Whether they are calling for a boycott of Tesla cars, calling for a federal investigation into campus sexual assault or urging the Trump administration to pull US troops from Syria, millions of people around the country have taken part in social protests. And yet, when it comes to reporting about these demonstrations, news media frequently miss the mark. That is according to research that a growing body of social movement and communication scholars have been conducting over the past few decades. These scholars have dubbed the coverage of protests the “protest paradigm,” and they say it tends to systematically marginalize social movement agendas.
Harlow says that her latest research into the way news media report on protests offers new insights into this dynamic. The study, which is based on a large dataset, compares the number of participants registered by organizers (stored in police permit records) with the number of demonstrators presented in news media stories. It turns out that, even though reporters omit organizers’ perspective on turnout in their reporting, the results are not as contentious as one might expect. Indeed, reporters seem to largely stick with the police’s estimate of crowd size, with a tendency to underplay or reflect it.
Moreover, the research also shows that the extent to which journalists overplay or underplay crowd size is determined by a range of factors such as the issue at hand and the type of staging organization. Hence, the findings offer new ammunition for those who argue that, rather than a pervasive logic of marginalization, it might be more a question of “normalization” — that is, the degree to which reporters’ news-making practices follow traditional journalistic norms and principles of newsworthiness.