Topic > Essay on protest and traditional media - 914

Several scholars, however, underline the existence of the “protest paradigm” (Oliver and Maney 2000; Boyle and Schmierbach 2009; Mcleod 1999; Stein et al. 2009). This paradigm can be briefly explained as the phenomenon that the media focuses only on the dramatic and spectacular events during protests rather than focusing on the underlying reasons for the protest. This paradigm is seen as an obstacle to the role of traditional media in covering protests (Stein et al. 2009). Another important aspect regarding newspaper coverage of protests is objectivity. As mentioned above, the “protest paradigm” does not enhance objectivity. On the other hand, a community's level of pluralism is an important factor in how newspapers describe protests. This structure in which traditional media operates is an important factor in how newspapers describe protests. A less pluralistic community reduces the number of stories about protests due to the high level of criticism, on the other hand, a more pluralistic community is less critical and more headlines about protests appear in the news (McCluskey et al. 2009). Furthermore, news coverage of protests can have two outcomes: it selects and distorts the representation of protests or infinite predictors of an event receiving news coverage (Boyle et al. 2012). In both cases there is a tendency towards a partial report by the traditional media and by comparing the different points of view: from the community towards the coverage of the protest and from the newspaper article itself it emerges that objectivity in covering the protests is not present objectivity in news. (Oliver and Maney 2000; Boyle et al.