UNDER WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES do journalists challenge the protest paradigm?

Likewise, across the country, coverage of the protests that followed Floyd’s killing emphasized disruption and violence, detailing the “total loss” of buses and “broken windows, ransacked vending machines and graffiti on walls” before a rare, fleeting engagement with the fatal outcome of a racist system.

The protest paradigm produces patterns of coverage that help insulate police, governments, and the judicial system by privileging their voices and reporting their positions as fact.

This pattern is known as the protest paradigm; protest movements that might convey their concerns through news coverage instead see their efforts delegitimized by a press that favors spectacle, conflict, disruption, and official narratives over the substance of movements that challenge the status quo.

Time and again, analyses of Black Lives Matter coverage demonstrate that protesters’ platforms and grievances take a back seat—if they show up at all. 

violence, rioting, criminality, and property damage.

We concluded that protesters’ demands mattered most to the press after the judicial system had formally invalidated protesters’ calls for justice. 

While news outlets devoted space and effort to discrediting Trump, they did less to validate protesters’ concerns or explore them in depth.

Frequently, they emphasize the behaviors of the victim in the moments before they were killed and unearth details from the victim’s criminal record.

For each, we analyzed the initial wave of protests that followed the killings as well as a subsequent wave that followed judicial decisions

We found the protest paradigm at work in both waves, with one catch: after the judicial decisions, there was a statistically significant uptick in legitimizing coverage. Protest framing shifted slightly from protester’s actions to their critiques of policing, mass incarceration, and economic inequalities, among other ideas that shape the movement in support of Black lives.

Such coverage is typical of contemporary Black civil rights protests: Demonstrators are simply disruptive, their concerns minimized or made invisible. 

And my research shows that coverage reverts to the paradigm’s patterns with each new incident. 

While those protests didn’t receive extensive national media attention, what coverage they received was more legitimizing: stories highlighted police behavior during protests, not just arrests; contextualized protest tactics; and provided protesters with opportunities to place Clark’s death in the broader context of what Black and brown people experience when interacting with police. 

Journalism champions skepticism of powerful institutions; here, however, skepticism goes to work only after those institutions are protected

Since the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, I’ve researched coverage of contemporary Black civil rights protests.

Unraveling the protest paradigm requires radically repairing journalism’s foundations—work that includes re-evaluating our foundations and interrogating traditional ideas of who we grant legitimacy to, and why.

Even well-intentioned newsrooms struggle with the accurate and comprehensive coverage of Black civil rights protests and social movements. The institutions that sustain journalism’s culture tend to be extremely white; journalism’s norms and routines—daily decisions about stories, sources, and staffing—are viewed primarily through a white gaze.

Stories largely identified Clark as a victim of a police shooting, but also emphasized his criminal record, which helped undermine his victimhood.

Find Black advocates, activists, community members and leaders in your community, and give them a voice in your coverage. 

Early coverage favored a police statement that claimed Clark “turned and advanced toward the officers,” who “believed the suspect was pointing a firearm at them.”

Protest Paradigm