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Troublemakers in the Streets? a Framing Analysis of Newspaper Coverage of Protest in the UK 1992-2017

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Gruber, Johannes B. (2021) Troublemakers in the streets? A framing analysis of newspaper coverage of protest in the UK 1992-2017. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/82346/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Troublemakers in the Streets? A Framing Analysis of Newspaper Coverage of Protests in the UK 1992-2017 Johannes B. Gruber, MSc, MA Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Social and Political Sciences College of Social Sciences June 2021 © 2021, Johannes B. Gruber i Abstract The main objective of this thesis is to contribute to a more systematic understanding of how mainstream news media in liberal democracies report about protests. Existing research indicates that when mainstream news media report about demonstrations, protesters often face delegitimising coverage. This phenomenon, known as the “(jour- nalistic) protest paradigm”, is thought to be a default mindset that leads journalists to emphasize the method of protesters over their message — restricting the impact of one of few tools citizens have to raise important issues. More recent studies, however, suggest a more mixed picture, indicating both that the protest paradigm is used more conditionally than previously thought and that there have been overall changes in protest reporting in recent decades. There are limitations to the existing literature, however. The scope of studies has been rather narrow, focusing only on single, often radical, protest events or scrutinize the coverage surrounding a specific issue or movement. Furthermore, there are limitations to the theoretical foundation of the protest paradigm. Consequently, operationalisation of the paradigm and the way results have been interpreted differ substantially across studies, which has even ledto contradicting findings regarding one protest event in the past. The thesis uses a novel dataset of all articles published in eight national UK newspapers between 1992 and 2017 about domestic protests and demonstrations (푁 = 27,496). To analyse coverage in this large corpus, I use an innovative approach to framing analysis that combines best-practice manual coding techniques with supervised machine learn- ing. Using this approach provides a strong methodological and theoretical foundation ii for the analysis of protest coverage: the operationalisation of frames is more explicit than in existing studies of the protest paradigm and frames are found inductively from the data, rather than being derived from decades old theory. The analysis shows that a stable majority of articles uses frames linked to the protest paradigm throughout the time frame. At the same time, a substantial and growing number of articles employ legitimising frames — either on their own or co-existing with delegitimising framing. Specifically, I find seven distinct frames: four that follow the delegitimising patterns of the protest paradigm, two frames that legitimise protests and their message and one that is neutral. The results show that patterns of reporting about protest are not static and that the circumstances and features of protest events shape their coverage. Specifically, I find four main determinants for the use ofthe different media frames: (1.) violent protests get more delegitimising coverage, and less legitimising coverage; (2.) the goal of a protest matters for the kind of reporting it receives, yet relationships between frames and goals are complex and goals overall matter more for legitimising frames; (3.) protests receive less legitimising coverage from tabloid newspapers than from broadsheet outlets and one of the legitimising frames is used less often by right-wing media — which means that differences between outlet categories exist but are less pronounced than expected; and (4.) reports published more recently and longer after the start of an event have a higher chance of containing legitimising framing. Overall, the thesis adds to existing knowledge on how the media frames protest over time and provides insights into the conditional logic with which journalists use different frames. Moreover, it develops a new approach to framing analysis combining manual and automated content analysis. ii iii Table of Contents Abstract i List of Tables vii List of Figures x Acknowledgements xii Author’s Declaration xiv 1 Introduction 1 2 Protest in the News 11 2.1 Media Selection of Protest . 12 2.2 Media Description of Protest — aka the Protest Paradigm ....... 14 2.2.1 The Protest Paradigm ....................... 15 2.2.2 Empirical Knowledge . 19 Chapter Conclusion . 27 3 What Makes the Media Frame Protest? 29 3.1 Media Framing . 30 iv 3.2 Random Reactions to Random Events? . 35 3.3 Changing Media Ecology, Changing Protest Coverage? . 38 3.4 What Drives Protest Coverage? . 47 3.4.1 Event-Level Factors . 49 3.4.2 Outlet-Level Factors . 55 3.4.3 Time-Bound Factors . 57 Chapter Conclusion . 58 4 Research Design and Methods 61 4.1 Case Selection . 62 4.2 Dependent Variable: Reporting of Protest . 65 4.2.1 Definition of Protest . 66 4.2.2 Measurement of Media Frames — Available Approaches . 68 4.2.3 Semi-Automated Content Analysis of Media Frames — The New Approach . 77 4.2.4 A Note on Sound Measurement . 82 4.3 Independent Variables . 86 4.3.1 Data . 86 4.3.2 Matching Strategy . 92 Chapter Conclusion . 92 5 Building a Dataset of News on Protest Events 94 5.1 Newspaper Selection . 95 5.2 A Note on Digital News Archives and LexisNexis ............ 96 iv v 5.3 Pilot: Finding the Right Keywords . 99 5.4 Collecting and Cleaning the Database . 104 5.4.1 Removing Fragments of Data Entry . 106 5.4.2 Removing Duplicated Entries . 107 5.4.3 Removing Foreign Protest Events . 108 5.4.4 Removing False Positives Using Topic Models . 110 5.4.5 Removing Homonyms . 112 5.4.6 Removing False Positives Using Machine Learning . 113 Chapter Conclusion . 115 6 Framing Protest 117 6.1 Manual Coding . 119 6.1.1 Frame Elements and Codebook . 119 6.1.2 Coding Procedure . 126 6.1.3 Inter-Coder Reliability . 128 6.2 Frame Identification . 131 6.2.1 Data Structure . 133 6.2.2 Cluster Analysis . 134 6.2.3 Factor Analysis . 143 6.2.4 Interpretation of Frames . 152 6.3 Frame Coding . 160 6.3.1 Teaching the Computer to Code Frames . 160 6.3.2 Results . 166 6.4 Discussion and Summary . 173 v vi 7 What Explains the Frames? 178 7.1 Data Processing and Models . 179 7.2 Hypotheses Testing . 187 7.2.1 Event-Level Factors . 189 7.2.2 Outlet-Level Factors . 195 7.2.3 Time-Bound Factors . 197 7.3 Unpacking Frame Usage . 198 7.3.1 Event-Level Factors . 200 7.3.2 Outlet-Level Factors . 207 7.3.3 Time-Bound Factors . 208 7.4 Discussion and Summary . 209 8 Conclusion 215 8.1 Findings . 216 8.2 Contributions . 220 8.3 Limitations and Future Avenues . 223 References 227 Appendices 273 A Extended Codebook and Coding Instructions . 274 B Additional Information on the Cleaning of the News Media Database . 302 C Regression Results for Change of Frame Share Over Time . 310 D Recoded Protest Event Data . 312 E Additional Models . 342 vi vii List of Tables 2.1 Empirical Studies on the Protest Paradigm in Legacy Media, Ordered by Publication Year . 20 3.1 Hypotheses . 60 4.1 Confusion Matrix . 85 5.1 Selection of Newspaper Outlets for Data Collection . 96 5.2 Cleaning Steps . 105 5.3 Topic Examples . 111 5.4 Confusion Matrix for Validation of Naïve Bayes Model . 114 6.1 Codebook for Manual Content Analysis . 121 6.1 Codebook for Manual Content Analysis (continued) . 122 6.1 Codebook for Manual Content Analysis (continued) . 123 6.2 Inter-Coder Reliability for Identification Task . 130 6.3 Inter-Coder Reliability for Classification Task . 130 6.4 Removed and Merged Rare Codes . 131 6.5 Example Matrix of Coded Articles . 134 viii 6.6 Confusion Matrix. k-Means vs. Manual Coding of Main Frame in an Article (Agreement in Green; Disagreement in Red) . 142 6.7 Factor Loadings . 146 6.8 Factor Loadings Full Model . 150 6.9 Example Factor Scores . 161 6.10 Example Document-Feature Matrix Including Class . 162 6.11 Classification Performance of Frames (Top 3 Models) . 165 7.1 Model Variables . 180 7.2 Recoded Protester Demands . 181 7.3 Distribution of Protester Demands . 181 7.4 Comparison . 186 7.5 Regression Results for Aggregated Frames . 188 7.6 Regression Results for Individual Frames . 201 B.1 Topic Model Used for Cleaning . 302 B.2 Replaced Phrases . 307 B.3 Phrases Used to Remove Articles . 310 C.1 Regression Results for Change of Frame Share Over Time . 311 D.1 Employed Subset of the MMP Data by Clark and Regan (2019) with Additional and Recoded Variables . 312 E.1 Regression Results for Aggregated Frames (with all State Responses) . 343 E.2 Regression Results for Aggregated Frames (without The Times Articles) 344 E.3 Regression Results for Individual Frames (without The Times Articles) 345 viii ix E.4 Regression Results for Aggregated Frames (Newspaper Instead of News- paper per Year as Level 2) . 346 E.5 Regression Results for Individual Frames (Newspaper Instead of News- paper per Year as Level 2) .
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