Media Representations of Protests

Portrayals of public protest in the media - speaking specifically here of the press - has interested me since coming across the book Culture Jam in high school, authored by Kalle Lasn, the founder of AdBusters. Toward the end of his book, Lasn offers some strategies for successful protest, including guidelines for ensuring the protest is framed in a manner sympathetic to the protest's goals. Below, I provide a passage from this section:

“When a reporter asks, ‘What are you protesting against, exactly?’ you answer: ‘Please, let’s get something straight right off the top. We’re not protesters. We’re citizens of this city…’ […] The reporter who had practically written her story in advance (‘…insert inflammatory quote from protester here…’) now has that word ‘protester’ yanked out from under her.”

Lasn is speaking here of reframing the narrative for the inquiring journalist. Of course, if there is need for reframing, then there must be a preexisting frame or mindset that most journalists bring to their coverage of a protest. It has been my experience - and a quick Google News image search backs this up nicely - that protests are mainly covered for the spectacle, the car-crash surreality of hundreds or possibly thousands of people turning up to decry or to lend their support to this or that cause. One of the most iconic and repeated photograph to take at a protest is the long shot between the phalanx of riot-geared police officers and the jagged lines of protesters. This and other shots usually taken at protests reinforce conceptions of protests as adversarial, rather than demonstrative events. The sober, stoic police pitted against the crazed, futile vitriol of fringe elements of society.

Naturally, there is the fact that photographs do not lie - Photoshop excepted - and that protests are portrayed as violent, unscripted, and disorganized because they in fact are. What, then, of the protests that turn out peacefully? One can imagine there is not much of a storyline to be had there. Successful protests that do not offer an adversarial storyline are not any more likely to be covered by journalists than most other bits of good news that go unaired year after year. This effect should be familiar to anyone who has heard talk about the over-reporting of violent crime on the evening news. Bad news is good news, good news is no news.

What this coverage means for the effectiveness of protest as well as peoples' views on protest is plain to see. Protests are seen as disorganized, lacking a coherent voice, and generally attended by young, glory-seeking rabble rousers. Again, this is certainly the case for some protests, but by no means do all protests fit this description, and those protests that do not frequently go uncovered by the press.

For my outside source, I came across an article in the June 2001 edition of the journal, Social Forces. As explained in the title of the article, the authors were concerned with "description bias in media coverage of protest events in Washington, D.C." Among other findings, the article authors discovered that media coverage of protests tends to be episodic (covering the protest as an event) rather than thematic (covering the issue the protest is trying to bring to light). What follows is an excerpt from their findings: “Thus, social movement actors engaging in protests as a means of attracting media coverage to their grievances ideally seek thematic framing of the reports on their protests, since social movement aims are best served by coverage that addresses the underlying structural sources of the problems they target. However, the majority of news coverage of protests is episodic or, at best, represents some mixture of episodic and thematic framing” (Smith, McCarthy, McPhail, and Augustyn 1417). This is in agreement with my initial observation that protests are generally covered for the spectacle, not for the issue.

While what is at issue here is generally an under-representation of positive protests, there is also the issue of framing, or what to focus on in covering a protest. On both counts, the media has only an incomplete picture to convey. As always seems to be the case in considering the mass media, what is most interesting is what is left unsaid.