No Reckoning for the Right: How Political Ideology, Protest Tolerance and News Consumption Affect Support Black Lives Matter Protests

Shifting the protest paradigm? Legitimizing and humanizing protest coverage lead to more positive attitudes toward protest, mixed results on news credibility

“…Theoretically, our findings demonstrate that the delegitimizing effects of marginalizing protest coverage documented in the protest paradigm can be shifted when journalists take a more legitimizing and humanizing approach to coverage of protest stories related to racialized issues. Our study reinforces findings from other experimental research (Brown and Mourão, 2022;Mourão and Brown, 2022) by showing that coverage that legitimizes a protest by focusing on its underlying Figure 3. This significant interaction shows that the effect of a protest story told in a humanizing manner on positive perceptions of the credibility of the news story was heightened for democrats and those with democrat-leaning viewpoints and diminished for republicans and those with republican-leaning beliefs.…”

“…Experimental work has shown that protest stories following the delegitimizing tenets of the protest paradigm led to more criticism of a social movement and its participants (Brown and Mourão, 2022). Meanwhile, legitimizing coverage reduced negative attitudes and increased audiences' identification and support of protesters (Brown and Mourão, 2022; Mourão and Brown, 2022).…”

“…Experimental work has shown that protest stories following the delegitimizing tenets of the protest paradigm led to more criticism of a social movement and its participants (Brown and Mourão, 2022). Meanwhile, legitimizing coverage reduced negative attitudes and increased audiences' identification and support of protesters (Brown and Mourão, 2022; Mourão and Brown, 2022). We build on these studies, testing the influence of legitimizing and delegitimizing news stories about protests of racialized human rights issues while also exploring the effects of humanizing versus dehumanizing framing of victims of governmental force.…”

Did George Floyd’s murder shape the public’s felt obligation to obey the police?

“…Finally, these differences in political ideology were also found in perceptions of current, high-profile police events. For example, Brown and Mourão (2022) surveyed U.S. adults about their perceptions of protest behaviors and government responses that occurred in the summer of 2020 following the police murder of George Floyd. They found that conservatives were much less supportive of protest behaviors than liberals were.…”

“…They found that conservatives were much less supportive of protest behaviors than liberals were. Additionally, conservatives believed that government responses to protests were too lenient, whereas liberals believed that government responses were too severe (Brown & Mourão, 2022). Altogether, these findings demonstrate that political ideology—especially within the context of research suggesting that news sources frame the same events differently to appeal to a particular group’s values (Fulgoni et al, 2016)—might be a key moderator in determining how people perceive police-related events, especially those that are widespread and valanced.…”