News coverage of social protests in global society

Abstract

This article links media and social movement studies with world society theory to explain cross-national variations in media attention to domestic social protests. We compile a novel large-scale dataset with over 1.2 million protest-related news articles from 12,644 web news sites across 140 countries/areas in 2015–2020. Our cross-national analysis shows that both media- and country-level characteristics explain news coverage of domestic social protests. Our findings show that web news outlets with high web traffic and a propensity to report conflictual events tend to cover more protests. In addition, web news sites in nations with vibrant civil society organizations report more protest events. We also find that there is a positive relationship between online censorship and news coverage in general. But this is driven by news media in democratic countries, and news sites in authoritarian regimes experiencing strong censorship cover fewer protest events. Finally, news media in authoritarian nations with more organizational ties to the international community cover more domestic protests.