Through a textual analysis of online comments in response to live broadcast from the San Bernardino shooters' apartment, we explore the rhetorical strategies the audience used to legitimate its participation in boundary work. Our study demonstrates that audience members can operate as resourceful boundary workers with a sophisticated, multifaceted understanding of journalism that echoes scholarly and normative professional discourse. Their critique was not limited to questioning unambiguously pernicious practices, such as glorifying violence, tabloidization, pack journalism, and violating the ethical obligation of minimizing harm. Instead, they went beyond that to problematize the practice of breaking news live as underdelivering on the promise of connecting audiences to newsworthy events of social significance, promoting voyeurism, and overusing the format as an end in itself. We also demonstrate that commenters operate as competent rhetorical agents. Although they did rely on established legitimating strategies (e.g., acting as proto-professionals), they appropriated them at the level of tactical moves in distinctive new ways (e.g., by parodying, rather than authentically emulating, the journalistic style of delivering breaking news live). They also deployed novel ways of establishing their authority as boundary workers, such as rhetorical questions and direct address, often using them in conjunction with other authority-claiming moves.

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Taxpaying constitutes a major opportunity for citizens to relate to their governments. Although it is true that paying taxes is a responsibility, it also entitles citizens to claim control over government spending, which may facilitate a greater democratization of a country’s political regime. Consistent with this reasoning, a growing body of scholarship has documented a positive relationship between the size of tax revenues extracted by the state and the adherence of the country’s regime to democratic values. What has been left underexplored is the role in this relationship of the media, a commonly available and relied-upon source of information about taxpaying for the public. This study offers a first contribution in this direction, by exploring the relationship between the nature of the political regime and the rhetorical construction of the concept of a taxpayer in the national press. Based on an automated content analysis of articles (N=24,969) published by ninety-two newspapers and news agencies in fifty-one countries using a set of pretrained and validated machine-learning algorithms, the study demonstrates that the less democratic a state is, the more likely it is for the national press to frame a taxpayer as a subordinate in a hierarchical relationship with the state, by discussing taxpaying in tax collection, rather than public spending, terms. The study furthers a more nuanced understanding of the place of the media in the taxation-democratization link and demonstrates the applicability of the supervised machine-learning approach to classifying frames in large cross-national samples of newspaper data.

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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.