Protest Policing and the Magnitude of Distortion by the Western Press

Ellen Egyptien

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Bachelor Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Communications - Media and Politics, Politic Communications, grade: 2, Maastric...

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Bachelor Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Communications - Media and Politics, Politic Communications, grade: 2, Maastricht University (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences), language: English, abstract: In order to get information about protests and social movements that are going on somewhere in the world, people consider the news for keeping up to date. The coverage of protests and other news which are provided by the mass media in general, need to be looked at from a critical perspective. When political dissent changes into a crisis, threatening to escalate as it was the case in Kiev at the end of 2013, then the state responses with the policing of protest, which can be defined as the "police handling of protest events - a more neutral description for what protesters usually refer to as repression and the state as law and order" (Porta & Reiter, 1998, p. 1). Reputation and people s opinion about the general situation of a crisis and the executive power which has to carry out the instructions of the state can be shaped by news media to a great extent. Since the citizen is not in attendance of the protests and for the majority of people, the main source of information about the situation are indeed the mass media. It is consequently logic that they have a substantial impact on public opinion. Thus, the question that arises here is how far this exerted media influence can get. Therefore the news consumer needs to be aware of the background and context of the source that has been chosen. As a consequence, this research addresses media consumers, who not only passively read the news for example, but are also interested in scrutinising and questioning the source itself critically. Of course any form of media can have a manipulative tendency, no matter if Western or non-Western media. Also news media can be biased, depending on the political background the media coverage follows and supports. Without forgetting that, this thesis, however, concentrates on one specific Western newspaper, namely dieZeit, its coverage and distorting potential. News media are always part of politics as well - it is a mutual interference between knowledge and power, which is also topic of Michel Foucault s theory. In this thesis, the interaction between knowledge and power and the conducted discourse by the news will be investigated more. In short, the protests in Kiev, going on between the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014, provide an interesting case study for questions about the more concrete role played by Western mass media coverage in a contemporary social movement.