Shifting the protest paradigm? Legitimizing and humanizing protest coverage lead to more positive attitudes toward protest, mixed results on news credibility

Abstract

A US experiment ( n = 1506) demonstrated how a new approach to writing protest stories challenges press patterns in the United States of underrepresented groups. News stories that explain the goals and background of a protest—a concept called legitimizing—and that humanize—rather than criminalize—a person whose death sparked a protest led news audiences to better understand the protest and those involved in the social movement. We also found that those with conservative political beliefs perceived these stories as less credible than those written following journalistic norms typical in the United States that tend to cast protesters and their causes in a negative light, although the opposite was true for those with liberal views. Results are discussed in relation to the protest paradigm.