Media coverage of protests can help to shape the narrative of a movement. It can reinforce and promote a message, but it can also derail a movement by focusing attention on a small subset of the movement. This sort of coverage can make people think that the whole movement is criminal, trivial or illegitimate, even if most of the movement supports it and wants positive change. This is one of the reasons why many social movements are so hostile toward the media and want to distance themselves from it.
As a result, it is important for news media to be transparent about how they are covering a demonstration. This requires presenting accurate information about how large a protest is and what the broader implications of that protest are. NPR’s recent coverage of student protests against President Trump and Elon Musk’s attempts to take over nonpartisan and independent government institutions is a good example.
NPR’s reporting on those protests focused on a relatively small number of students and the confrontations between them and police. But the story could have provided more context by describing how those protests were a part of a wider national movement. It could have also been more transparent about how NPR was calculating the size of the crowds that were showing up to demonstrate. We know from previous research that how much emphasis is placed on protest turnout in a news report correlates with the importance of a demonstration, and whether or not it has an external baseline against which to measure its significance (interpretation). It also correlates with the degree to which the gap between organizer and police guesstimates is wide (contestation). The latter explains why journalists often pay more attention to a demonstration’s size when it is perceived as being controversial.