Media reporting on mass political protests

What is it about?

We analyse how two mainstream television stations in Slovenia, the commercial POP TV and public broadcaster RTV SLO, have covered the largest political protests in Slovenia of the last two decades. We find that the reporting separates the protesters according to two dominant frames: - the frame of the people: legitimate protesters expressing consensual moral values like opposition to corruption and patriotism; - the frame of the mass: deviant groups of masked irrational, violent and destructive hooligans that are driven by a blind lust for destruction; In this sense the legitimacy of the protesters was affirmed, while their political claims were at the same time marginalised by being crowded out by consensual moral values.

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Why is it important?

The protest paradigm predicts that reporting on oppositional political protest will tend to be negative and attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the protest. We find that this is not necessarily the case as reporting can take a much more sympathetic view on protests, while still focusing attention away from the concrete political demands of protesters and focusing on consensual moral values.