No Surrender. No Challenge. No Protest Paradigm: A Content Analysis of the Canadian News Media Coverage of the “Yellow Vest Movement” and the “United We Roll Convoy”

Abstract

This study's exhaustive content analysis (N = 538) examines how Canada's mainstream news media covered the nascent yellow vest movement from the first Canadian protests in December 2018 culminating in the February 2019 crosscountry United We Roll convoy. We demonstrate that Protest Paradigm scholarship does not offer a useful analytic for understanding the coverage of this right-wing social movement whose tactics were banal and law abiding. Furthermore, we argue that Canadian news media coverage of the protest movement was largely uncritical and decidedly hegemonic, raising questions about normative watchdog conceptions of the news media in Canadian democracy. Résumé Grâce' à une analyse de contenu (N = 538), cet article examine comment les médias d'information grand public du Canada ont couvert le mouvement naissant des gilets jaunes depuis les premières The authors wish to thank Prof. Maria Petrova Bakardjieva, Prof. Gregory Taylor, and the external referees for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Variables de éxito mediático de los movimientos sociales. El 15-M y la PAH en España

“…This raises the question of why a social movement, or an act of protest, may receive a more favorable media treatment. In the quest for an explanation, different movements and protests have been analyzed and comparative research has been promoted, without getting a consensus on the causes (Andrews & Caren, 2010;Boyle et al, 2012;De Cillia & McCurdy, 2020;Di Cicco, 2010;Evans, 2015;Kilgo & Harlow, 2019;Rohlinger & Brown, 2013;Veneti et al, 2012;Weaver & Scacco, 2013).…”

“…All these factors are more often present in the news referred to the PAH compared to the news related to the 15-M. We applied a quantitative content analysis on a sample of news pieces to study the news media coverage of the 15-M and the PAH. This research method has been used widely in similar papers (De Cillia & McCurdy, 2020;Kilgo & Harlow, 2019;Xu, 2013).…”

Anti‐Indigenous policy formation : Settler colonialism and neoliberal political advocacy

“…Other analysis of taxpayer groups more generally emphasizes the policy entrepreneurship that emerged from perceived policy threats to the wealth of the rich. Martin (2013) shows how early taxpayer groups, tax clubs, were able to organize citizens around libertarian anti‐tax, and anti‐state politics, which have been replicated across a variety of right‐wing movements (De Cillia & McCurdy, 2020). Like the current form of the CTF and other contemporary taxpayer groups, tax clubs were historically associated with capital and resource extraction industries (Martin, 2013).…”

Why are carbon taxes unfair? Disentangling public perceptions of fairness

“…They conclude that various forms of technology support instruments are considerably more effective. Still, although carbon taxes may not be the only solution to the emissions problem, they have been successfully implemented in several jurisdictions around the world, starting with the Nordic countries in the early 90 ′ s (Finland 1990, Sweden and Norway 1991, and Denmark 1992 As several recent instances of public protests against governmental attempts to increase fossil fuel prices demonstrate, for example in France (Maestre-Andrés et al, 2019), Ecuador (Schaffitzel et al, 2020), and several Canadian provinces (De Cillia and McCurdy, 2020;Harrison and Peet, 2012), the effects of carbon pricing stretch beyond the immediate consequences for carbon emissions levels. Carbon tax also has tangible distributional effects, as it imposes a relatively larger direct burden as a share of income on lower-income than on higher-income households.…”