COMMUNICATING DEVIANCE - THE EFFECTS OF TELEVISION-NEWS COVERAGE OF SOCIAL PROTEST

Past research raises concern that media coverage may unfairly bias the audience against social protesters by portraying them as deviant. Furthermore, negative treatment of protest groups may discourage protest as a form of democratic participation. To examine whether such concerns are indeed warranted, an experiment was conducted exposing 266 subjects to one of two television news stories about the same protest. Results indicate that subtle differences in the news :stories led to significant differences in subjects' perceptions of the protesters and police, but no differences in perceptions of the utility of social protest in general.