What affects media commentators’ views of protest actions? Evidence from the Portuguese wave of anti-austerity contention

ABSTRACT

Media attention is crucial for social movements in pursuing their goals. Opinion makers in the press, in particular, can be expected to influence how mass audiences perceive protests. Yet we still have a poor understanding of the factors that explain the level of legitimacy that media commentators award to different protest actions. To address this gap, this paper compares 45 opinion articles written by press commentators in main-interest Portuguese newspapers about two of the prominent anti-austerity demonstrations in the country: the Geração à Rasca demonstration on 12 March 2011, and the Que se Lixe a Troika demonstration on 15 September 2012. Content analysis of this corpus of articles suggests that there were important differences in the level of legitimacy that commentators awarded to each of the protests. An analysis of the way commentators framed each protest suggests the use of a similar set of frames related to the characteristics of the protest events (e.g. claims, strategy), but differential deployment of these frames across the cases. For example, the same frames were sometimes used to legitimize one protest event, and delegitimize the other, and hence could not explain the differences in commentators’ views. It was rather the different context of the protests (e.g. social, economic and political), and the way that media commentators framed that context, that explains the level of legitimacy awarded to the two protests. Because the QSLT demonstration of 15 September 2012 was a protest directed against a measure that commentators framed as unfair and unnecessary (raising the single social tax), they regarded the demonstration as being more legitimate. In turn, because the Geração à Rasca demonstration occurred in a context where austerity was framed as necessary and unavoidable, it was regarded as less legitimate.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movements
• press commentators
• framing
• anti-austerity protests
• Portugal

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Britta Baumgarten and Joaquim Valentim for their helpful comments on early versions of the manuscript. The author would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, whose comments greatly improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. While it would have been possible to follow the same commentators over different platforms, such as their personal blogs, their comments on those platforms have lower levels of visibility and reach different publics. Moreover, focusing on opinion articles published in newspapers allows one to see whether or not each commentator decided to write about each protest action in the printed version of the national newspaper, which can taken as a proxy of the relevance they grant to that event.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vicente Valentim

Vicente Valentim is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute. His research focuses on electoral participation, social movements, and political parties. Before starting his PhD, Vicente completed an MA in ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon. Simultaneously, he was a contracted researcher in the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES-IUL), working on the Project Changing Degrees of Europeanization? Social Movements Social Movements in the Public Debate on the EU Sovereign Debt Crisis in Portugal, coordinated by Dr. Britta Baumgarten.