"We woke up. Change is underway and it won't stop." : An analysis of how U.S. mainstream- and alternative media covered the 2019 protests in Latin America

Sammanfattning: Protests constitute one of the most important means for citizens to raise key issues on the social agenda and express marginalised voices, in which an important factor to spread their message is attracting mass media coverage. However, previous research has repeatedly found that the mass media delegitimizes protests and focus on the protest event itself rather than the issues behind it. Meanwhile, the role of alternative media on digital platforms is growing stronger. Given this background, this study sets out to answer how U.S. mainstream- and alternative media depicts three protests in Latin America in 2019 and how they potentially differ in their depiction of these protests. More specifically, the study aims to find if the media portrays protests in a negative manner, and if so, how it is done. These questions are analysed through postcolonialism and the protest paradigm theory, which suggests that the media delegitimize protests through certain ways of describing the protest events. Through a critical discourse analysis of 36 articles in total, this study finds that both the mainstream- and alternative media largely adheres to the protest paradigm. It is found that violent aspects of the protests are often in focus, as well as an absence of lifting the structural issues that the protesters want to lift. However, exceptions that deviate from the theory are found as well, indicating that the protest paradigm alone may not be sufficient to explain the complexities behind the media’s coverage of protest events.