From Mass to Elite Protests: News Coverage and the Evolution of Antigovernment Demonstrations in Brazil

Abstract

In 2013, small demonstrations against bus fares evolved into a series of large protests expressing generalized dissatisfaction with leftist president Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. Communication research has long examined the “protest paradigm,” a pattern of news coverage delegitimizing social movements. The Brazilian context provided a chance to assess the extent to which the paradigm holds when protests take on a conservative elite-supported narrative contesting the government. Through a quantitatively driven mixed-methods approach combining content analysis and interviews with mainstream journalists, this study revealed that when grievances evolved into coherent antigovernment demands, official sources from opposition parties served to legitimize the movement. As such, this study departed from an understanding of protest coverage as paradigmatic toward a complex view of the relationship between protestors and the press. Findings showed that when elite opposition groups supported protests, journalistic norms and routines validated demonstrations.

Acknowledgments

I acknowledge the coders Heloisa Aruth, Giovana Sanchez, and Thays Monticelli for the time and dedication to this project. I also thank Stephen Reese for the feedback and Rosental Alves, director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin, for allowing access to the center’s database of reporters.

Notes

¹ Brasil de Fato is an activist research project that focuses on raising awareness to media portrayals of leftist groups in Brazil. This study is a content analysis of headlines during the 2014 elections and is available at http://www.brasildefato.com.br.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel R. Mourão

Rachel R. Mourão (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 2016) is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism at Michigan State University. Her research interests include how journalists cover elections and protests, both in the United States and in Brazil.