Protesting the Paradigm

Abstract

This study assesses the scope and applicability of the "protest paradigm" in non-Western contexts by examining the news coverage of Brazilian, Chinese, and Indian protests in their domestic media. Two publications from each nation, one conservative and one progressive, are content analyzed for adherence to a series of marginalization devices that have often been used by the U.S. media to ridicule protest movements and portray them as violent. The Indian media emerge as the least likely to follow the protest paradigm, while Brazilian and Chinese media conform to it in moderate levels. Comparative analysis suggests the historical legitimacy of informal power negotiations in a political culture makes news media more willing to take protesters seriously and limits adherence to the protest paradigm. In contrast, a news organization's ideological affiliation with the government of the day, rather than any ideology per se, makes it relatively more likely to conform to the protest paradigm. Marginalization devices such as circus, appearance, and eyewitness accounts are rarely used in any of these nations. But disparity of sources, (non)reference to protesters' causes and violence, and violence blame appear to be abiding features of news coverage of protests everywhere.

Is the Whole World Watching? Building a Typology of Protest Coverage on Social Media From Around the World

“…Wittebols (1996) showed that news coverage of protests was more favorable when protesters' issues aligned with the government's foreign policies. Other studies suggest that general attitudes toward protest activity can influence adherence to the paradigm, as the more protesters are seen as outsiders, the more negative coverage will be (Shahin et al 2016;Streeck and Kenworthy 2005). Kim and Shahin (2019) pointed out that news media ideological similarities could sometimes overcome national boundaries when covering certain social movements and protests.…”

“…While previous studies have identified various factors that limit adherence to the paradigm (e.g., Cottle, 2008;Harlow and Johnson 2011;Shahin et al 2016), little research has attempted to comprehensively show how the paradigm in stories shared on social media varies across the world in different types of media. With this in mind, we offer a typology to better explain how the protest paradigm operates across countries, languages, protest topic, and types of media outlets in this social media age (see Figure 1).…”

Troublemakers in the Streets? A Framing Analysis of Newspaper Coverage of Protests in the UK 1992–2017

“…Later studies have often reused these frames but measured how commonly they appeared through quantitative content analysis. This enabled researchers to compare how commonly frames linked to the protest paradigm are used in different countries (e.g., Dardis, 2006, Shahin et al (2016); Harlow et al, 2020), for different kinds of protests (e.g., Kilgo and Harlow, 2019; De Cillia and McCurdy, 2020), employing different tactics (e.g., Wouters, 2015; Wasow, 2020) between different news outlets (e.g., Kyriakidou and Olivas Osuna, 2017; Kim and Shahin, 2020), on social media sites (e.g., Mourão et al, 2021; Harlow and Johnson, 2011; Harlow et al, 2020), and over time (e.g., Gil-Lopez, 2020; Jha, 2007). However, while some studies have complemented the original set with inductively identified frames (e.g., Kyriakidou and Olivas Osuna, 2017; Mourão et al, 2021), Kleut and Milojevic (2021) remark that the original set by McLeod and Hertog (1999) has rarely been assessed for completeness by fully inductive research strategies.…”

Looking in the Mirror: US and French Coverage of Black Lives Matter in France

“…Existing scholarship on media coverage of BLM focuses exclusively on the US context and was not designed to analyze coverage outside of the United States. While protest paradigm approaches have been applied in comparative examinations of the American and foreign media (Di Cicco 2010; Harlow and Johnson 2011; Shahin et al 2016), research has also highlighted variations in the applicability of the paradigm depending on factors such as protesters’ tactics, journalists’ own preferences, or the perceived legitimacy of informal power negotiations (Boyle et al 2012; Shahin et al 2016; Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2014).…”