Protesting that is fit to be published: issue attention cycle and nationalist bias in coverage of protests in Ukraine after Maidan

Abstract

ABSTRACT There is an established tradition in social movement research to study protests through event datasets constructed from newspaper data. However, studies evaluating the magnitude of bias in newspaper reporting on protests have been largely confined to Western Europe and North America and have predominantly focused on time-invariant bias. I extend the past scholarship by analyzing the bias in online newspapers’ reports on protest events in Ukraine prior to and following the Maidan protests, focusing on issue attention cycles. I find that the number of mentions per protest event in the national media dropped after Maidan, while the coverage of ideological protests increased, indicating an issue attention cycle. The regional sources displayed less bias; however, they over-reported protests against separatism and Russian intervention. This presents researchers with a trade-off between using selective national outlets which adhere more to journalism standards and less selective regional outlets featuring more unpredictable patterns of bias.