From “Angry Mobs” to “Citizens in Anguish”: The Malleability of the Protest Paradigm in the International News Coverage of the 2021 US Capitol Attack

Abstract

This study tests the robustness of the “protest paradigm”—a routinized, predominantly negative pattern in covering social protest—by examining the news coverage of the 2021 US Capitol attack in eight countries that vary in the nature of their political regime and geopolitical standing, with democratic US allies United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, Australia on one side, and authoritarian adversaries Russia, China, and Iran on the other. Based on a computer-assisted analysis of 3,579 news articles, the study shows that rather than operating as a rigid template, the protest paradigm offers national media a malleable set of journalistic devices that can be appropriated to construct the meaning of disruptive global events in a way that reproduces dominant domestic ideologies and advances the ruling elites’ geopolitical interests. In addition to theoretical contribution, the study offers a novel empirical finding to the literature on protest coverage by providing evidence of national media not simply deviating from, but explicitly violating the protest paradigm. As demonstrated by the analysis of the Russian press, rather than delegitimizing the January 6 attackers by making light of their agenda and emphasizing their unruly behavior—which could be expected from coverage consistent with the protest paradigm—the Russian state-owned media trivialized the brutality of the attack by opting for cues with less violent connotations and elevated the legitimacy of the protesters’ actions by framing them as valid demands by politically minded citizens unjustly prosecuted for concerns about the integrity of electoral process.

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

“…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.…”

“…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.…”