systematically oppressing certain populations, need to be analyzed differently than the inherently negative assumptions about violence and delegitimization that the paradigm encourages (e.g., Harlow and Bachmann forthcoming). By understanding the power imbalances between police and protesters and between journalists and protesters, as well as between police and journalists, we can begin to better understand the nuances in how violence is perceived differently depending on the actors and time and space specificities. Starting from a critical perspective founded on power hierarchies also allows us to better analyze protest coverage, producers, and production processes, and to account for the ways journalistic norms, values, and practices—at personal, professional, and organizational levels—can affect how violence and disruption are covered and, ultimately, perceived.

Traditionally, the spectacle frame addresses parts of protests deemed “trivial” or lacking substance: the emotions of protesters, the involvement of celebrities, the size and appearances of collective action, and sensational behavior. Each feature is deemed “delegitimizing” in the paradigm's original construction. But this frame dominates coverage, indicating that the features of this frame are complicated for journalists to avoid. Hertog and McLeod (2001: 158) assigned negativity to the frame because they found the press “used terms like goofballs and clowns to describe anarchists.” Protests were described as carnivals, circuses, and celebrations. Demonstrators were highlighted for their oddity and emotional behavior. We contend, though, that the spectacle frame should not necessarily be equated with negative coverage: epistemological shifts that consider the origins of social movements would tell a different story about this frame's valence. Protests require emotional involvement to catalyze mobilization. Messages must be empathetic and catchy to attract attention. The anger of protesters can be so intimately woven into the grievances and causes of protests that it legitimizes those causes (Wahl-Jorgensen 2018). Work that has connected media content with media effects encourages us to reject binary outcomes and instead consider a “spectrum of legitimacy” that accounts for variations in scenarios and perspectives (Brown 2021: 160). The step forward, however, is applying our critical knowledge of power systems to understand where, why, and under what circumstances some issues and representations might allow us to understand the spectrum with more precision. Doing so will also help tailor intervention-oriented research.

Using a critical framework that considers systems of power also allows us to avoid simplistic understandings of the debate frame as inherently legitimizing or favorable toward protests. The power dynamics of oppression, repression, and marginalization can shift a narrative's purported legitimizing tenor drastically. In-depth analyses of coverage of protesters’ grievances and goals thus must be made explicit and go beyond mere parroting of what protesters want. While it is important for protest coverage to include the rationale and aims underlying protests—in line with the debate frame—it is naive to assume that this will automatically legitimize protesters and their causes in the eyes of the public. For example, the criminalization of a victim of police violence can reinforce racist power systems and trivialize protesters by negatively portraying the event that is central to their grievances (Brown 2021). Further, when protesters’ goals and grievances are included but juxtaposed against the official perspective, we shouldn't necessarily consider inclusion of the protesters’ perspectives to be legitimizing, since adding the official view can be a way to contradict or dismiss whatever the protesters said. We also must consider media organizations’ relationships with protesters, and media organizations’ motivations behind the inclusion of protesters’ voices and demands, as those relationships can influence the valence of the debate frame. The capitalist and corporate nature of mainstream media, along with media ties to the state, government advertising, and ruling elites, also must be factored into our analyses in order to understand how certain narratives operate within broader systems. If the coverage includes protesters’ perspectives only because they align with the media organization's political or economic interests—which often are linked with the interests of political and business elites, especially in countries with polarized or instrumentalized media systems (see Harlow et al. 2022)—then the debate frame becomes less about legitimizing protesters and more about maintaining social control and upholding the status quo. We thus see a need to build on the work of scholars who have used the paradigm to examine pro-status quo protests and riots (e.g., Kananovich 2022; Mourão 2021). While these studies have found that use of the debate frame and other portrayals of protesters do not necessarily follow the delegitimizing coverage patterns predicted by the paradigm, we argue that the applicability of the paradigm is less important than the analysis of power structures. In recognition that the applicability of the paradigm indeed varies depending on the circumstances, we need to move beyond questioning the relevance of the paradigm, and instead interrogate the role of power hierarchies in influencing protest news coverage.

The hierarchy of social struggle makes an important step in broadening the ways we might approach the analysis of protest coverage (Brown and Harlow 2019). This hierarchy acknowledges that the protest paradigm mirrors society's power hierarchies, with U.S.-based empirical evidence showing that in 2017, racialized hierarchies were most damning for protesters. In that study, protests that challenged the subjugation of Black and Indigenous peoples received more negative coverage than protests that could be perceived as less of a challenge to society's power holders. The hierarchy pushes against the foregone conclusions of the protest paradigm, asking researchers to reject the idea that the valence of protest coverage is based mostly on protesters’ threat to the status quo, and, instead, recognize the interplay of social struggles and their variation in different times and places. It's true that normative ideas suggest we shouldn't compare struggles against one another: each has its own unique challenges. We are not pushing against this ideal, but rather acknowledging that people and societies do compare, rank, and prioritize struggles. The hierarchy of social struggle recognizes that prioritizing and emphasizing one thing over another is inherent to newsworthiness and the basis of newsmaking. We can expect that this prioritization will play out in coverage of all kinds, and considering the rise in protest activity over the past two decades that has created perpetual and concurrent attention to social movements, we can also anticipate that some protests will be prioritized and treated differently than others for reasons other than the movement's perceived threat to destabilize the status quo. The comparative framework provided by the hierarchy of social struggle, which we have extended to social media (Harlow and Brown 2021), encourages us to explore how media systems and societies have differentially prioritized various social struggles. This comparative approach offers opportunities for quantitative and qualitative researchers to lean into the application of critical theories by interrogating intersecting power systems.

Innovating Methodological Approaches

The path forward also entails methodological clarification, development, and innovation. A critical approach to the analysis of protest coverage requires fundamentally reinterpreting the paradigm and how its frames and sourcing patterns operate, but it also demands a re-consideration of our methodological choices—our very understanding of which protests the paradigm applies to has not adequately been delineated. Chan and Lee (1984) referred to anti-status quo protests, but this term is slippery and unfixed, context and time-dependent. We also recognize that given the concerns about the theoretical development of framing (Cacciatore et al. 2016), analyses that provide insights outside of master frames are critical. Analyses of word choice are important. As Kananovich (2022) rightfully pointed out, the labels journalists use (e.g., protest, riot, insurrection, rally) serve as framing cues for how audiences will understand protest activity. Likewise, the words scholars use to identify news stories about protest can skew our analyses, calling into question whether or how the paradigm operates differently for radical protests or those that support or challenge power hierarchies. For example, analyzing coverage that only uses the term “protest” or its variants could miss delegitimizing stories about white supremacist events that were referred to as rallies or riots, thus creating an imbalanced picture of how right-wing protests are covered. More attention to linguistic characteristics may also aid in the development of context-specific computer-assisted analyses that could also adopt critical frameworks.

However, the need to connect the analysis of content to the creators and audiences of that content remains vital. Content analysts have broadly long called for such innovation. Neuendorf (2017: 52) argued “all attempts at collating content analysis data and extramessage data are improvements over simple message description and unwarranted inference to source and receiver.” With so much of the traditional protest paradigm based on inference, we believe that the future compels explorations of the challenges, norms, and routines that help us understand the production of the overall patterns of news narratives and their individual components. More qualitative and quantitative work is also needed to understand the individualized consequences and effects of these media messages.

This Special Issue

The articles in this special issue are linked by a recognition of the limitations of the protest paradigm. These articles point to variations in the applicability of the paradigm on social media, over time, and in a hyperlocal or right-wing context. In so doing, the authors highlight emerging or increasingly important opportunities for moving beyond the paradigm and for critically considering the interplay of power structures. Eric Bleich, Amelia Pollard, and Maurice van der Veen conducted a comparative analysis of U.S. and French coverage of France's Black Lives Matter protests. Their work wrestles with the discursive differences that appear in coverage, and how that shapes different understandings of issues across countries, contributing to differentiated understandings of racialized contexts. The authors identify the paradigm's weakness in understanding coverage of race-based movements and the need to bring in historical contexts and racial structures to better understand what drives protest coverage. Two studies in this issue invite us to consider the complexities of media gatekeeping when thinking about the protest paradigm. Ioana Literat, Lillian Boxman-Shabtai, and Neta Kligler-Vilenchik also examine Black Lives Matter protests, but through the lens of media criticism on social media. This study focuses on the riot frame and the role of citizen creators and platform affordances to show how TikTok was used to challenge and reinforce hegemonic, mainstream media power. Social media likewise are central to the research presented by Kaiping Chen, Amanda Molder, Zening Duan, Shelley Boulianne, Christopher Eckart, Prince Mallari, and Diyi Yang. The researchers compared Twitter and news media discourse about recent climate strikes. Their study points to reciprocal framing, wherein activists use Twitter to promote their actions, and then news outlets cover those actions, allowing for new voices and actors to emerge in protest coverage. Johannes B. Gruber examined changes in legitimizing and delegitimizing framing in U.K. protest coverage over time. Results suggested delegitimizing frames were stable over time, but that the use of legitimizing frames increased, thus raising important questions about what might be driving this change. Lastly, Julia Freeman and Brett Hutchins’ case study about the role of hyperlocal media during an environmental protest in Australia offers place and rurality as important new factors to be considered in the hierarchy of social struggle. Their research also offers insight into potential community consequences of journalistic decisions while covering protests, illustrating how coverage can affect public trust. While all the studies in this issue challenge the protest paradigm and note an inattention to power, Freeman and Hutchins’ study in particular emphasizes the links between news media and place-based struggles for political power, calling attention to the role of elites’ interests.

The Way Forward

The articles in the special issue offer observations and lessons from around the world that can guide us toward the development of our understanding of the hierarchy of social struggle and innovation in our analyses of protest coverage. We advocate for meaningful cross-national and comparative work that goes beyond testing the applicability of the paradigm outside of a U.S.- or Global North context to instead interrogate how the interplay of various systems of power are at work in the protest coverage produced, as well as how the public receives it. By taking a critical approach to the analysis of protest coverage that accounts for its production and consumption, we can better position journalists, audiences, protests, and protesters within power hierarchies in order to more holistically understand the news media's role in the (de)legitimization of social struggles. Doing so, we argue, will allow for a different paradigm of protest coverage that is premised on an acknowledgement of the importance of protest as a human right and as fundamental to democracy.

Going forward, we emphasize that we must build upon the work in this special issue to advance theory and embrace opportunities to create work that is relevant to the public. Additionally, we must be ready to reimagine the paradigm and the hierarchical treatment of protests that helps us understand social movements in relation to one another to keep up with changing times. Social media and other emerging digital technologies are changing what protest looks like and where it occurs, as well as changing how news about protests is disseminated and amplified. In addition, the renewed global rise of authoritarianism and populism makes urgent the need to redefine our priorities and innovating our theoretical and methodological toolkits. Scholars and researchers can contribute to knowledge that could be used to protect human rights and human lives. The critical re-imagination of protest coverage and paradigm research is not just a thought exercise, but a vital measure we call on scholars and journalists to consider.