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No Reckoning for the Right: How Political Ideology, Protest Tolerance and News Consumption Affect Support Black Lives Matter Protests View supplementary material
Abstract
After the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a flood of protest activity against racial injustice ensued around the world, and a significant uptick in support for Black Lives Matter followed. This study investigated the narratives produced in news coverage of Black Lives Matter protests and how media consumption and individual predispositions help us understand public support for the movement. Combining a content analysis of news about protests and a survey of people’s attitudes, we assessed if patterns in mainstream and partisan coverage have changed, and how those patterns relate to people’s level of support for the movement, assessment of its effectiveness, and of police response during demonstrations. Our findings suggest that persistent negative patterns of protest coverage continued to dominate news headlines, with a major emphasis on negative actions, disruption, and violence in centerist- and right-leaning media coverage from the Associated Press, CNN and Fox News. MSNBC produced the least coverage overall, but their coverage was most legitimizing. Survey results showed that preexisting attitudes remain consistently stronger determinants of support for the movement than media coverage and suggested a possible ideological asymmetry among the general public. Conservative affiliation and news consumption are strong predictors of less support for Black Lives Matter and perceptions of police response to these protests as too lenient. Mainstream news consumption, though producing predominantly delegitimizing coverage, is correlated with more support for Black Lives Matter.
... Finally, these differences in political ideology were also found in perceptions of current, high-profile police events. For example, Brown and Mourão (2022) surveyed U.S. adults about their perceptions of protest behaviors and government responses that occurred in the summer of 2020 following the police murder of George Floyd. They found that conservatives were much less supportive of protest behaviors than liberals were. ...
... They found that conservatives were much less supportive of protest behaviors than liberals were. Additionally, conservatives believed that government responses to protests were too lenient, whereas liberals believed that government responses were too severe (Brown & Mourão, 2022). Altogether, these findings demonstrate that political ideology-especially within the context of research suggesting that news sources frame the same events differently to appeal to a particular group's values (Fulgoni et al., 2016)-might be a key moderator in determining how people perceive police-related events, especially those that are widespread and valanced. ...
Objective:
Our goal in the present study was to use longitudinal data to assess how normative (i.e., consensually motivated) and instrumental (i.e., coercively motivated) obligation to obey police changed after police murdered George Floyd and whether these changes differed by political ideology.
Hypotheses:
Using procedural justice theory, we hypothesized that after Floyd's murder, participants would feel less normatively obligated and more instrumentally obligated to obey police. We also hypothesized that these trends would be stronger for liberal-leaning than conservative-leaning participants.
Method:
Adults (N = 645) were recruited through Prolific from four politically diverse U.S. states. Participants reported their normative and instrumental obligation across three waves of data collection, each separated by 3 weeks. The first two waves were collected prior to the Floyd's murder, and the third was collected after.
Results:
Hierarchical linear models indicated that although normative obligation remained stable before Floyd's murder, it declined after Floyd's murder (b = -0.19, 95% CI [-0.24, -0.14], p < .001). In contrast, coercive obligation to obey increased consistently across all three waves. Liberal-leaning participants drove most of the effects.
Conclusions:
For researchers, these findings help strengthen our understanding of procedural justice theory by differentiating normative and instrumental obligation and by distinguishing differences by political ideology within the context of a historic police-brutality event. For policymakers and law enforcement, our research suggests that police brutality may undermine the public's normative felt obligation to obey the police, which would be problematic for police reformation efforts grounded in governing by mutual consent versus by fear and coercion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
A US experiment ( n = 1506) demonstrated how a new approach to writing protest stories challenges press patterns in the United States of underrepresented groups. News stories that explain the goals and background of a protest—a concept called legitimizing—and that humanize—rather than criminalize—a person whose death sparked a protest led news audiences to better understand the protest and those involved in the social movement. We also found that those with conservative political beliefs perceived these stories as less credible than those written following journalistic norms typical in the United States that tend to cast protesters and their causes in a negative light, although the opposite was true for those with liberal views. Results are discussed in relation to the protest paradigm.
In recent years, scholars have argued that protests that employ nonviolent tactics attract greater support and are therefore more likely to succeed than those that use violence. We argue that how protest tactics are perceived is not a purely objective determination, but can be influenced in part by observer characteristics – in particular, by partisan identity. We conducted a survey experiment on two independent samples through the MTurk platform, randomly assigning protester group identity and tactics. Results show that when controlling for assigned tactics, self-identified Republicans but not Democrats perceive higher levels of violence when a disliked group is protesting. The effect is strongest in regard to tactics that are nominally the least disruptive. The findings have implications for theories of nonviolent protest, the legitimacy of repression, and the prospects for marginal groups to influence policy in polarized societies.
How do stigmatized minorities advance agendas when confronted with hostile majorities? Elite theories of influence posit marginal groups exert little power. I propose the concept of agenda seeding to describe how activists use methods like disruption to capture the attention of media and overcome political asymmetries. Further, I hypothesize protest tactics influence how news organizations frame demands. Evaluating black-led protests between 1960 and 1972, I find nonviolent activism, particularly when met with state or vigilante repression, drove media coverage, framing, congressional speech, and public opinion on civil rights. Counties proximate to nonviolent protests saw presidential Democratic vote share increase 1.6–2.5%. Protester-initiated violence, by contrast, helped move news agendas, frames, elite discourse, and public concern toward “social control.” In 1968, using rainfall as an instrument, I find violent protests likely caused a 1.5–7.9% shift among whites toward Republicans and tipped the election. Elites may dominate political communication but hold no monopoly.
How do protest actions impact public support for social movements? Here we test the claim that extreme protest actions-protest behaviors perceived to be harmful to others, highly disruptive, or both-typically reduce support for social movements. Across 6 experiments, including 3 that were preregistered, participants indicated less support for social movements that used more extreme protest actions. This result obtained across a variety of movements (e.g., animal rights, anti-Trump, anti-abortion) and extreme protest actions (e.g., blocking highways, vandalizing property). Further, in 5 of 6 studies, negative reactions to extreme protest actions also led participants to support the movement's central cause less, and these effects were largely independent of individuals' prior ideology or views on the issue. In all studies we found effects were driven by diminished social identification with the movement. In Studies 4-6, serial mediation analyses detailed a more in-depth model: observers viewed extreme protest actions to be immoral, reducing observers' emotional connection to the movement and, in turn, reducing identification with and support for the movement. Taken together with prior research showing that extreme protest actions can be effective for applying pressure to institutions and raising awareness of movements, these findings suggest an activist's dilemma, in which the same protest actions that may offer certain benefits are also likely to undermine popular support for social movements. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
Building on research analyses of Black Lives Matter media portrayals, this inquiry uses a two-wave panel survey to examine the effects news coverage has on the evaluation of the core ideas from the Black Lives Matter social movement agenda. Results show that conservative media use increases negative evaluations; models suggest this relationship works as a multidirectional feedback loop. Mainstream and liberal media consumptions do not lead to more positive views about Black Lives Matter's core ideas. The 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, was the catalyst that launched a brewing protest movement into the international spotlight. Police officer Darren Wilson shot the unarmed teenager multiple times in the middle of a neighborhood street. Initial protests aimed at finding justice for Brown turned violent quickly and were subsequently met with a militarized police force (e.g., Brown, 2014). Local protests continued in Ferguson while the jury deliberated Wilson's possible indictment. However, in November 2014, Wilson was not indicted, and the decision refueled national protests. Brown's death was one of many in 2014, and news media paid attention to the reoccurrence of similar scenarios, as well as the associated protests. These demonstrations were part of the growing, decentralized Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Protests echoed demands for justice for Black men, women, and children killed by excessive use of force, for police policy reformation, and for the acknowledgment of oppression against Blacks and other marginalized communities.
How do people respond to violent political protest? The authors present a theory proposing that the use of violence leads the general public to view a protest group as less reasonable, a perception that reduces identification with the group. This reduced identification in turn reduces public support for the violent group. Furthermore, the authors argue that violence also leads to more support for groups that are perceived as opposing the violent group. The authors test this theory using a large (n = 800) Internet-based survey experiment with a politically diverse sample. Participants responded to an experimental scenario based on recent violent confrontations between white nationalist protesters and antiracist counter-protesters, allowing the authors to study whether violent protest would reduce public support even when used against a widely reviled group. The authors found that the use of violence by an antiracist group against white nationalists led to decreased support for the antiracist group and increased support for the white nationalist group. Furthermore, the results were consistent with the theorized causal process: violence led to perceptions of unreasonableness, which reduced identification with and support for the protest group. Importantly, the results revealed a striking asymmetry: although acts of violence eroded support for an antiracist group, support for white nationalist groups was not reduced by the use of violence, perhaps because the public already perceives these groups as very unreasonable and identifies with them at low levels. Consistent with this interpretation, the authors found that self-identified Republicans, a subset of the sample that reported less extremely negative views of white nationalists, showed reduced support for white nationalists when they engaged in violence.
The rise of the modern Black Lives Matter movement can be traced back to two key events, the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin and the 2014 death of Michael Brown. Research routinely showed that mainstream media’s narrative choices marginalize and delegitimize protesters and their causes, a pattern known as the protest paradigm. This study provides a longitudinal examination of how the same mainstream media system varied in their coverage of similar events and the degree to which journalists challenged the predicted paradigms conceptualized in other academic work. A content analysis of national newspaper coverage revealed that news before the judicial rulings focused on protesters’ tactics (violence versus peaceful) and changed to the realm of ideas (grievances and demands) after the assailants were considered not guilty of wrongdoing. No progression was found in legitimizing coverage of protests between the two cases.
The shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in August 2014 served as a pivotal case that pushed excessive use of police force against minority groups to the national spotlight. Guided by the scholarship on protest coverage, this article investigates the interplay between advocacy and journalistic framing in the coverage of the Ferguson protests by national and local news. A content analysis of five newspapers during the first cycle of protests identified how journalistic frames of presentation derived from the ‘protest paradigm’ literature related to the content frames pushed forward by the Black Lives Matter movement. Results reveal that initial stories were predominantly episodic and focused on violence to the detriment of demands and grievances. However, episodic stories were also critical of the police response and the use of military-grade weapons to contain the demonstrations. As the weeks progressed, journalists gave space to the ideas of protestors in a more thematic way, especially on issues related to race beyond the topic of police brutality. Taken together, findings suggest small but significant progress as time continued during the first month of demonstrations after Brown’s shooting. Results presented here challenge the paradigmatic nature of protest coverage but reinforce that more space should be given to contextual narratives behind social movements’ actions in addition to coverage that is critical of police and protestor tactics.
Events in Ferguson (MO), the Eric Garner incident, and most recently Chicago (IL), have again brought perceptions of race to the forefront of the public’s conscience. Often perceptions of racially charged events are split along racial lines with Whites often siding with law enforcement and Blacks seeing a miscarriage of justice. Bifurcated perceptions along racial lines are nothing new, dating back to the early 1900s. Despite this schism, few analyses have examined the genesis of this difference in perceptions on racial issues. This analysis looks to fill that gap. Specifically, we examine the role media frames and people’s preexisting attitudes and motivations play in determining what they think of contentious race issues and the people involved in them. Using the Jena Six incident as a case study, we find that people with less egalitarian racial attitudes—and low motivation to hide those attitudes—are less likely to blame race-related problems on mitigating cultural factors. They are also more likely judge news stories about a racial issue as being low quality. However, thematically framed stories that include discussion of the cultural aspects of the event may help to reduce this process.
Protest surveys are increasingly used to tackle questions related to participation in social movements. However, it is unclear whether they generate useful and valid data. This study puts the protest survey design to the test by relying on data of 51 demonstrations (2009-2011) in seven European countries. We use data on 15,000 protest participants combined with screener questionnaires and extensive debriefing records of the interviewer teams. We account for noncontact (fieldwork problems), immediate and delayed refusal, and refusal bias. Results show that fieldwork problems are frequent, that immediate refusal is low, and that delayed refusal is considerable. Systematic refusal bias is only found for age and education. Differences between countries and protest issues are small but the issue determines the composition of an event which, in turn, leads to higher or lower refusal. Researchers should be cautious when using protest survey data to compare protest events across issues. The paper pleads for standardization and constant monitoring of the data-gathering process.
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.
Protest is now central to politics in Western democracies, but it is known to citizens mainly through portrayals in the media. Yet the media cover only a small fraction of public protests, raising the possibility of selection bias. We study this problem by comparing police records of demonstrations in Washington, D.C. in 1982 and 1991 with media coverage of the events in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and on three national television networks. We model the consequences of demonstration form, context, and purpose on the likelihood of media coverage. The estimated size of a demonstration and its importance to the current media issue attention cycle are the strongest predictors of its coverage. Additional analyses support our claim that heightened media attention to an issue increases the likelihood that protests related to that issue will be covered. Comparing 1982 to 1991 suggests that television coverage of protests is increasingly subject to the impact of media issue attention cycles.
Information presented in news articles can be misleading without being blatantly false. Experiment 1 examined the effects of misleading headlines that emphasize secondary content rather than the article’s primary gist. We investigated how headlines affect readers’ processing of factual news articles and opinion pieces, using both direct memory measures and more indirect reasoning measures. Experiment 2 examined an even more subtle type of misdirection. We presented articles featuring a facial image of one of the protagonists, and examined whether the headline and opening paragraph of an article affected the impressions formed of that face even when the person referred to in the headline was not the person portrayed. We demonstrate that misleading headlines affect readers’ memory, their inferential reasoning and behavioral intentions, as well as the impressions people form of faces. On a theoretical level, we argue that these effects arise not only because headlines constrain further information processing, biasing readers towards a specific interpretation, but also because readers struggle to update their memory in order to correct initial misconceptions. Practical implications for news consumers and media literacy are discussed.
The emergence of a national “Tea Party” movement in the United States stimulated much media commentary regarding the movement’s origins, goals, participants, and even temperament. Unlike political movements of the recent past, the Tea Party stands starkly to the right. This study examines nightly cable news coverage of this movement by using key frames associated with the “protest paradigm”—the tendency for media to marginalize movements by drawing attention away from core concerns raised by such movements. We ask whether the protest paradigm can be applied to a right-wing movement and whether such application varies by the ideological leaning of a given source. That is, do cable news channels use frames in ways consistent with their respective ideological hues? We draw on a representative sample of stories regarding the national movement from the most viewed nightly news programs on Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN, with the Associated Press as a reference point. Results show significant differences across sources in issue and marginalization frame use. Although utilization of marginalization frames is popular among ideological channels, traditional news sources are not immune from using these devices.
Relative to traditional newspapers, Internet-based papers provide fewer cues about news story importance and give readers more control over story selection. As a result, readers of an online paper may acquire less information about national, international, and political events than would print paper readers. This article reports the results of a multi-day experiment which compared the differential effects of exposure to print and online versions of the New York Times. Online readers of the Times appear to have read fewer national, international, and political news stories and were less likely to recognize and recall events that occurred during the exposure period.
Research shows that news coverage of protest groups that challenge the status quo treats them relatively critically. To develop a more precise understanding of such coverage, this study content analyzes an international set of newspapers (N = 220) to explore the relationships between a protest group’s goals and tactics on resulting news coverage. The findings indicate that a group’s tactics—more than its goals—play a substantial role in affecting coverage. Furthermore, the findings also show that the protest issue and location indirectly affect coverage through their relationship to a group’s tactics. Implications for journalists and protesters alike are discussed.
In the American political process, news discourse concerning public policy issues is carefully constructed. This occurs in part because both politicians and interest groups take an increasingly proactive approach to amplify their views of what an issue is about However, news media also play an active role in framing public policy issues. Thus, in this article, news discourse is conceived as a sociocognitive process involving all three players: sources, journalists, and audience members operating in the universe of shared culture and on the basis of socially defined roles. Framing analysis is presented as a constructivist approach to examine news discourse with the primary focus on conceptualizing news texts into empirically operationalizable dimensions—syntactical, script, thematic, and rhetorical structures—so that evidence of the news media's framing of issues in news texts may be gathered. This is considered an initial step toward analyzing the news discourse process as a whole. Finally, an extended empirical example is provided to illustrate the applications of this conceptual framework of news texts.
A consistent news frame that deligitmizes and depicts most social protests as "police vs. protesters" has been identified in studies of news coverage of social movements. This study used an experimental design to examine the extent to which photographs and prior attitudes toward protests and protesters in general contribute to previously identified framing effects of protest news. Results indicated that for the protest issue of interest evaluations of the protest and protesters were more negative when photos depicting higher levels of conflict were shown. The amount of conflict shown in the photos did not affect evaluations of the protest and protesters when the issue was of less interest to participants. Additionally, participants who had more positive prior attitudes toward protesting in general were more likely to identify with the protesters in the stimulus story and to perceive that the protest was more effective than were those with more negative prior attitudes. Findings suggest the need to address possible nuances associated with the visuals alone and to incorporate prior attitudes when examining effects of news coverage of protests.
Analyzing news coverage of the killing of Stephon Clark in 2018, this research contributes to the further theorization of the hierarchy of social struggle by (1) confirming the consistent use of demonizing and delegitimizing framing devices to describe Black human rights protest, and (2) illustrating that the quality of the presentation of grievances and demands must also be considered when assessing the degree to which coverage can be legitimizing for a racial justice movement. In addition, findings show selective social media sharing amplified the limited coverage about police character but amplified sensational reports of injury.
It is clear in news coverage of recent uprisings for Black life that journalists and media organizations struggle to reconcile the fact of ongoing racism with narratives of U.S. progress. Bound up in this struggle is how collective memory—or rather whose collective memory—shapes the practices of news-making. Here I interrogate how television news shapes collective memory of Black activism through analysis of a unique moment when protests over police abuse of Black people became newsworthy simultaneous with widespread commemorations of the civil rights movement. I detail the complex terrain of nostalgia and misremembering that provides cover for moderate and conservative delegitimization of contemporary Black activism. At the same time, counter-memories, introduced most often by members of the Black public sphere, offer alternative, actionable, and comprehensive interpretations of Black protest.
This study tests the impact of protest news frames on audience support for a civil rights movement. Using a 3 x 2 experimental design, we explored how frames and visuals affect audiences’ criticism of police and protesters, support for, and identification with the movement. Findings show that articles with a legitimizing debate frame increase support for protesters, identification with protesters, and police criticism compared to articles with riot and confrontation frames. Riot and confrontation frames increase criticism towards protesters, decrease support for and identification with the movement, and decrease police criticism. We also considered predispositions towards Black people, the police, and social movements in general as essential to understanding support. Results revealed prior levels of support for the movement influenced criticism of police action and support for and identification with protestors more than media frames. As such, we argue that preexisting attitudes about actors in a news story are essential variables to consider in protest coverage effects research.
Protest paradigm researchers theorize that protests are delegitimized in news coverage because of journalistic culture and practices. This study explores the degree to which norms, routines, values and perceptions explain coverage patterns of protest. This mixed-methods study utilizes self-reflections from a survey of US journalists in four regions, alongside a content analysis of their coverage. Our study highlights how objective-observer role conceptions, routines driven by newsworthiness, and a perception-performance gap help explain protest coverage patterns. Importantly, journalists believed they did a better job covering protests than the content analysis showed, raising questions about what protest coverage should look like.
A poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion, and moralization poses a threat to democracy
Unlike political or economic institutions, social movements have an elusive power, but one that is no less real. From the French and American revolutions through the democratic and workers' movements of the nineteenth century to the totalitarian movements of today, movements exercise a fleeting but powerful influence on politics and society. This study surveys the history of the social movement, puts forward a theory of collective action to explain its surges and declines, and offers an interpretation of the power of movement that emphasises its effects on personal lives, policy reforms and political culture. While covering cultural, organisational and personal sources of movements' power, the book emphasises the rise and fall of social movements as part of political struggle and as the outcome of changes in political opportunity structure.
This study advances the protest paradigm as a transnational theory by examining how ideological affiliations within and across national borders influence the framing of a protest movement. Our empirical focus is the coverage of the 2016-17 South Korean “candlelight” protests to oust conservative President Park Gyun-hye in Korean and U.S. newspapers. Content analysis of six months of coverage suggests that liberal publications in both nations (Kyunghyang Shinmun and New York Times) were supportive of the movement, framing the protests as large yet peaceful and relying on protesters for information. In contrast, the conservative press in the U.S. (Wall Street Journal) was closer in its coverage to Korea’s conservative publication (Chosun Ilbo), which was defensive of Park and her supporters. We argue that ideological affinities can operate beyond national boundaries — what we term “ideological parallelism” — to make news organizations sympathetic or hostile toward a social movement. But nationalist sentiments also remain significant to the extent that a foreign (Korean) social movement affects a nation’s (U.S.) foreign policy. We identify a novel framing device — Gaze — under which the coverage of both U.S. newspapers converged and considered the adverse implications of candlelight protests for America’s relations with South Korea and its containment of North Korea and China. We also show how the U.S. media’s Gaze recursively shapes South Korean press coverage, indicating that transnational protest frames impact local perceptions of social movements and can potentially influence their legitimacy and outcome.
News coverage is fundamental to a protest’s viability, but research suggests media negatively portray protests and protesters that challenge the status quo (a pattern known as the protest paradigm). This study questions the validity of those claims within the context of digital newspaper coverage, interrogating how topic and region shape coverage. Using a content analysis of coverage from sixteen newspapers in various U.S. market types and regions, this research examines framing and sourcing features in articles about protests. Results suggest media coverage of protests centered on racial issues (discrimination of Indigenous people and anti-Black racism) follows more of a delegitimizing pattern than stories about protests related to immigrants’ rights, health, and environment. A model to understand news coverage of protest based on a hierarchy of social struggle is proposed.
How do protest actions succeed in winning public support? In this paper, I theorize how features of protest can persuade citizens to support demonstrators. In particular, I argue that broadcasting an attractive collective identity by means of diverse, worthy, united, numerous and committed participants (dWUNC) triggers supportive reactions of observers through increasing identification with protesters. I test this argument by exposing respondents to manipulated television news items of a protest event in two video vignette experiments. Study 1 scrutinizes the effect of dWUNC displays in an asylum seeker demonstration on a sample of Belgian citizens. Study 2 replicates this design in the US for the Black Lives Matter issue of police brutality. Both studies show predispositions of citizens to strongly affect favorability towards protesters. On top of these potent receiver effects, however, also the dWUNC features prove persuasive. In both experiments, a consistent pattern of feature effects is found: demonstrations that mobilized more diverse participants, who behaved worthy and acted in unison, elicited more supportive reactions. Study 2 adds that these protest feature effects are in part mediated by increasing identification with the demonstrators. The heterogeneity of protest feature effects is explored.
Protests can engender significant institutional change. Can protests also continue to shape a nation's contemporary politics outside of more formalized channels? I argue that social movements can not only beget institutional change, but also long‐run, attitudinal change. Using the case of the U.S. civil rights movement, I develop a theory in which protests can shift attitudes and these attitudes can persist. Data from over 150,000 survey respondents provide evidence consistent with the theory. Whites from counties that experienced historical civil rights protests are more likely to identify as Democrats and support affirmative action, and less likely to harbor racial resentment against blacks. These individual‐level results are politically meaningful—counties that experienced civil rights protests are associated with greater Democratic Party vote shares even today. This study highlights how social movements can have persistent impacts on a nation's politics.
In 2013, small demonstrations against bus fares evolved into a series of large protests expressing generalized dissatisfaction with leftist President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. Communication research has long examined the “protest paradigm,” a pattern of news coverage delegitimizing social movements. The Brazilian context provided a chance to assess the extent to which the paradigm holds when protests take on a conservative elite-supported narrative contesting the government. Through a quantitatively-driven mixed methods approach combining content analysis and interviews with mainstream journalists, results revealed that when grievances evolved into coherent anti-government demands, official sources from opposition parties served to legitimize the movement. As such, this study departs from an understanding of protest coverage as paradigmatic towards a complex view of the relationship between protestors and the press. Findings show that when elite opposition groups support protests, journalistic norms and routines validate demonstrations.
Violence is a more and more ubiquitous phenomenon. While a great deal of attention has been paid to certain aspects, terrorism for example, it has not been studied as a political phenomenon in and of itself. In The Legitimization of Violence eight well-known specialists explore various types of violence, from ideological to fundamentalist movements, within a framework of comparative theory.
In August 2014, police officer Darren Wilson shot unarmed Michael Brown, sparking months of protests in Ferguson, Missouri and other American cities and capturing worldwide media attention. This article presents a critical discourse analysis of Fox News Channel’s segments from August 2014 to March 2015. It systematically uncovers themes and larger discourses within five major areas: blaming black victims in the characterisation of Michael Brown and his shooting death, blaming black leaders, blaming the black community, attacking the black protesters and their movement against police brutality, and discrediting attempts to address issues of racism as the ‘politics of racial division’. Several major emergent discourses include: the criminal black (wo)man, blaming the victim, projection of racism on minorities, denial and counterattack, minimisation of racism, redistributing responsibility, personal responsibility, and deadbeat dads and unwed mothers. The author argues that Fox News in perpetuating these racist discourses helps to obstruct the addressing of racism in the criminal justice system.
Communication scholars have articulated the concept of protest paradigm to capture the news media's tendency to portray social protests as deviant, threatening, or impotent. Developments in the media and social environment have led to more diversified media representations of protests, however. Correspondingly, scholars have started to treat the protest paradigm as a variable. Extending this line of research, this study content-analyzed Hong Kong newspaper coverage of protests. The results show that the protest paradigm is more likely to emerge if the protest involved radical tactics, if the protest's target responded to the media, and, in politically conservative newspapers, when the protest addressed political topics. Protest coverage is less negative when the protest addressed a political matter, and there is evidence that protest coverage has become less negative over time.
In this article, we use an experimental survey design to explore how the tactical choices of social movements affect public opinion about whether the government should negotiate with the movement and the bargains that should be struck once negotiations begin. In doing so, we test competing theories about how we should expect the use of tactics with varying degrees of extremeness—including demonstrations, occupations, and bombings—to influence public opinion. We find that respondents are less likely to think the government should negotiate with organizations that use the tactic of bombing when compared with demonstrations or occupations. However, depending on the outcome variable and baseline category used in the analysis, we find mixed support for whether respondents think organizations that use bombings should receive less once negotiations begin. The results of this article are generally consistent with the theoretical and policy-based arguments centering around how governments should not negotiate with organizations that engage in violent activity commonly associated with terrorist organizations.
How can we get inside popular collective struggles and explain how they work? Contentious Performances presents a distinctive approach to analyzing such struggles, drawing especially on incomparably rich evidence from Great Britain between 1758 and 1834. The book accomplishes three main things. First, it presents a logic and method for describing contentious events, occasions on which people publicly make consequential claims on each other. Second, it shows how that logic yields superior explanations of the dynamics in such events, both individually and in the aggregate. Third, it illustrates its methods and arguments by means of detailed analyses of contentious events in Great Britain from 1758 to 1834.
Time-series analysis is used to assess the relationship between antiwar protests and congressional voting on war-related roll calls during the Vietnam era. Using protest event data coded from The New York Times and counts of roll-call votes generated from congressional voting data, we test for three specific mechanisms: disruptive protest, signaling, and public opinion shift. Extreme forms of disruptive protest are hypothesized as having a direct positive effect on congressional voting. Lohmann's signaling model posits exactly the opposite relationship between protest and policy. Especially extreme protests are expected to have a negative effect on both the pace and pro-peace direction of congressional action. Conversely, large (and more moderate) protests are expected to have a positive effect on House and Senate voting. The final mechanism, public opinion shift, depicts the relationship as indirect, with protest encouraging public opinion change, which, in turn, encourages increasingly favorable congressional voting. The results are somewhat mixed with respect to all three mechanisms, but suggest an interesting general pattern. The most extreme or threatening forms of protest (e.g., those featuring violence by demonstrators and/or property damage) simultaneously increase pro-peace voting while depressing the overall pace of congressional action. The reverse is true for more persuasive forms of protest (e.g., large demonstrations), which appear to increase the pace of voting while depressing the likelihood of pro-peace outcomes.
Protest events occur against the backdrop of public life. Of 382 public events in police records for one year in a small U.S. city, 45% convey a message, 14% involve social conflict, and 13% are standard protest event forms. Local newspapers covered 32% of all events, favoring events that were large, involved conflict, were sponsored by business groups, and occurred in central locations. The more liberal paper also favored rallies and events sponsored by national social movement organizations (SMOs) or recreational groups. Discussion centers on the ways these factors shape the content of the public sphere.
Trump: Black lives matter is a 'symbol of hate
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Os protestos no Brasil: Um Estudo Sobre as Pesquisas Na Web, e o Caso Da Primavera Brasileira
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Black Lives Matter has brought a global reckoning with history. This Is why the Uluru statement is so crucial
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Trump’s push to amplify racism unnerves republicans who have long enabled him
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