From Disruptive Protests to Disruptive Framing? Comparing German News on Fridays for Future and Letzte Generation

Abstract

This paper explores factors that drive polarization in news media coverage about climate protests. We develop a method for measuring polarization by means of automated text analysis and apply it to the case of climate protests in Germany. By comparing discursive polarization surrounding "The Last Generation" and "Fridays For Future" in different news outlets, we test the impact of more or less disruptive protest forms and of different political leanings of newsrooms. Utilizing Word2Vec-based semantic mapping and transformer-based emotion and toxicity classifiers, we assess the ideological and affective dimensions of polarization in 6,632 news articles coming from 21 news media between January 2022 and May 2023, covering the entire ideological spectrum. We find that newsroom policies do influence the discourse. Extreme right-wing media displaying high levels of discursive polarization when covering the relatively conventional protests. However, even mainstream and left-wing media are susceptible to frames depicting protesters as extremists and criminals and high levels of toxicity when covering the more disruptive protests. This indicates the risks for climate movements involved in employing disruptive tactics and also shows how polarizing patterns of coverage may spill over from extreme right and into mainstream media.