HOW TO GET YOUR PROTEST COVERED

Okay, before we begin, let me just say that the ideas mentioned below are more applicable to Australia. Or any country with a good degree of freedom for the media.

STEP 1: GETTING COVERAGE

In general (as mentioned before), only protests with disruption or novelty factors become newsworthy for the mainstream media coverage.

However, getting access into the mainstream media is only the first step. It does not necessarily guarantee that the coverage would be sympathetic enough for sufficient publicity to garner support. 

Most of the time, the media accounts tend to frame the protests by focusing on the events itself and the participants; instead of focusing on the wider social issues concerned.

Priority is quickly given to the protesters' violent or bizarre aspects, which are likely to draw condemnation than approbation. 

Media accounts tend to focus on the sentiments and actions of protestors, while the wider cause will be sullied and trivialized.

For you see, whenever an event happens, journalists always look on their cultural shelf to find a thematic framing package to classify and construct meaning for the event; so that readers can understand it in a frame that is familiar to the dominant culture, making it easier to absorb and digest.  It just so happens that violence and bizarre spectacle are one of those culturally familiar frames.

Abit like this, if you can imagine… Example frames in the picture are strictly products of the writer’s imagination and is not based on real examples of frames.

So, negative framing is majorly prevalent when the dissidents’ interests conflict with governmental interests. The same factors that increase the politically powerful’s level of access to the news media also increase the professional and political resonance of their information flows to the media, giving them the upperhand to skew the news’ framing.

Indeed, we should be alerted to the fact that there are powerful corporate interests behind government, which are mostly in conflict with collective interests of the public.

Hence, the dependent relationship of the media on authorities could be easily abused.

One such example of abuse is a tool called stigmatization. By attributing dissidents with a negative public image, authorities are socially constructing them as undesirables in society. And the media absorbs these labels for their cultural familiarity in constructing meaning.

Another indirect tool of stigmatization is the arrests of dissidents for disruption, which tarnishes their reputation in the public eye when reported in the media.

Observed from the last post by David, the Malaysian government used some of such techniques, aimed to protect the interests of some form of corporate interests (not sure about details), I suppose.

STEP 2 (or back to STEP 1): GETTING POSITIVE/SYMPATHETIC COVERAGE

One important fact to understand is the media’s focus in employing the shallowest level of frames in framing conflict; the media are interested in current affairs, not ideology.

So protesters have to learn how to produce useable information that fits the media’s idea of the culturally familiar.

In other words, protesters have to understand how to play the media game, by employing strategies like:

1. ‘news management’—using professional spokespeople or public relations managers to can manage information flows
   
2. deciding on a clear and simplified media frame of the protest; and persistently push the same consistently coherent messages 
3. Haul a celebrity into the campaign to boost its credibility
   

Figure 3 below provides a summary of the conclusion, in a game I created.

Figure 3: The Activist’s Frame Game

Applying this game on the recent rallies against racism in Melbourne, the issue follows the flow of:

Clear/simplified message-->disruption/violence-->not in conflict with government interests

--> covered positively

As a conclusion, although authorities have advantages over the media in terms of gaining access, challengers sometimes do emerge victorious .This rare condition only applies if the movement:

1. Is able to manage their issues or messages and exploit the media appropriately
   
2. Works for long-range change in society, leading them to change media frames in the process 

Politically marginal groups will have to continue finding human interest angles to associate with their agenda for journalists to work on, and to present their message in individualized ways with sensational or dramatic aspects.

Specifically, protesters could either keep increasing the participation rate in demonstrations, or to continue raising the level of drama.

For these purposes, it is more advisable to construct a more ‘moderate’ voice of pressure politics in contrast to ‘extreme’ movements.  Greenpeace and Friends of Earth are good examples of former politically marginal movements that have adjusted their political and media strategies majorly to accumulate more political capital. Their emergence in the 1960s as  an environmental movement left the media struggling to find appropriate labels for their novel cause. For immediacy’s sake, the media dealt with the issue by categorizing the movement as irresponsible and lacking in authority, especially when the movement employed high profile spectacular stunts.