MADISON, Wis. – News coverage of protest demonstrations often misses the message that organizers want to convey, according to scholar Douglas McLeod at the University of Wisconsin. McLeod, who researches news coverage, says reporters often focus too heavily on easy-to-report detail like crowd size — and skip exploration of underlying issues that protestors are raising. Such reporting, he said, also can have other unfortunate effects: “Headline-grabbing content like property destruction or arrests can give protesters a bad rap as troublemakers, even if the majority of protests are peaceful.” In a lengthy interview with Wisconsin Public Radio, McCleod offered this advice: Focus on a single issue that news reporters and their mass audiences can glom onto easily. As examples, he commended protest marches last weekend in LaCrosse and Manitowoc that went after President Trump for supply disruptions to food shelves. In contrast, he noted, most of the weekend’s several hundred other protests nationwide attacked Trump on a dizzying array of issues. To underscore his point, McLeod cited the success of the massive but relatively narrow-focused civil rights movement of the1960s. He also cited the success of the anti-Vietnam war movement of the 1970s. Those protests, he said, succeeded in fundamental shifts in public opinion and public policy.
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McLeod. Journalism scholar at University of Wisconsin.