Does Violent Protest Receive Negative Coverage?—Media Framing of Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Bill Movement and French Yellow Vest Movement

Abstract

Regarding media framing of protests, current studies have primarily focused on the negative side of framing tools, that is, marginalization devices that news media employ to belittle and demonize a protest. Yet little scholarship has scrutinized the positive side of framing tools, i.e., affirmation devices that mass media adopt to convey sympathy for and approval of a protest. Through comparing U.S. media coverage of two recent large anti-government movements taking place in China and France—the movements sharing similarities in vital factors impacting media coverage—this paper illustrates a series of affirmation devices, including highlighting issues and downplaying violence, blaming violence on authorities, stressing public approval, backing protest goals, and understating a movement’s dark side. A systematic examination of affirmation devices contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of media framing and the relations between the media and social movements. This exploration also challenges the popular conception that violence by protesters typically leads to negative media coverage.

Keywords:

• Media framing
• social movements
• transnational coverage
• protest paradigm
• indexing

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank anonymous reviewers and Rachel Core for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article and H. Christoph Steinhardt for helpful advice on coding.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The key words, “Hong Kong,” “protest*/protest,” and “extradition,” were used to conduct the search for HKM articles. For YVM articles, the search words were “yellow vest*/vest,” “protest*/protest,” and “movement*.”

2 Op-Ed articles were excluded from our dataset.

3 The average Cohen’s kappa scores for the NYT and WSJ datasets are 0.82 and 0.85, respectively.

4 It should be noted that the causes of YVM also got wide coverage in the two outlets (Table 1).

5 When the term “rioters” is indeed used in HKM reports, it is meant to express that protesters are being unfairly characterized as such by authorities (e.g., NYT #43 and WSJ #44).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yao Li

Yao Li, PhD (Johns Hopkins University), is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law at the University of Florida. Before joining UF, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. She is the author of Playing by the Informal Rules—Why the Chinese Regime Remains Stable despite Rising Protests (Cambridge 2019; Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics). Her research combines quantitative and qualitative methods to address debates in the fields of social movements, environmental studies, political sociology, and development.

Marion Cassard

Marion Cassard is a PhD candidate in Sociology and instructor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law at the University of Florida. She received her master’s degree in Political Science from Sciences Po Strasbourg. Her research uses feminist and diverse economies theories and methodology to address debates in the fields of social movements and political economy and ecology.

Brooke Holmes

Brooke Holmes is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law at the University of Florida, where she recently received her MA. Her research centers in Critical Cultural Theory, exploring the interaction among media, culture, sociopolitical phenomena, and social relations generally.