Media coverage of protests has long been criticized for overemphasizing violence, confrontation and spectacle — but there are also more subtle issues in play. For instance, there are the decisions journalists make about how much to cover and whether to present a balanced picture of a movement.
NPR’s coverage of recent protests involving Elon Musk and the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrates how challenging it is to keep a balance. The protests were both large and largely peaceful. But NPR has been criticized for giving more airtime to conflict, property damage and other incidents than to the reasons behind the demonstrations.
There are many factors in the decision to focus on these aspects of protests, and some of them have to do with commercial considerations. The old journalism adage of “if it bleeds, it leads” applies to protest coverage, and many newsrooms have an aversion to allowing movements to be portrayed as a nuisance to their readers.
Other factors include the tendency of journalists to report on crowd sizes and to follow cues from police departments about what the size of a crowd should be. Our research finds that, in fact, the more contradictory the organizers’ and police department estimates are, the more likely it is that media will report a larger crowd than either source expected. This result is a stark contrast to the narrative that media blindly follows police counts and undercounts demonstrations.