The language that we use to describe things can determine how people think about them. That's especially important when it comes to news and how media report on events such as protests.
The Nieman Foundation has published an article that examines the semantics of how new organizations use language and how that creates unconscious bias.
Centering protest coverage around the impact on traffic, local businesses, and property is one way that the protest-as-nuisance framing manifests. And according to the study, that “annoyance” framing increased over time — newspapers were more likely to frame a protest as a nuisance in 2007 than in 1967. The study also found that protests over liberal causes were framed as nuisances more often than protests over conservative causes.
Why does this matter? The role of protest is to publicize grievances from people who typically exist outside of traditional power structures. It’s why freedom of assembly is written into the Constitution, along with freedom of the press. And the role of journalism is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable to the broader public. But that’s not possible if the way we report on protests is biased from the start.
It’s a bias that creeps in, for example, when we use passive voice to describe how people in positions of authority, such as police officers, are behaving but use active voice to describe protestors’ behaviors.
The protest paradigm helps explain why, on May 31, WUSA, the Washington, D.C. CBS affiliate, tweeted, “Pepper spray caused a short stampede in Lafayette Park during a peaceful march honoring George Floyd” — suggesting that the pepper spray somehow acted of its own accord. (WUSA eventually took down the tweet.)
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