‘Protest Paradigm’ Shows What’s Wrong with Media Coverage of Student Activism
Media coverage of university students speaking up against the war in Gaza, just like coverage of other protest movements, has fallen prey to some serious weaknesses

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.

Protest movements can look very different depending on where you stand, both literally and figuratively.

For protesters, demonstrations are usually the result of meticulous planning by advocacy groups and leaders aimed at getting a message out to a wider world or to specific institutional targets. To outside onlookers, however, protests can seem disorganized and disruptive, and it can be difficult to see the depth of the effort or their aims.

[OCS: Professional agitator-led Astro-turfed protests designed to look like mainstream grass-roots protests and often funded by those with a malign political ideology and agenda.]

Take the pro-Palestinian protests that have sprung up at campuses across the United States in recent weeks. To the students taking part they are, in the words of one protester, “uplifting the voices of Gazans, of Palestinians facing genocide.” But to many people outside the universities, the focus has been on confrontations and arrests.

[OCS: Sprung up? No. These were pre-planned and staged efforts whose planning appears to be months in the making. These are Arabs, not Palestinians. They do not face genocide but advocate genocide against the Jews and whose majority population has selected terrorist leadership and openly celebrate Jewish deaths.]

Where does this disconnect come from? Most people don’t participate in on-the-streets protests or experience any of the disruption that they cause. Rather they rely on the media to give a full picture of the protests.

[OCS: The simple truth is that the protests are staged for the media with the purpose of attracting funding and ill-informed followers that are more interested in making social connections than actual protest.]

For over a decade, my research has extensively explored trends in how the media shapes narratives around different kinds of demonstrations. Reporting on the campus encampments by large parts of the media fits a general pattern of protest coverage that focuses more on the drama of the disruption rather than the underlying reasons behind it – and that can leave audiences uninformed about the nuances of the protests and the movements behind them.

[OCS: The media, for the most part, is being manipulated by malign interests and cannot distinguish the difference between good and evil without upsetting their corporate masters. Likewise, the author is a product of an educational system that has long been slavishly devoted to radical progressive communist democrat causes and is unlikely to produce research which pushes back strongly against the malign agenda of the far left.]

Read more at Scientific American.

Michigan State University, College of Communication Arts and Sciences, School of Journalism

Danielle Brown, Ph.D., is the 1855 Community and Urban Journalism Professor and an associate professor in the School of Journalism. She is also the founding director of the LIFT Project -- an engaged research effort aimed at identifying networks of trusted messengers in Black communities in the Midwest to 1) understand their effects on civic and democratic life; 2) create, network, and allocate resources needed to inform Black communities better; and 3) build new opportunities for sustainable reparative narrative change.

Dr. Brown’s interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship utilizes the cross-sections of journalism, political science, and sociology. She specializes in analyses of media representations and narrative change, social movements and activism, and identity and political psychology. Dr. Brown has published dozens of articles in top-tier journals, and her work also appears in popular media outlets like the Washington Post, Nieman Lab, Columbia Journalism Review and The Conversation. 

Much of her research and work has been supported with the more than $1.5 million in external funding she has secured from foundations and non-profit organizations like the Knight Foundation, Global Impact, Robert Wood Johnson, and Color of Change. She has received multiple awards and recognitions for her research and service record as an early-career scholar and her pioneering public engagement work. Dr. Brown is an associate editor for the International Journal of Press/Politics and serves on the editorial board for Journalism Practices. She previously served on the faculty at the University of Minnesota and Indiana University. Prior to joining the academy, she was a photojournalist, writer, and later a non-profit public relations professional. Her full curriculum vitae is available here.   <Source>

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Brown, D. K. (2024). What January 6 was Not. In Kriess et al. (eds), Media and January 6. Oxford University Press.

Brown, D. K., Williams Fayne, M., Henderson, J., Snow, J. C., Harisiadis, C., Gunapalan, T., & DeFoster, C. (2023). Lifted Voices: Local News Coverage After the Racial Reckoning, Minnesota News Media Report. www.LIFTproj.com.

Brown, D. K., Snow, J. C., Walker, D., Henderson, J., Williams Fayne, M., Myers, C. L., & Smith, M. A. (2023). Lifted Voices: Perspectives of Residents and Leaders, Minnesota Survey Report. www.LIFTproj.com

Brown, D. K. & Searles, K. (2023). “New” Methods, “New” Challenges. Political Communication Forum. http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/refubium-39043.

Grabe, E. M., Brown, D.K. et al. (2023). The social contagion potential of pro-vaccine messages on Black Twitter. Health Communication.

Brown, D. K. & Mourão, R. R. (2022). No Reckoning for the Right: How Political Ideology, Protest Intolerance and Media Consumption Affect Support for Black Lives Matter Protests. Political Communication. doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2022.2121346

Brown, D. K. (2022). Media models for nonviolence: Instagram representations of the #WomensMarch mass mobilization news and audience engagement. International Journal of Communication, 16, 1669-1687.

Brown, D. K., & Midberry, J. (2022). Social media news production, emotional Facebook reactions, and the politicization of drug addiction. Health Communication, 37(3), 375-383. doi: 10.1080/10410236.2020.1846265

[OCS: Let us not forget that the racial unrest in Minnesota and elsewhere can be traced to the trained queer Marxist community organizers of Black Lives Matter and their massive multi-million dollar fraud. Or that the far-left media drove the murder conviction of Derek Chauvin for a violent felon resisting arrest who died from his heart condition and a fentanyl overdose.]