Media coverage of protests can be crucial in shaping the perceptions and outcomes of social movements. Yet research shows that journalists often fall into a pattern of reporting that marginalizes protesters and their causes. This is known as the “protest paradigm.” It is a tendency to frame protesters as criminal, irrelevant or trivial elements of the status quo and to focus on their confrontations with police and other officials.
For example, during the recent Tesla demonstrations, the media focused largely on vandalism and violence by some participants against the car company. This distorts the message of the movement, which is one that supports free speech and peaceful assembly. More importantly, it discourages people from stepping forward to exercise their First Amendment rights and take part in a legitimate democratic process.
To counter this, it is important to understand the context of a protest and how it affects its initial media coverage. The most significant predictor of whether the protest will receive contentious turnout coverage is whether the gap between organizer and police guesstimates about crowd size is wide. This is because journalists are more likely to focus on the gap in a protest when organizers and police disagree about the number of attendees.
In addition, the nature of the protest is also important. For example, nonviolent protests tend to be covered in a hard news mode, while violent ones are generally in the soft news mode. Moreover, the type of protest and whether it is political or economic in origin is also associated with how it is treated by the media.