"Anti-Cop Riots" or Black Civil Rights Protests? Media Portrayals of the 2020 George Floyd Protests

Abstract

Protests have long been marginalized by media coverage which fails to capture the motivations, goals, and demands of the protestors. The media, instead, tends to focus on the actions and appearances of protestors which leads to the delegitimization and demonization of protest. This type of negative coverage has been termed the “protest paradigm”. The protest paradigm has been found to be particularly prevalent in coverage of anti-Black racism protests. This is despite scholarship which argues that anti-Black racism protests tend to encounter more state repression by police than other types of protests. This indicates that there is a significant media bias against anti-Black racism protests in that repression is not being accurately covered.

This work aims to investigate whether media coverage of the George Floyd protests from May-June 2020 are similarly delegitimized by the protest paradigm despite the greater institutionalization of the Black Lives Matter movement since its inception. This analysis also seeks to investigate how the actions and appearances of the police at protests factor into the portrayals of protestors and the protests themselves. These questions will be answered through a frame analysis of protest coverage from Fox News and CNN during the height of the protests following the murder of George Floyd. This analysis, then, seeks to move the protest paradigm literature forward by furthering understandings of how the protest paradigm is used by media outlets of different political orientations as well as how other protest roles are portrayed. The analysis finds that anti-Black racism protests are still heavily delegitimized by the media regardless of political orientation. It also finds that the police tend to be given greater legitimacy even when using force. The delegitimization of protestors/protest is achieved through extensive focus on the criminal and confrontational nature of protestors while police are framed as victims of these behaviors. Only slight differences in framing between the media outlets was observed.

Ultimately, this research concludes that the protest paradigm is still used to systematically delegitimize protest movements which challenge the status quo. However, the analysis also finds that greater refinement of the protest paradigm is needed to capture nuances in media coverage as well as to include how the paradigm manifests differently textually versus visually. The research also argues the need for greater collaboration between the protest paradigm, police militarization, and protest policing literature to understand the potentially cyclical effects of disproportionate state repression and biased media coverage.