Reporting Protests and Alternative

PoliticsPolitical Reporting (JN 513/815)

Lecture/Seminar Outline

• 1. History and Forms of Political Protest• 2. Protest and the Public Sphere

• 3. Journalistic Reportage of Protests• 4. Alternative Politics and Journalism

• 5. Slutwalkers article

History and Forms of Political

Protest• As long as there has

been politics there have been political protests and protest movements.

• The Protestant Reformation, the American and French Revolutions, the Luddites in the nineteenth century, the Suffragette movement, etc.

History and Forms of Political

Protest• More recently we have

had the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the WTO anti-globalisation protests in Seattle in 1999, the Iraq War Protests in 2003 where 6-10 million people protested across 60 countries, and the Occupy movement.

History and Forms of Political

Protest• Protest marches,

picketing, sit-ins and protest camps, direct action campaigns, civil disobedience campaigns, consumer boycotts, petitions and letter writing campaigns, protest songs and concerts, etc.

History and Forms of Political

Protest• There are more

cultural forms of political protest about urban spaces: Culture jamming, Critical Mass, guerilla gardeners, etc.

History and Forms of Political

Protest• Online forms of political

protest: cyber-activism.• Cyber-activism takes many

forms – hacking, protests, efforts to change laws, self-help groups, educational groups, cultural groups, activist news sites, etc.

• Cyber-activists can be part of a strictly defined group (e.g., an NGO) a civic advocacy group, a lobbying group, an independence group, a loosely defined group (anti-globalization protesters), or individuals.

Protest and the Public Sphere

• Jürgen Habermas’ (1974; 1989) work on the idea of the “public sphere” influenced understandings about journalistic and media reportage of public life.

• The public sphere is an open and inclusive forum, allowing (and requiring) full participation and scrutiny of all issues relating to the public good.

• The public sphere portrayed as “a neutral arena where information about ‘the public good’ is available, regardless of the individual rank and free from the domination of the state” (Craig, 2004: p. 51).

Protest and the Public Sphere• Demonstrations and public protest are “means by

which citizens can register their collective disagreement and dissent, build public support and legitimacy for their aims, and influence governments, policy formation, and even societal change.” (Cottle 2006, p. 33).

Protest and the Public Sphere

• Habermas emphasised the public sphere as an arena where rational-critical discourse is produced.

• Habermas has been criticised because he privileged transparent, rational, face-to-face, print-based communication, and he was suspicious of emotion and rhetoric, mediated forms of communication and visual-based media.

Protest and the Public Sphere

• Protests highlight how modern public life is a mediated phenomenon and they demonstrate how contemporary political practice revolves around the management of visibility.

Journalistic Reportage of Protests

• Cottle outlines how often journalistic ‘frames’ influence reportage of protests:

• Event-orientation – “The event orientation … tends to displace from public view underlying conditions and causes”.

• Commercial imperatives to attract readers/viewers. Entertainment value of the drama of conflict.

• Objectivity – “By focusing on events, rather than their political interpretations, newspapers can claim to be simply ‘reporting events’, avoid being seen as overly partisan…”

• Political elite access – reports establish a hierarchy of voices with political elites commenting on the protest actions while the actual voices of protesters are marginalised or not even articulated.

• Journalistic socialisation – reporters learn how to report particular kinds of events and the difficulty of offering different perspectives.

Journalistic Reportage of Protests

• Journalistic reportage of protests is also now at times more open and pluralistic due to:

• Declines in social consensus;• Less deference to political elites;• More awareness of communicative purposes of

protest actions and greater public literacy about protest strategies and media reportage;

• Growing information channels and media outlets challenge primacy of mainstream media reportage.

Alternative Politics and Journalism

• Historically, protest movements accompanied by forms of alternative journalism.

• Red Pepper - http://www.redpepper.org.uk

• SchNews - http://www.schnews.org.uk/index.php

• Indymedia - http://www.indymedia.org.uk

Alternative Politics and Journalism

• “Alternative” loose term: radical/socialist, anarchist, trade-union, green, student, new-age, avant-garde.

• Alternative media characterised by:Selection of topicsChoice and treatment of sourcesReporting proceduresPolitical orientation or advocacyOwnership and production processStatus of readership (Atton 2002)

Alternative Politics and Journalism

• Native reporters are activists who report“from the inside the motives, experiences, feelings, needs and desires of the wider social movements they thus come to represent” (Atton 2002, p. 495)

Slutwalkers article• http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/07/mar

ching-with-the-slutwalkers

References• Atton, C. 2002, “Approaching Alternative Media: Theory and Methodology.”

Alternative Media. London: Sage.• Cottle, S 2006, ‘Reporting Demonstrations and Protest: Public Sphere(s),

Public Screens’, in: Mediatized conflict: developments in media and conflict studies Open University Press, Berkshire, pp. 33-45.

• Craig, G. 2004, The Media, Politics and Public Life. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin.

• Ericson, R.V, P. Baranek & J.B.L. Chan 1987, Visualizing Deviance: A study of news organization. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

• Habermas, J. 1974, The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article. New German Critique, 3 (Autumn), 49-55.

• Habermas, J. 1989, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Trans. T. Burger with F. Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity.