From “Angry Mobs” to “Citizens in Anguish”: The Malleability of the Protest Paradigm in the International News Coverage of the 2021 US Capitol Attack

Abstract

This study tests the robustness of the “protest paradigm”—a routinized, predominantly negative pattern in covering social protest—by examining the news coverage of the 2021 US Capitol attack in eight countries that vary in the nature of their political regime and geopolitical standing, with democratic US allies United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, Australia on one side, and authoritarian adversaries Russia, China, and Iran on the other. Based on a computer-assisted analysis of 3,579 news articles, the study shows that rather than operating as a rigid template, the protest paradigm offers national media a malleable set of journalistic devices that can be appropriated to construct the meaning of disruptive global events in a way that reproduces dominant domestic ideologies and advances the ruling elites’ geopolitical interests. In addition to theoretical contribution, the study offers a novel empirical finding to the literature on protest coverage by providing evidence of national media not simply deviating from, but explicitly violating the protest paradigm. As demonstrated by the analysis of the Russian press, rather than delegitimizing the January 6 attackers by making light of their agenda and emphasizing their unruly behavior—which could be expected from coverage consistent with the protest paradigm—the Russian state-owned media trivialized the brutality of the attack by opting for cues with less violent connotations and elevated the legitimacy of the protesters’ actions by framing them as valid demands by politically minded citizens unjustly prosecuted for concerns about the integrity of electoral process.