Demonstrations (2014-2016) against President Dilma Rousseff’s Government
Marcel van Hattem, M.S.c.
University of Amsterdam
Marcel van Hattem, Graduate School of Communication,
Erasmus Mundus Master’s Programme – Journalism, Media and Globalisation
Specialisation in Media and Politics
Communication Science, University of Amsterdam.
Student ID: 10583467
Supervisor: Andreas Schuck, Ph.D.
Date of completion: June 02
nd2017
Correspondence concerning this thesis should be addressed to:
Marcel van Hattem by e-mail: marcelvh11@gmail.com
A very special thank you to Instituto Ling and Acton Institute for the invaluable support.
I believe in your work.
Abstract
This study approaches media framing in Brazil, analysing media coverage of protests
against President Dilma Rousseff’s government between 2014 and 2016. Two of the
most important Brazilian newspapers, Estado de S. Paulo and Folha de S. Paulo, were
analysed, considering the concepts of news value and protest paradigm, in order to
answer how these Brazilian traditional media framed those events. Ratifying previous
research in the social and communication sciences, both hypotheses put forward were
confirmed by means of a quantitative content analysis: small protests received far less
coverage than large protests and smaller protests were far more subjected to protest
paradigm than the larger ones. The results encourage researchers to replicate the
analysis to other newspaper and media companies in Brazil and elsewhere as well as to
diversify the study of media framing by analyzing other possible saliences and
dominant meanings in the media coverage of protests and other political phenomena.
Keywords: news framing, protest paradigm, news value, Brazilian politics, Brazilian
Media Framing In Brazil: News Values and Protest Paradigm in the Coverage of
Five Demonstrations (2014-2016) against President Dilma Rousseff’s Government
The relationship between, on the one hand, journalism and the media and, and
on the other, democracy, can be “described in terms of a social contract” (Locke, 1988,
cited in Strömback, 2005, p. 332): “journalism needs democracy for its freedom and
independence and, in turn, democracy needs journalism for the flow of information, for
public discussions about political issues, and as a watchdog against the abuse of power”
(Strömback, 2005, p. 332). In other words, one needs the other since “the efficiency and
quality of representation is likely to be enhanced under all theories of democracy as
citizens become better informed about the actions of their elected representatives and
the important public issues of the day (citing Althaus, 2003; Delli Carpini and Keeter,
1996)” Althaus, 2011, p. 21).
Protests and social movements, in turn, also exert impact on political institutions
and on democracies, frequently shaping and changing them, either by means of
disruption or moderation. Whether protests are intrinsically self-sufficient to bring about
change or whether they are dependent on external factors to become successful is a
debate beyond the scope of this thesis, but of intense controversy in the academy
(Giugni, 1999). In a more recent and similar effort to compile studies on what the
authors call “the interactive dynamics of protests”, Jasper and Duyvendack’s (2014)
book’s introduction asseveres that “media are crucial players and arenas in politics”,
making “political players fight hard to gain media coverage, even though they never
entirely control that coverage, a dilemma that players always face when deciding
whether to enter a new arena or not (Gitlin, 1980 and Soberiaj, 2011). (…) How they are
portrayed in the media affects what they can do in other arenas” (Jasper, 2014, p. 19).
This is a communication sciences thesis with many links to the social and
political sciences as it sets itself to analyse the coverage of street protests in Brazil
demanding the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff. These demonstrations took
place from her reelection in October 2014 and lasted until after her impeachment was
authorised by the Chamber of Deputies, in April 2016. If controversy exists about
whether internal or external factors are the most relevant for the success of a
demonstration, by analysing newspaper articles about five protests that happened in São
Paulo (as well as in other Brazilian cities) between October 2014 and March 2016 -
three very small, two very large -, I transfer this internal versus external debate about
the effectiveness of protests to the framing of the media coverage of protests.
It is my argument that internal factors, such as the news value of such events
were relevant to define whether they deserved coverage and especially regarding their
size, to define how the coverage of protests was framed by applying the news framing
theory and the concept of protest paradigm. It is hypothesized that smaller and earlier
events would receive less coverage than larger ones because of their news value (cf.
Galtung and Ruge, 1965; Rocco, 1990; Koopmans, 1995; Harcup and O’Neill, 2001;
Harcup and O’Neill, 2016), and that smaller protests would more likely be covered in a
distorted, stereotypical way than larger ones (in line with McLeod and Hertog, 1992;
Entman, 1993; Di Cicco, 2010).
The reason for the choice of analysing the coverage of protests against the
government of Dilma Rousseff is at least threefold: firstly because, to the author’s best
knowledge, no relevant academic article has been published about news framing and the
media coverage of those events in Brazil; secondly, albeit Brazil’s long history of
political protests shaping its political system, literature specifically about media
in the subject, as I am Brazilian and was personally involved both as a participant and as
an organiser of demonstrations in Porto Alegre, state capital of the southernmost state of
Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul.
Regarding this last point, such a proximity to the matter assures access to
sources of information and the collection of inside stories known by very few. This
allowed for informed insights based on the impressions garnered with other participants,
more specifically regarding the frequent complaints of demonstrators that media
supposedly was at times biased against the protests or distorting their real objectives.
On the other hand, such a close participation demands the utmost caution in order not to
contaminate the research with the author’s personal opinions and worldviews. However,
a strong methodological section with a clear research design, assuring the validity and
reliability of the results is the solution to conduct serious scientific research.
Structurally, there are two more short sections that complement the introduction.
These are not commonly present in similar papers but are deemed necessary here. The
first and next section contextualises the recent Brazilian political history for the foreign
reader, especially considering popular protests and political change at a federal level.
The second section deals more specifically with the coverage of protests against the
government of president Dilma Rousseff and her party, PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores –
Worker’s Party, left), in the years 2014-2016, with very relevant and concrete examples
of alleged media framing which served as inspiration to conduct a broader, quantitative
content analysis to confirm or reject alleged media framing claims.
The theoretical section delves deeper to explain the concepts of news value,
media framing and protest paradigm, further explaining this thesis’ hypotheses. The
methodological section will briefly present the dataset of this study, which comprehends
over 300 newspaper journalistic articles published in print editions of Folha de S. Paulo
and Estado de S. Paulo, in specific timeframes, covering five protests against Dilma
Rousseff’s government between October 2014 and March 2016. Concepts’
measurements and operationalization will follow and the results section will
demonstrate the results achieved, confirming or rejecting the hypotheses, followed by
the discussion and conclusion section.
Popular protests and street demonstrations in Brazilian recent history
After two waves of popular protests, in the 1980s (Diretas Já) and the 1990s
(Impeachment of president Collor) (Bueno, 2013; Starling and Schwarcz, 2015), it was
not until June 2013 that Brazil saw a new wave of popular protests against the federal
government spread across the country. Whereas localised street protests were not
uncommon in Brazil during the mandates of presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso
(1995-2002) and Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010), it was only during the mandate
of President Dilma Rousseff that Brazil experienced widespread popular unrest again.
Even so, the protests of 2013, which were called Jornadas de Junho (June journeys),
were more broadly directed against the whole political class - even against the
organization of the World Cup in the country -, having no clear political agenda that
united the protesters who took to the streets against the central government, for instance
(Morgenstern, 2015; Damin, 2015).
Finally, one week after the reelection of President Dilma Rousseff on October 26
2014, a new wave of protests against the federal government began. Corruption
scandals involving high ranking officials of the ruling party, PT, and the beginning of
what would become the most severe economic crisis in Brazilian history, fuelled
protests against president Dilma Rousseff, who was eventually impeached on August
31st 2016. The first protests, which occurred on November 1st 2014, were not organised
by any specific group and were convened and organized through Facebook event pages
created by social media users demanding the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff
(Akel, 2014). I participated in the Porto Alegre demonstration, which took place at
Moinhos de Vento Park, also convened through a social media event page that was not
linked to any particular social movement
1. Similar protests took place that day in at least
four Brazilian capitals: Porto Alegre (Zero Hora, 2014), Rio de Janeiro (Resende, 2014),
São Paulo and Brasília (Sanches and Brígido, 2014).
After this first demonstration, two more protests took place in 2014 in at least
eleven Brazilian state capitals, this time convened by the social movement Movimento
Brasil Livre (MBL)
2, of which I became in between the first and the second
demonstration one of the local coordinators, in Porto Alegre. The social movement
MBL was founded by young libertarian activists during the protests of June 2013
(Ostermann, 2017), also in Porto Alegre. It remained inactive until after the reelection of
president Dilma Rousseff, when it was reactivated and started convening and organizing
protests against the federal government and the ruling party, PT, not only in Porto
Alegre but also across the country. The 2014 protests on November 15th and December
6th, were convened with the motto “More Brazil, Less PT” (Mais Brasil, Menos PT),
but there was no clear or specific agenda in the callings.
A clear pro-impeachment demand only became solidly present from the March
15 2015 demonstrations onwards, including all the following protests, which took place
on April 12, August 16, December 13 2015, and March 13 2016. Other groups and
social movements also organised and convened protests, such as Revoltados Online and
1 Unfortunately, the Facebook event page for the Porto Alegre protest has been deleted by the social media user who created it. I remember that the girl who created the event told me later that she did not attend the protest she had convened on Facebook because she was at work at an hospital. Even though the event page had as main demand the impeachment of the president, I remember that many were not comfortable then with that demand, preferring to take to the streets to protest more broadly against the government. 2 Movimento Brasil Livre (2017). Events page [Facebook page]. Retrieved May 26th 2017. Retrieved:
Vem Pra Rua (Martín, 2015). Nevertheless, Movimento Brasil Livre is used as the
reference in this thesis because it was the first to officially demand the impeachment of
Dilma Rousseff and because it has always been and still is the largest amongst its peer
movements, today with over 2.2 million followers on Facebook only
3.According to the
military police estimates, the sizes of demonstrations in São Paulo were as follows
(Sources: Chapola, Ricardo (2014); O Estado de S. Paulo (2014); Hupsel Filho, Valmar
(2014); Galvão, Daniel (2015); G1 (2015); Bretas, Célia (2015).
Table 1
Number of participants per demonstration
Demonstration (in São Paulo)
Military Police estimate
2014 - November 1st
2.5 thousand
2014 - November 15th
10 thousand
2014 - December 6th
5 thousand
2015 - March 15th
1 million
2015 - April 12th
275 thousand
2015 - August 16th
350 thousand
2015 - December 13th
30 thousand
2016 - March 13th
1.4 million
Anti-Dilma protests and media framing
In spite of not having a clear agenda at the end of 2014 except for expressing
their opposition to Dilma Rousseff’s government, some of the people who took to the
streets then - among them the author of this thesis -, became organisers of the protests
demanding impeachment in 2015 and 2016. As a participant, I acknowledge that there
were indeed protesters who demanded radical action, such as military intervention.
Notwithstanding, and preventing myself from making statements about how
numerically (ir)relevant they were in order not to be accused of biasing my research,
according to blog posts from journalists who in fact were also supporting the protests,
some of the most traditional media framed in some articles those events, particularly the
first ones, in such a way as to make the reader believe that protesters were actually
mostly in favor of anti-democratic solutions.
Journalist Reinaldo Azevedo, for instance, wrote, in reaction to an article about
the demonstrations of Saturday, November 1st 2014 that was published on the Folha de
S. Paulo’s website (Uribe, Lima and Galeno, 2014) that: “the overwhelming majority of
protest posters at Paulista [Avenue] carried messages denouncing a supposed fraud in
the election, [or] were about demands of an audit in the election process [or] defended
impeachment (…) One old man, however - and even if there were 10, 20 or 100 -
demanded military intervention. The proof that it was an ‘avis rara’ in the protest is that
he was, look at that!, interviewed both by Folha and by Estadão which, miraculously,
published almost the same story with differences that are only perceived in the details.
His name was Sérgio Salgi, 46 years old, a police investigator. And why was he found
by reporters from both newspapers? Because he was carrying a poster saying “SOS
Armed Forces”. This poster was sufficient to make Folha de S. Paulo decide on the
following title: ‘Act in SP demands Dilma’s impeachment and military intervention’. If
there was a crazy guy in the demonstration asking for the help of Martians, the title
could have been: ‘Act in SP demands Dilma’s impeachment and ET’s intervention”
(Azevedo, 2014).
It is interesting noting that the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo actually changed the
title of the aforementioned article after publishing it online: the hyperlink to the article
remains unchanged, including the original title with reference to military intervention,
while the new title mentioning the number of demonstrators but nothing about military
intervention is what is now to be found on Folha de S. Paulo’s website (Uribe, Lima and
Galeno, 2014). Journalist Felipe Moura Brasil wrote on his blog about this title change
on November 3rd 2014 and also made reference to Folha’s post on its Facebook page,
which read “Act with about a thousand demonstrators demands the impeachment of
Dilma Rousseff and military intervention in Brazil” (Folha de São Paulo, 2014). Brasil
(2014) posted in his blog that “Folha states that THE ACT demanded ‘military
intervention’ - which is false - and that there were ‘about a thousand demonstrators’ -
which is also false. Journalist Gustavo Uribe, author of Folha’s article – as well as his
compadre Ricardo Chapola, author of almost identical article in Estadão -, were
criticised and derided by sites, columnists and anti-PT protesters for distorting facts and
trying to disqualify the movement (…) As far as we know, who asked for ‘military
intervention’, was actually only one (one!) supposed protester, coincidently interviewed
both by Uribe and by Chapola” (Brasil, 2015).
The frequent complaints coming both from protesters and from journalists who
supported demonstrators was that mainstream media depicted the protests in a supposed
negative and distorted way, especially regarding the first protests in 2014, served as
inspiration for this thesis. Although some of the articles analysed acknowledged that
radical protesters were a minority, especially regarding the first demonstrations in 2014,
other articles’ titles, subtitles, leads or pictures gave the reader the opposite impression,
as I will briefly demonstrate in the following paragraphs.
Using as an example the second protest out of the five that will be analysed in
this study, which took place on November 15th 2014, both newspapers considered,
Folha de S. Paulo and Estado de S. Paulo, had clear discrepancies between the titles of
their stories and the text. Folha de S. Paulo in its November 16th edition, for instance,
stated in the subtitle of the respective story that “In São Paulo, the march splits after
divergences” and, in the lead, that “impeachment of Dilma and praises to military
regime cause divisions between demonstrators and politicians in the events”. Only in its
fourth paragraph did the text make it clear that “a minority defended the return of the
military regime, which generated divergences” (Folha de São Paulo, 2014a, p. A15).
Similarly, the newspaper Estado de S. Paulo stated in the corresponding story’s
title that “‘Military intervention’ divides act in São Paulo”. The subtitle clarifies the
matter a little, at least to make it clear that such division was not one of 50%-50% when
stating that “in a protest of 10 thousand people, the demand for act against the president
is rejected by three of four groups that organized the event” (Venceslau, 2014, p. A13).
Even though the idea that perhaps only a minority demanding radical action is present,
it is not clear in any of these stories, even if approximately, of about how many people
the journalists are talking about.
In the hundreds of articles considered in this thesis, the only article that gave a
clearer numeric sense of how many protesters were indeed demanding military
intervention was published by O Estado de S. Paulo on December 7 2014, regarding the
protest convened on the previous day. Nevertheless, it is not before the end of the text’s
second paragraph that the number of people demanding military intervention becomes
clearer: “about 400 people” out of the 5,000 mentioned in the title, whereas the subtitle
stated that “military intervention divided protesters” (Hupsel Filho, 2014, p. A6).
Other examples of similar media approaches abound in the series. Titles such as
“act against president Dilma demands for impeachment and military intervention”
(Chapola, 2014, p. A6), which does not differentiate numerically the protesters who
demanded for one or the other; or photo captions like “March of discord: protest against
Dilma government, that gathered 5,000 on Paulista Avenue, was divided between pro-
and anti-military intervention groups” (Folha de São Paulo, 2014c), which does not give
anywhere close to a clear idea of how big or important (or small or less important) the
group of demonstrators demanding for anti-democratic actions against the government
was in comparison to those demanding for impeachment or democratic solutions for the
political crisis.
The aforementioned examples demonstrate that at least some newspaper articles
about the protests against Dilma Rousseff had a leaning towards depicting the events as
gatherings in favor of anti-democratic action. As a participant of such events and myself
officially being an opponent of Dilma Rousseff’s party in parliament as an elected
representative, analysing media coverage about the same demonstrations I took part in
is especially challenging. The methodological choice of a quantitative content analysis
is therefore in place also to avoid, as much as possible, the interference of my own
world view of opinions in the results of this study. The main question to be answered is
how was media framing of protests against president Dilma Rousseff’s government
between November 2014 and March 2016.
Theoretical section
Political protests are defined here as social events that are organized by and even
confounded with social movements. Van Stekelenburg and Klandermans (2013, p. 887)
definition that “protest is a form of collective action and of social movement
participation at the same time” is therefore in place. Likewise, Tilly (1978), cited in
McCarthy et. al. (1996) defines protests as “gatherings of two or more people in which a
visible or audible ‘claim is made which, if realized, would affect the interest of some
specific person(s) or group(s) outside their own numbers’” (McCarthy et. al., 1996, p.
482). A necessary condition for protests to happen is the “existence of strain and
relative deprivation” (Kitchelt, 1986, p. 59), frustration or perceived injustice
(Berkoviwtz, 1972; Gurr, 1970; Lind and Tyler, 1988, all cited in Van Stekelenburg and
Klandermans 2013, p. 887)
As seen in the Brazilian example of Movimento Brasil Livre (which, even
though it was created in 2013 did not organize the very first protest of the series
considered in this work but whose leaders nevertheless engaged in that occasion and
convened and organized the following ones), social movements have some kind of
formal organizational core but, “typically, there is no formal membership and many
participants are not interested in that” (Caramani, 2011, p. 333). Accordingly, the
decision for one to take part in a protest may take time, since the process of
mobilization may be lengthy (van Stekelenburg and Klandermans, 2010, p. 895). Hence,
the efficacy and even size of protests vary over time, depending on how potential
participants perceive the social movement, including their sympathy with the cause,
information about future events, willingness and ability to participate (Klandermans and
Oegema, 1987), which are decisive factors for someone to join the social movement.
Protest, media and news value
If on the one hand the efficacy and size of a protest varies according to its social
psychology, the relation between media and social movements is also believed to be
different considering the event’s size. According to Roccon (1990, p. 108) and
Koopmans (1995, p. 149-52), cited in Caramani (2011), “there are three main factors
which contribute to the news value of a protest event: the originality of an event (its
surprise effect), the number of participants, and their radicalism” (Caramani, 2011, p.
297). It is thus legitimate to suppose that, lacking one or even two of these factors, the
factor(s) remaining will be more salient.
News values are also defined as “how do ‘events’ become ‘news’” (Harcup and
O’Neill, 2001, p. 263). Besides the news values mentioned in the previous paragraph,
others should be noted regarding protests such as frequency (the event is happening at
the same time of the publication), threshold (the event needs to have a certain intensity
to be recorded), unambiguity (the easier it is for anyone to understand what is
happening, the better), unexpectedness and continuity (the event remains in the spotlight
because it has an enduring attractiveness as news), as defined by Galtung and Ruge
(1965 cited in Harcup and O’Neill, 2001). The definition of threshold is particularly
important here, as it states that “events have to pass a threshold before being recorded at
all. After that, the greater the intensity, the more gruesome the murder, and the more
casualties in an accident—the greater the impact on the perception of those responsible
for news selection” (Harcup and O’Neill, 2001, p. 263; Harcup and O’Neill, 2016).
This brings us to the first hypothesis, which expects the demonstrations in 2014
to have received less coverage, as measured in number of newspaper articles published,
in comparison to the demonstrations in 2015 and 2016. Whereas the first three
demonstrations (in 2014), according to police estimates, gathered around 17.5 thousand
people, the fourth demonstration (March 2015) had one million demonstrators and the
fifth considered (March 2016), 1.4 million - the largest ever in Brazilian history.
Therefore, hypothesis 1 is: the larger the protest, the higher its news value and more
coverage in the number of stories it will receive.
News framing and protest paradigm
This research also aims at analysing how the news published about protests in
Brazil were framed in mainstream media newspapers. The debate about framing in
communication sciences is very vivid and the framing concept seems at times very
controversial as such: from Entman’s (1993) seminal effort in the communication
sciences to clarify and synthesise what he called a “fractured paradigm” to D’Angelo’s
(2002) response calling news framing a fractured, “muliparadigmatic research
program”, the controversy is still present in the academy. The four empirical goals
mentioned by D’Angelo to underpin the hard core of what he calls the news framing
research program are “(a) to identify thematic units called frames; (b) to investigate the
antecedent conditions that produce frames; (c) to examine how news frames activate,
and interact with, an individual’s prior knowledge to affect interpretations, recall of
information, decision making, and evaluations, and (d) to examine how news frames
shape social-level processes such as public opinion and policy issue debates”
(D’Angelo, 2002, p. 873). For this study, the interest in the news framing discussion is
related only to the first of these empirical goals, ie., the identification of thematic units
called frames per se, which is also similar to Entman’s (1993) core element in his
analysis as we shall see below. This reason should suffice to prevent this literature
review from engaging in further theoretical discussion about that which is controversial.
Vliegenthart and van Zoonen (2011), however, call framing a “buzz word”
suggesting that there are inadequacies in the use of the concept. These would include
the “lack of consistency in how different authors define and apply ‘frame’ and ‘framing’
(citing Scheufele and Tewksbury, 2007) as well as differences that are frequently
neglected between “frame” and “frame building”, on the one hand, and “frame” and
“frame effects” on the other, whereas they should be “simultaneously examined as
distinct features of news that are intrinsically tied to each other” (Vliegenthart and van
Zoonen, 2011, p. 101-102).
Advocating to bringing sociology back to frame analysis, thus giving “power to
the frame” as their article’s title suggest, Vliegenthart and Van Zoonen (2011) criticise
Entman’s (1993) definition of ‘frame’ as “a tool to promote a particular version of
reality” because, in this case, the intentionality underlying this definition would be “in
stark contrast to, on the one hand, the early frame building studies that emphasise that
frames do not come about intentionally but are the result of interactions and conflicts
between collective and individual, social and media actors, and, on the other hand, early
frame effect studies that demonstrated that the power of frames was contingent on a
range of different articulated social and individual variables” (Vliegenthart and van
Zoonen, 2011, p. 107).
In a previous section of the same article supporting this ‘interactions and
conflicts between distinct actors is more important to the frame building and effects’
idea, the authors stress that the current “routinised production in which newsworthiness
is dependent on how a particular event or story fits the time and space requirements of
the news organisation” substantially reduces the power of individual journalists in
framing the news, whom can not “do much against the unrelenting pressure of news as a
(…) 24/7 enterprise that has to produce immediate and ongoing output” (Vliegenthart
and van Zoonen, 2011, p. 103-104). Hence: media framing is not exclusively contingent
on the journalists’ choices, but also on other internal and external factors, as Reese
(2007) so well described in his hierarchy of influences model, considering the level of
the professional, the routine at the media organisation, the external forces and the
ideological environment as different instances of the same model of hierarchy of
influences.
It is not my objective though to adventure into the theoretical dispute between
the communication science and sociological approaches to framing, less so do I have the
ambition to interfere in it or resolve it. Quite to the contrary: by taking into
consideration the main standpoints in this healthy theoretical debate, it is essential to
stress that my intention is to focus on how the coverage of news about the recent
Brazilian protests were framed, avoiding deeper considerations about either frame
building or frame effects. This attitude is also justified, it is worth repeating, because of
my personal involvement in the demonstrations, which could imply accusations, fair or
unfair, of biasing my own research.
Therefore, seeking for a more straightforward definition of framing, this paper is
aligned with Tankard’s position that “the concept of media framing […] offers an
alternative to the old ‘objectivity and bias’ paradigm, [while] it helps us understand
mass communication effects and it offers valuable suggestions for communication
practitioners” (Tankard, 2001, p. 95). The author aims at establishing an empirical
approach to the study of media framing in the referenced article, being cautious to
disambiguate media framing from media bias and presenting a measurement solution.
Media framing is, according to Tankard (2001), different from media bias
because the former is, first of all, “a more sophisticated concept [that] goes beyond
notions of pro or con, favorable or unfavorable, negative or positive. Framing adds the
possibilities of additional more complex emotional responses and also adds a cognitive
dimension (beliefs about objects as well as attitudes). Secondly, framing recognizes the
ability of a text - or a media presentation - to define a situation, to define the issues and
to set the terms of a debate. (…) Convincing others to accept one’s framing means to a
large extent winning the debate” (Tankard, 2001, p. 96). Tankard very instructively
explains that there are three distinct ways to use the framing metaphor when looking at
media content: separation, tone and structure. In this paper, my focus is on the first,
separation, emphasising “selection, emphasis, and exclusion” (Gitlin, 1980: 7 cited in
Tankard, 2001, p. 98).
Therefore, this paper relies on the conceptualization of news framing in its most
objective, descriptive aspect, considering the notions of salience and dominant
meaning presented by Entman (1993). Starting from the idea that “the concept of
author contends that “to frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make
them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular
problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment
recommendation for the item described” (Entman, 1993, p. 52).
In a sign that the aforementioned criticism of Vliegenthart and Van Zoonen
(2011) was partially unfounded, Entman (1993) did make it clear that there are more, as
he called them, ‘locations’ in the communication process than just the journalist’s
writing. Entman actually pointed at, “at least”, four locations in such a process,
including the communicator, the text, the receiver and the culture. Nevertheless, Entman
indeed put more stress on the text location, which, according to him “contains frames,
which are manifested by the presence or absence of certain keywords, stock phrases,
stereotyped images, sources of information, and sentences that provide thematically
reinforcing clusters of facts or judgments” (Entman, 1993, p. 52).
The concepts of salience and dominant meaning appear in Entman’s (1993)
article to describe the framing phenomenon. While salience makes “a piece of
information more noticeable, meaningful, or memorable to audiences” because “frames
highlight some bits of information about an item that is subject of a communication,
thereby elevating them in salience” (Entman, 1993, p. 55), the “dominant meaning
consists of the problem, causal, evaluative, and treatment interpretations with the
highest probability of being noticed, processed, and accepted by the most people. To
identify a meaning as dominant or preferred is to suggest a particular framing of the
situation that is most heavily supported by the text” (Entman, 1993, p. 56). In sum,
"frames call attention to some aspects of reality while obscuring other elements”
(Entman, 1993, p. 55).
Beyond the debate of which external factors influence news framing, be they
Vliegenthart and Van Zoonen’s routine or social interaction arguments, be they
Entman’s three remaining communication processes, specifically regarding coverage of
political protests and social movement another phenomenon is an object of study in the
academy: protest paradigm. According to McLeod and Hertog (1992), “journalists’
tendency to seek out the ‘unusual’ is very much in evidence in protest coverage.
Coverage gravitates toward individuals exhibiting the most extreme appearance and
behaviours. In the process, protesters are often characterised as being more ‘deviant’
from the mainstream than they really are.” (McLeod and Hertog, 1992, p. 260).
A similar explanation, this time only mentioning the concept of protest
paradigm, is given by McLeod and Detenber (1999) when explaining the framing
effects of television news coverage of social protests: “examinations of news content
show that news stories about protests tend to focus on the protesters’ appearances rather
than their issues, emphasise their violent actions rather than their social criticism, put
them against the police rather than their chosen targets, and downplay their
effectiveness. This kind of coverage constitutes what has been called the ‘protest
paradigm’ (Chan& Lee, 1984), which leads to news coverage that supports the status
quo” (McLeod and Detenber, 1999, p. 3).
Studies have confirmed the presence of protest paradigm in protest coverage in
mainstream media, as was the case of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune
stories about the 1968 Democratic Convention. According to Brasted (2010), even
though “the Chicago Tribune’s articles and editorials showed a greater bias in support of
the status quo than did the New York Times”, revealing different degrees of protest
paradigm between them, in both newspapers protest paradigm “was used to construct
the stories. As a result, the dominant narrative structure was of a battle or conflict (…)
and the movement was delegitimised through various framing techniques” (Brasted,
2010, p. 23).
Similarly and taking one step ahead, Di Cicco (2010) found something else in
his study about the coverage of mass media of political protest in the US since the
1960s. Protest paradigm is defined by him as “news coverage [which] contains
consistent patterns, beginning with criticism of protesters and protest groups - such as
an emphasis on protesters’ unusual appearances and demonstration strategies and
highlighting the presence of any so-called ‘extremists’ present among them. Such
coverage creates an image of demonstrators as fringe radicals”. (Di Cicco, 2010, p.
136). However, in going beyond, Di Cicco (2010) creates the concept of public
nuisance, which is the negative framing of protests: the very “idea of protest itself” as
something inherently positive or deserving coverage is challenged, resulting in “news
[that] has increasingly dismissed protests in general - as an irritation, a hindrance,
something that interferes with daily life” (Di Cicco, 2010, p. 136)
Based on the protest paradigm concept, the expectation is that protests in Brazil
were covered giving salience to the most radical participants. In this case,
demonstrators defending military intervention or antidemocratic attitudes against the
president, as seen in the few examples given in the introduction, will be depicted
following the protest paradigm as representing the whole. However, in line with the
aforementioned three main factors which contribute to the news value of a protest event,
namely originality, number of participants and radicalism (Roccon, 1990; and
Koopmans, 1995 cited in Caramani, 2011), it is also expected that, the larger the
number of people taking to the streets to demonstrate, the less salient radical
participants will be in the news framing.
Hence, hypothesis 2 expectation is that protesters will be depicted following the
protest paradigm as radicals, demanding military intervention, because of the salience
of these participants and the news value of radicalism. However it is also expected that
protest paradigm will be less pronounced in large protests than in small ones because,
in large events, other news values are more important, especially the number of
participants.
Methodology
In order to test, either to confirm or reject the hypotheses, a quantitative content
analysis was conducted on articles published in two of the largest Brazilian newspapers,
both published in the state of São Paulo: Folha de S. Paulo (Folha) and Estado de S.
Paulo (Estadão). The criteria for choosing these publications (apart from being amongst
newspapers with the largest circulation
4in the country and being two of the most
traditional Brazilian diaries), were identical to three of the criteria of Vliegenthart et. al.
(2016) in their comparative study of protest coverage: continuous publication
throughout the research period, daily publication and high quality newspapers.
However, different to theirs, this thesis does not rely on Kriesi et. al. (1995, cited in
Vliegenthart et. al., 2016, p. 846) method of consulting only Monday editions, which is
normally used not only to “reduce the work of collecting a large number of events over
a long period of time, but also because the Monday edition covers events during the
weekend, since protest activities tend to be concentrated on weekends” (Vliegenthart et.
al., 2016, p. 846).
4 Daily circulation figures of Folha de S. Paulo (3rd in Brazil): 189.254; O Estado de S. Paulo (4th): 157.761. Source: Instituto Verificador de Comunicação (2015). Maiores Jornais do Brasil (Largest Newspapers in Brazil). Retrieved from: http://www.anj.org.br/maiores-jornais-do-brasil/:
In spite of the fact that, indeed, the protests analysed in this thesis also took
place on weekends - namely Saturday November 1st 2014; Saturday November 15th
2014; Saturday December 6th 2014; Sunday, March 15th 2015; and Sunday, March 13th
2016 -, the time frame for the articles’ selection comprised of every publication on each
day of the week prior to the demonstration and on each day of the week afterwards.
Besides ensuring a higher-N in the analysis, this also guaranteed that all different
formats of news and newspaper sections were researched. The articles were selected
from a careful reading, from cover to cover. Every newspaper article with any reference
to one of the demonstrations that are the object of this study was selected, regardless of
their size, section in which they were published or even type of article (in the first
selection, even letters to the editor, op-eds and photo-stories (captions) were selected).
Research design and operationalization
The quantitative content analysis of the data set was conducted through a
codebook in which questions included dummies as to the presence or absence of words
and/or expressions that could be identified as framing the news. The two words or
expressions that were sought for in the dataset were “impeachment” (which were the
motto of the organisers) and “military intervention” (demands of the radicals amongst
protesters). Similar expressions were also considered. For instance, when inquiring
whether the expression “intervenção militar” (military intervention) was present or not,
the expressions such as “volta à ditadura” (return to dictatorship) or “defesa de um
golpe militar” (defense of military coup) were also considered a “yes” answer.
The articles were not coded as a whole: the coding was subdivided into the
article’s parts, which corresponds to what is called the “list of frames approach”,
focused “on how the issue is defined by inclusion and exclusion of certain key terms”,
subdividing the article in different sections, as for instance headline, subtitle (or byline),
lead (or eye) and text (Tankard, 2001, p. 100-101). Therefore, the process of coding the
articles according to presence or absence of a given word of expression was repeated for
each subdivision.
Furthermore, a certain idea in a text “can make bits of information more salient
by placement or repetition” (Entman, 1993, p. 53). Therefore, when the yes box was
ticked for the presence of a given word or expression, the coder also had to identify in
how many paragraphs in the text that word was present. This is in line with the claim
that “the major task of determining textual meaning should be to identify and describe
frames; [coders] neglect to measure the salience of elements in the text” (Entman, 1993,
p. 57).
When analyzing the results, answers “no” and “not applicable” were collapsed
as “no”, once “neutral categories [are] more or less ruled out by one of the basic
assumptions of media framing theory - that every story has a frame” (Tankard, 2001, p.
101). An inter-coder reliability test was applied with a sample of 32 articles (10% of the
dataset) and the results ranged from a Krippendorff’s Alpha reliability estimate from
0.7005 to 0.9150 (see appendix C).
Results
In the first reading of each one of the 150 newspapers that were read from cover
to cover (15 per demonstration per title), 727 articles were selected. The content of the
articles ranged from briefly mentioning a demonstration to covering the event from the
title to the last word of the text. Of the first dataset, 53.9% of the articles (n=392) were
published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo and 46.1% in the Newspaper Estadão.
Table 2
Type per newspaper
Newspaper
Total
Estadão
Folha
Story
35,8% (120)
29,8% (117)
32,6% (237)
Opinion
26,3% (88)
27,0% (106)
26,7% (194)
Letter
22,4% (75)
22,7% (89)
22,6% (164)
Note
1,8% (6)
7,1% (28)
4,7% (34)
Interview
3,3% (11)
4,1% (16)
3,7% (27)
Short
7,2% (24)
,8% (3)
3,7% (27)
Headline
1,2% (4)
2,8% (11)
2,1% (15)
Teaser (opinion)
,6% (2)
2,3% (9)
1,5% (11)
Other
1,2% (4)
1,5% (6)
1,4% (10)
Teaser (story)
,3% (1)
1,8% (7)
1,1% (8)
Total
100,0% (335)
100,0% (392)
100,0% (727)
N=727
This first selection was further narrowed down since only journalistic articles are
part of this research. Therefore, stories, notes, shorts, headlines and teasers to stories on
the front page were regrouped in a new dataset. This dataset has a total of 321 articles,
51.7% published by Folha de S. Paulo and 48.3% by Estado de S. Paulo, reducing the
already small gap of 7.8% in the larger data set (n=57) to 3.8% (n=11) between both
titles. Most of the articles analysed were published on Monday (23.1%), followed by
Tuesday (17.9%) and Sunday (17.3%), which confirms the tendency of more
publications soon after an event or on the event’s day. Finally, 68.5% (n=220) of the
analysed dataset are articles in which demonstrations were the main topic whereas in
31.5% (n=101) of the sample are about other issues but references to demonstrations
appeared.
When the dataset is subdivided by demonstration, it becomes clear that the first
three demonstrations, all of them in 2014, received much less coverage than the protests
of 2015 and 2016:
Table 3
Total of articles per demonstrations
Newspaper
Total
Number of
demonstrators
according to police
estimates
Estadão
Folha
01/11/2014
(Demonstration 1)
6,5% (10)
3,6% (6)
5,0% (16)
2,500
15/11/2014
(Demonstration 2)
3,9% (6)
3,0% (5)
3,4% (11)
10,000
06/12/2014
(Demonstration 3)
2,6% (4)
2,4% (4)
2,5% (8)
5,000
15/03/2015
(Demonstration 4)
42,6% (66)
49,4% (82)
46,1% (148)
1,000,000
13/03/2016
(Demonstration 5)
44,5% (69)
41,6% (69)
43,0% (138)
1,400,000
TOTAL 100,0% (155)
100,0% (166)
100,0% (321)
N=321
Demonstrations 1, 2 and 3, together, represented 10.9% of the sample, while
Demonstration 4 represented 46.1% and Demonstration 5 totalled 43%. By grouping
protests of similar size (thus, 1, 2 and 3 versus 4 and 5), hypothesis 1 is clearly
confirmed: larger protests received together 89.1% of the coverage, confirming that the
larger the protest, the higher its news value and more coverage in number of articles it
will receive. In other words, while 2015 and 2016 protests counted respectively 148 and
138 articles each, the 2014 protest totaled, together, 35 articles.
Even though the difference is very pronounced between the amount of coverage
the 2014 protests received vis à vis the 2015 and 2016 protests, it is also noticeable that
the same does not necessarily apply when one protest is compared to the next one of
similar size. For instance, in spite of the 400 thousand participants in the 2016
demonstration in excess in comparison to the one in 2015, the number of articles
actually decreased in 2016 when both newspapers are considered together. However,
when newspapers are looked at separately, Estadão has an increase of three articles (66
to 69) while it is Folha that contributes to the overall decrease that year with a reduction
from 82 articles in 2015 to the same number of 69 articles as Estadão in 2016. Finally,
in both newspapers the first protest of the 2014 series, even though the smallest
according to police estimates, had most of the coverage when the three first events are
considered.
From this point onwards, the three protests of 2014 are collapsed in one variable,
Demonstrations 2014, mainly for two reasons: (a) the three demonstrations are similar
in size and happened in a period of just 35 days; and (b) the low n (35) of all articles
covering the three events together against the much higher n representing the
demonstrations of 2015 and 2016 (148 and 138, respectively).
Regarding the coverage and the salience of terms depicting protesters as
radicals, the results in the table below show that the identification of at least some, if not
all, demonstrators as demanding a coup, especially through a military intervention, was
present throughout the sample:
Table 4
Protest paradigm - military intervention I (whole sample).
Does the title, subtitle, lead, paragraph and/or text identify demonstrators as coup
supporters/interventionists?
Demonstrations AG
Total
Demonstrations
2014
Demonstrations
2015
Demonstrations
2016
Yes
85,7% (30)
31,8% (47)
15,9% (22)
30,8% (99)
No
14,3% (5)
68,2% (101)
84,1% (116)
69,2% (222)
Total
100,0% (35)
100,0% (148)
100,0% (138)
100,0% (321)
N=321
However present in all demonstrations, the saliency of the term military
intervention or of similar words and expressions is much more visible in the 2014 news
articles, which represent 85.7% of the respective sample. This number decreases
abruptly to 31.8% in the 2015 sample and to just 15.9% in 2016. When only news
stories are analyzed (n=220), the results shown in the next table are not much different
than those on the previous:
Table 5
Protest paradigm - military intervention II (just stories). Does the title, subtitle, lead,
paragraph and/or text identify demonstrators as coup supporters/interventionists?
Demonstrations AG
Total
Demonstrations
2014
Demonstrations
2015
Demonstrations
2016
Yes
88,0% (22)
35,1% (33)
12,9% (13)
30,9% (68)
No
12,0% (3)
64,9% (61)
87,1% (88)
69,1% (152)
Total
100,0% (25)
100,0% (94)
100,0% (101)
100,0% (220)
N=220
If Tankard (2001) list of frames approach is applied and only title, subtitle and
lead (or eye) of the article are taken in consideration (here again considering the whole
analysed data set, N=321), then the identification of protesters as coup supporters drops
(compare tables 5 and 7) from 85.7% to 51.4% in 2014, it falls to less than half of the
occurrences in 2015, falling from 31.8% to 14.2%, and plummets from 15.9% in the
2016 demonstrations to less than a tenth of that percentage, ie., only 1.4%, or just two
articles:
Table 6
List of frames - military intervention (whole sample). Title, subtitle, lead, paragraph
and/or text identify demonstrators as coup supporters/interventionists?
Demonstrations AG
Total
Demonstrations
2014
Demonstrations
2015
Demonstration
s 2016
Yes
51,4% (18)
14,2% (21)
1,4% (2)
12,8% (41)
No
48,6% (17)
85,8% (127)
98,60% (136)
87,2% (280)
Total
100,0% (35)
100,0% (148)
100,0% (138) 100,0% (321)
N=321
Therefore, hypothesis 2 expectation that protesters would be depicted following
the protest paradigm as radicals, demanding military intervention, is confirmed in all
demonstrations, but it is much more frequent and salient in the 2014 demonstrations as
the three previous tables show.
Finally, Entman’s (1993) defense that an idea is more salient by repetition was
also tested by calculating the number of paragraphs in which the expression “military
intervention” appeared. Confirming the previous results, th
e number of paragraphs
mentioning military intervention is on average much higher in the smaller, 2014 events, than in
the large ones. In fact, the average of 2.02 paragraphs in 2014 drops to just about a quarter
paragraph on average in 2016, making it eight times more likely for the term to appear in an
article in the smaller events than in the larger one. In this case, a pattern is found as the
demonstrations of 2015 show an average of 0.5676, also much lower than the 2.0286 average of
the smaller demonstrations, but more than twice as high as the 2016 protest average of 0.2536
5:
Table 7
Average number of paragraphs with the expression “military intervention”
Number of paragraphs in which the
expression “military intervention” appears
Demonstrations 2014
Mean
2.0286 (N=35)
Demonstrations 2015
Mean
0.5676 (N=148)
Demonstrations 2016
Mean
0.2536 (N=138)
Therefore, also through repetition, the idea that demonstrators were demanding
for military intervention was on average almost four times more present in the 2014
demonstrations than in the demonstrations of 2015.
Finally, it is also important to stress that, even though the data used so far were
those of both newspapers, Estadão e Folha, combined, there are also differences
between both newspapers when it comes to protest paradigm.
5Independent-samples t-test were conducted to compare means in 2014 and 2015 (t=-6,420; Sig: 0.004); 2015 and 2016 (t=-2,895; Sig: ,000) and 2014 and 2016 (-9,848; Sig: ,000) conditions.
