Looking for Mr Hyde: The protest paradigm, violence and (de)legitimation of mass political protests

Abstract

Abstract This article analyses the shifting use of violence as a framing device that determines the legitimacy of political actors in mainstream media coverage of mass political protests. Building on an analysis of news reports on the largest political protests in Slovenia in the past two decades, which lasted between November 2012 and March 2013, we show how violence can be used as a ‘floating’ framing device that articulates the legitimacy or illegitimacy of protesters at large, and of specific groups of protesters, state institutions (e.g. police) and political elites. The analysis is grounded in the tradition of ‘protest paradigm’ research but is conducted according to a revised analytical framework, which better captures the nuances of mainstream media reports on mass protests and the complexities of contemporary protest action. A qualitative multimodal analysis of protest coverage in the main evening news programmes of two leading Slovene mainstream news sources – commercial TV station POP TV and national public broadcaster TV Slovenia – shows that mainstream media can resort to providing a normative social function, even in cases when protesters are framed as legitimate political subjects. It also shows that the legitimization of protesters as political subjects does not necessarily imply legitimization of their explicitly political challenges to the status quo, but can serve to shift the discourse from the sphere of politics to that of morality.