Protest Paradigm Research Articles

Muting the voices of the protesters

The study interrogated News24’s framing of the 2015 Malamulele service delivery protest inSouth Africa. The study sought to find out what frames were used, why they were chosen andwith what effect. Twenty newspaper articles published by News24 on the protest were purposivelyselected for inclusion in the study. The articles were analysed using quantitative and qualitativecontent analysis. Findings revealed that the reporters chose episodic frames which conformedwith the protest paradigm and which depicted the protestors as violent, destructive, unreasonableand a threat to the economy of the local community and of the nation. The paper argues that thechoice of sources and frames was largely informed by journalistic principles of news productionand that this resulted in the voices of the protestors being stifled.

Media Portrayal of a Civil Rights Movement: Perspective of Pakistani Journalists

ABSTRACT This study analyzes the perspectives of journalists on the reporting of a civil rights movement known as Pashtun Tahafuz Movement in the Pakistani media. The movement was started by the people of tribal areas to demand an end to the existing state policies on the US-led “war on terror” amidst calls for institutional reforms in the region. The study borrows from the existing scholarship on the media representation of social movements and utilizes the protest paradigm as its theoretical framework. Through content analysis and detailed interviews with journalists, the study found the civil rights movement is mainly reported in unfavorable terms in the leading media outlets. While sharing their perspectives on this particular treatment, the journalists believed that the media was tightly controlled by the government to blackout the movement from the mainstream media. Moreover, the organizational and personal opinions of journalists also influenced the negative portrayal. Though the social media has provided alternative avenues to the movement’s activists to speak out against the state’s policies, the journalists feared that even this limited freedom would not last longer in the face of some upcoming legislation aimed at controlling the country’s social media.

Diffusion-Proofing Protest Paradigm: Mass Media and China's Prevention of Social Movement Spillover During the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement

Studies on the “protest paradigm” have long explored how a society's mass media system frames the social movements occurring within that society. This study adopts a social movement diffusion perspective to sharpen the transborder dimension of the protest paradigm. Specifically, we introduce the concept of the “diffusion-proofing” protest paradigm, given that an understudied and undertheorized function of the protest paradigm is the prevention of the import of exogenous social movements. Taking the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement as an example, we investigate how mainland China's mass media acted to prevent movement diffusion. Four transborder components of the diffusion-proofing protest paradigm are proposed: reactions, attributions, consequences, and solutions. Through content analysis, we argue that by highlighting these transborder components, China's newspapers attributed the movement's rise to foreign intervention, emphasized the movement's negative effects on both Hong Kong and mainland China, and revealed the uncompromising nature of China's reaction and the urgency of cross-border cooperation for containing the movement and its diffusion. Further, we identify two modes of reporting: a mainly descriptive mode that relied on a local framework to depict the movement and its local context and an evaluative mode that emphasized the level of deviance and foreign intervention, thus amplifying the movement's transborder effects and the need to prevent its diffusion. Notably, the level of deviance acts as a mediating channel between the two modes, transforming the local framework into a transborder one. The diffusion-proofing protest paradigm is also found to vary across media types and periods.

From “Angry Mobs” to “Citizens in Anguish”: The Malleability of the Protest Paradigm in the International News Coverage of the 2021 US Capitol Attack

This study tests the robustness of the “protest paradigm”—a routinized, predominantly negative pattern in covering social protest—by examining the news coverage of the 2021 US Capitol attack in eight countries that vary in the nature of their political regime and geopolitical standing, with democratic US allies United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, Australia on one side, and authoritarian adversaries Russia, China, and Iran on the other. Based on a computer-assisted analysis of 3,579 news articles, the study shows that rather than operating as a rigid template, the protest paradigm offers national media a malleable set of journalistic devices that can be appropriated to construct the meaning of disruptive global events in a way that reproduces dominant domestic ideologies and advances the ruling elites’ geopolitical interests. In addition to theoretical contribution, the study offers a novel empirical finding to the literature on protest coverage by providing evidence of national media not simply deviating from, but explicitly violating the protest paradigm. As demonstrated by the analysis of the Russian press, rather than delegitimizing the January 6 attackers by making light of their agenda and emphasizing their unruly behavior—which could be expected from coverage consistent with the protest paradigm—the Russian state-owned media trivialized the brutality of the attack by opting for cues with less violent connotations and elevated the legitimacy of the protesters’ actions by framing them as valid demands by politically minded citizens unjustly prosecuted for concerns about the integrity of electoral process.

Protesting the Protest Paradigm: TikTok as a Space for Media Criticism

Though news representations of protest have been studied extensively, little is known about how media audiences critique such representations. Focusing on TikTok as a space for media criticism, this article examines how users employ the app to respond to representations of protest in mainstream news media. Content collected in the spring of 2021 illuminated two very distinct foci of discussion about news representations of protest: the Black Lives Matter movement and the Capitol riot. Our qualitative content analysis of TikTok videos and their related comments demonstrates how users employed TikTok’s creative affordances to dissect specific news representations, critique the media apparatus, and expand news narratives. These findings shed light on the complex role of TikTok as a platform for media criticism—one that can be used for both democratic and non-democratic ends.

How Mainstream and Alternative Media Shape Online Mobilization: A Comparative Study of News Coverages in Post-Colonial Macau

Protests today involve more identities and interests and have more complex relationships with the media ecology than previously. Former studies indicate the need to identify framing patterns within the changing media politics of activism. The current study empirically investigates the media framing of a social-media-driven protest in post-Colonial Macau, China. Drawing on the framing theory and content analysis methodology of 243 news coverage articles, reports, and posts published during the protest, this study explores the correlation between multimedia features. The results show that news coverage of the protest exhibits an issue–attention cycle. Media stance can affect the features of protest coverages significantly. Compared with mainstream media, alternative media adopted a more positive tone in reporting the protests, including quotations from news sources and the framing devices of the protest paradigm (show, goals, public attitude, impact) in favorable terms. The result suggests the activists’ alternative media counteracted the mainstream media’s marginalization by using a form of “legitimization paradigm”.

American Religion at The Met Cloisters

This article traces the religious history of The Cloisters, the branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to medieval European architecture and art in northern Manhattan, providing a case study of how Americans have used images of the medieval to articulate a moralistic American spirituality. It focuses on particular moments in the museum’s history—the 1914 museum created by sculptor George Grey Barnard; the 1938 opening of The Met Cloisters, funded by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; its reception in the mid-twentieth century; a series of Episcopal Masses in the 1970s; and the spring 2018 exhibit Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination—in order to unpack and contextualize the changes and constants in the visual vocabulary of religion at this museum. Throughout the twentieth century, founders, donors, curators, critics, and visitors saw a “right” way to respond emotionally to The Cloisters. One’s response to the museum demonstrated not only one’s sensitivity but also one’s character, especially the moral superiority of elite white Protestant men. In the twenty-first century, the design of Heavenly Bodies and its reception both drew upon and pushed back against the masculine Protestant paradigm of American medievalism that had long been established at The Cloisters.

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

Research indicates that when mainstream news media report about demonstrations, protesters often face delegitimizing coverage. This phenomenon, known as the “(journalistic) protest paradigm,” is thought to be a default mindset that leads journalists to emphasize the method of protesters over their message. However, empirical work has so far limited itself to specific protest movements or events and only covers brief periods. This study first identifies and then codes the main frames in all reports about domestic protest in the United Kingdom. Analysing data that covers eight national newspapers during a 26 year period ( N = 27,496), I provide a more systematic understanding of how the mainstream news media in liberal democracies report about protests. The analysis shows that a stable majority of articles uses frames linked to the protest paradigm throughout the time period. However, a substantial and growing number of articles employ legitimizing frames—either on their own or co-existing with delegitimizing framing.

Media framing of political protests – reporting bias and the discrediting of political activism

ABSTRACT Recently several European countries shifted to illiberalism and made attempts to dominate the media and political narratives. The question we raise is how media populism in Hungary contributes to the buttressing of the regime by discrediting protests. We offer a four-level media analysis. First, we ask whether the pro-government media is characterized by so-called selection bias. Second, we focus on framingbias relying on ideas presented by the protest paradigm. Third, we highlight the tone of disdain that characterizes numerous pro-governmental utterances. Finally, we point out the significance of iconic frames. Contrary to our expectations, we found no selection bias, but there was a clear framing bias in pro-governmental media, which was made harsher by the derogatory tone of pro-governmental media and the dog-whistling produced by iconic frames. By identifying how media populism operates, our aim is to offer a way to grasp democratic backsliding by concentrating on the media.

US Hypocrisy and the End of American Exceptionalism? Narratives of the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol From Illiberal National Media

Despite the United States being the only country in the world that places its former and incoming leader on a stage for millions to see, with the “Peaceful Transition of Power” being the very symbol of American democracy watched around the world, the events on January 6th, 2021, show how such performances of democratic culture are not permanent fixtures. Indeed, whereas US and foreign audiences have become accustomed to watching anti-government protests in illiberal states or underdeveloped democracies, the scenes of thousands of protestors storming the US Capitol has opened the United States itself for critique from the very nations it has admonished in the past. Thus, although the protest paradigm has become the dominant framework for understanding mediated portrayals of anti-government protests, this study argues it provides only partial insight into the January 6th insurrection, eschewing the larger strategic dimensions of non-democratic countries’ media coverage of the event. Rather than focusing on how media framed the event, this study examined 525 news articles from 26 Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and Saudi media outlets’ reporting on the event from January 5th to January 19th through the lens of strategic media narratives. Results show that while elements of the protest paradigm are present in all four countries’ reporting—providing clear condemnation of the event and its participants, with blame placed on President Trump for instigating the attack—two additional overarching plotlines emerge: one shifting the scene away from President Trump to America’s broader polarized politics and failed governance and a second concluding the end of US exceptionalism and characterizations of US hypocrisy. Taken together, these two overarching narratives highlight the significance of storytelling as a potent form of geopolitical contestation in today’s global media environment.

Appropriating media coverage of protests: A framing analysis of the ‘Save Akamas’ campaign in national news

News coverage of protests typically employs a protest paradigm: framing strategies for marginalizing protest actors and reducing the significance of protest issues and aims. However, recent studies are detecting less prototypical media responses, indicating the need to identify the extent of application of the protest paradigm and the underlying determinants for variations within media politics of dissent. This analysis of the framing of a Cypriot environmental campaign ‘Save Akamas’ by three national newspapers indicated that the coverage deviated from the protest paradigm. The results showed little emphasis on social deviance but validation of the protests in varying magnitudes through frames articulating governmental responsibility, environmental conservation, and ambivalence towards economic grievances. Finally, supplemented with interviews with two protest organizers and journalists, respectively, this article examines the conditions under which citizen protests mitigate media spectacles through appropriating legitimation strategies.

GIVING CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE: CONTENT ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVISM PATTERNS OF #BLACKTIKTOKSTRIKE ON TIKTOK

While the overwhelming flow of content on social media platforms allows for an ease of access to information and entertainment, it also blurs the lines for the original content creators to receive the proper credit to their intellectual property. With TikTok’s success among other social platforms, many TikTok dances were reused and their owners did not receive credit for the choreography, specifically when created by minority groups. As a result, the black TikTok community has gone on a content strike on the app and refused to create any new dances. The strike is a form of social media activism and as such, all users participating are creating awareness content under the hashtag #BlackTikTokStrike. The aim of this study is to analyze the patterns of social media activism in the videos shared under the mentioned hashtag. The study uses a purposive sampling method to selectively pick the sample. All videos were analyzed in reference to (a) storytelling analysis, (b) audio and music, (c) technical elements, and (d) protest paradigm. The findings illustrate patterns in all aforementioned themes of social media activism in the TikTok strike movement. Users of the hashtag often resorted to a humorous tone of storytelling. The videos also shared a song for the same artist across many videos. Additionally, participants of the social media movement shared mostly raw and uncut videos although more than half of said videos include graphics like images, infographics, and text. Lastly, users took to the platform to call out artists, redirect credit to original creators, and call for immediate action.

PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS OF FICTION REFLECTED IN FILM: A CASE OF DECRYPTION

The article deals with religious, materialistic, and mixed interpretations of the thing and the personality as generic entities in the story «Oh, whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad» by M. R. James and its screen versions. The differences found in the versions concern petty and significant deviations from the original story, which influence the initial message. The method used to achieve the results represented in the article combines the ideas of Philosophical Hermeneutics and those of the medieval exegetical method of allegorese applied to deal with obscure passages in sacred texts. The original story treated within the Protestant ideological paradigm gives way to materialistic views that are subject to refutation, reconsideration, and combination with philosophical issues in the screen versions – transponents. The thing as an inanimate object is endowed with personal qualities of a living being; on the contrary, an individual is viewed as a thing with no mind.

The Greta effect: Visualising climate protest in UK media and the Getty images collections

Media actors, broadly conceived, act as powerful agents shaping not only what we think about, but also how we think about it. Whilst research at the site of news content (e.g. newspaper articles) has proliferated, there is little understanding about the site of news production (i.e. the role that powerful actors play in shaping news content). Here, both news content (via newspaper articles) and news production (via image collections) are examined together to seek to understand how climate protest has been visually represented.This study focuses on the period between 2019 and 2020, a time of significant growth for climate protest through the expansion of movements including Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future. Historically, protest is often represented in the media through the ‘protest paradigm’, with protestors depicted as socially deviant. This study sought to examine if this paradigm held true for these most recent protests.Climate protest imagery was collected from a globally-dominant image collection, Getty Images; and from the digital archives of five major UK newspapers. Secondary analysis was also undertaken of a longitudinal visual media datasource featuring three of the same UK newspapers from 2001 to 2009. The study shows that in 2001–2009, climate protest was typically visualised in a way which obscured the human face of protest and was consistent with the protest paradigm. In contrast, in 2019–20, protesters – and particularly school strikers – were depicted in an individualised, powerful, and hopeful way. The dominant face of climate protest in 2019–20 is visually represented in the media as young and female. We conclude that the visual discourse of climate protest has shifted away from the protest paradigm to instead depict climate change as an issue of intergenerational equity.

The politics of fear in Hong Kong protest representations

AbstractThis study gives a corpus-assisted discourse study of the representations of 2019 Hong Kong protests in theNew York Times. With the corpus-analytic tools Wmatrix and Wordsmith, it examines both the dominant patterns in its representations and the specific strategies used. The findings suggest that while NYT still draws on the traditional patterns in its representations of Hong Kong protests, it deviates from the protest paradigm in its representations of concerned parties. Meanwhile, emotion discourse has emerged as a distinct strategy in its representations. This is most revealing in the emotion of fear, and a close analysis of its use in its context has revealed its role in the construction of concerned parties and the distrust of Hong Kong people towards the Chinese government.

When the Right Protests: How Journalists Cover Conservative Movements

ABSTRACT This study focuses on the relationship between the mainstream press and right-wing protests in Brazil. Guided by the “protest paradigm” literature, my goal was to understand how reporters in the Global South cover conservative demonstrations. Protest paradigm scholarship found that news norms and routines lead to delegitimizing patterns of coverage, focusing on official viewpoints, spectacle, and violence. Here, I consider how the same practices can aid in the legitimization of right-wing movements. Through a mixed methodology combining content analysis and interviews with reporters from the analyzed outlets, findings revealed that when protesters’ grievances and demands aligned with the preferences of anti-leftist elites, right-wing politicians subsidized information to journalists. The lack of clashes with the police and cohesive leadership also allowed for coverage to become more thematic. As a result, I argue three conditions lead to news legitimization of protests. First, the movement fitting within a broader political conflict between elites. Second, the movement being sympathetic to the state's repressive apparatus. Third, the movement having cohesive leadership and unified identity. These conditions, which favor right-wing demands, drove legitimizing coverage even when reporters viewed the movement with skepticism.

Hearts and Hahas of the Public: Exploring How Protest Frames and Sentiment Influence Emotional Emoji Engagement with Facebook News Posts

ABSTRACT The protest paradigm, which describes the unequitable reciprocity of the media-social movement relationship, creates a double-bind for social movements. Mainstream news media in the United States emphasize emotion, drama, and irrationality while excluding the grievances, agendas, and substance behind a protest, contributing to negative narratives that can hinder public support for a movement. This analysis of Facebook news posts of protests by mainstream U.S. news organizations contributes to our understanding of how social media’s engagement affordances work in cohort with journalists’ use of emotional appeals to legitimize some protests and delegitimize others. Results show posts encourage the mobilization of some protests more than others, and media frames and emotional linguistic devices might contribute to a spectrum of delegitimizing framing effects. Legitimizing features significantly decrease emotional reactions from audiences, leading to more neutral but potentially less engaging audience reception and response. Findings advance our understanding protest paradigm framing outcomes.

Strategic Framing Matters But Varies: A Structural Topic Modeling Approach to Analyzing China’s Foreign Propaganda About the 2019 Hong Kong Protests on Twitter

Drawing upon the approach of strategic framing, this study investigated how China’s state-run media mobilize foreign propaganda machine and use specific patterns to describe the 2019 Hong Kong protests on Twitter. It also shed light on the heterogeneity of both production and reception of the strategic frames used by state media. Structural topic modeling was employed to analyze a large amount of Twitter content (i.e., 14,412 tweets) posted by 13 verified organizational accounts, and six strategic frames were identified as conflicts and violence, calling for stability and order, marginalizing protests, criticizing the West as accomplices, delegitimizing protests, and social and economic disruption. These frames highlighted insider–outsider and causes and consequences as two overarching communication strategies. The results also revealed that the bureaucratic rank of state media and the engagement rate of each tweet were closely associated with the content prevalence of various strategic frames. In addition to enhancing our understanding of the construction of “protest paradigm” against the social media context, these empirical findings uncover the often overlooked mobility and flexibility of China’s state media discourse as well as the communication ecology shaped and consolidated by the increasing importance state media communicators attach to online engagement metrics.

Taking the star-spangled knee: the media framing of Colin Kaepernick

Colin Kaepernick, quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, opted to kneel during the American National Anthem throughout the 2016 NFL season as a symbolic protest against racial injustice and police brutality throughout the United States. His actions provoked criticism when the media focused on Kaepernick’s alleged unpatriotic and anti-military stance. Using the concept of media framing, this paper analyses the newspaper coverage of Kaepernick’s protest. We identify four key frames which can be scrutinized and understood using the theoretical framework of the protest paradigm. In an innovative approach the research also analyses the coverage of Kaepernick in 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a police officer, which sparked worldwide anti-racism protests. This paper builds on the understanding of media framing towards an individual’s protest and the consequences they face.

News media framing of social protests around racial tensions during the Donald Trump presidency

Media framing of social protests can influence public opinion and governmental response. An extensive line of scholarly work had pointed to the existence of two alternative news frames; public order and debate. We argue that prior work may have been limited by the reliance on deductive strategies using predefined, theoretically-driven frames. Using a data-driven computational method, the Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMN), we examine mainstream news’ framing of two contentious protests that took place during Donald Trump’s presidency; Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA ( n = 1231 news articles), and the Black Lives Matter protests ( n = 2810). In addition to the frames found in past research, we identify a prominent Politics frame, often focussing on the role of Trump in inciting and reacting to racial tensions. An in-depth analysis of the application of frames to each protest revealed a nuanced use of the Protest Paradigm. We suggest possible revisions to existing theories, and discuss the potential social and political implications of our findings.