Media Framing of Political Protests – Reporting Bias and the Discrediting of Political Activism in Hungary

In the last decade, some European countries have undoubtedly shifted to illiberal, non-democratic political regimes. According to the informational autocracy theory, centralized and controlled media might manipulate beliefs about the system’s performances and bring about positive attitudes towards the regime (Guriev and Treisman 2019). Agreeing with this, in this study we elucidate how government-leaning media marginalizes political protests and protesters. We believe the question here is not simply whether the media reports about protests and demonstrations, but how this takes place. That is, we assert that the way protests are framed is crucial in the marginalization of the opposition by the regime-supporting media. Through the study of Hungarian media, we highlight how the illiberal regime’s media frames political protests as pointless and disruptive activities. In order to scrutinize this issue, we have conducted two empirical analyses of the Hungarian on-line media news portals. 1) In the first study we used data of both police archives and our media database and we compared how biased are the pro-government and government-critical media outlets regarding protests. 2) In the second study, we analysed how a recent student protest in Budapest was framed in the Hungarian media. To describe marginalization frames we used the theory of protest paradigm (e.g. McLeod and Hertog 1999), i.e. a wide range of devices aiming at the marginalization and ‘demonization’ of protesters and their grievances. In order to analyse media selection bias, we merged two datasets, what now contains all the registered protests between January 2016 and November 2017, and dummy variables, whether the protest event was covered by the media sources. For conducting our second analysis, we rely on data collected by the professional data mining company SentiOne. Our database contains 1672 articles on the student protests against restructuring the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest. Students occupied the university between 1 September and 10 November 2020. Using quantitative text analysis we identified five elements of the protest paradigm. Our preliminary results indicate that government-leaning media does not withhold information about protests claiming democracy or other issues, or at least there is no substantial difference between government critical and government-leaning media outlets in the number of reporting in this respect. Thus we did not find support for our hypothesis about government-leaning media’s selection bias. However, there is a significant difference between government-leaning and government critical outlets in the quality of their reporting. We find that the student protests were displayed in the pro-government media as more violent, the protesters less capable, the mobilization less successful and demonstrations, in general, a less adequate form of shaping political decisions. Government leaning media also mentions more often political parties or politicians and Soros in their articles. Tentatively we suggest that what we can grasp here is media-populism. That is, the objective is not simply discrediting protesters, but dividing the society to those with the regime, and to its enemies. A Schmidtian logic that works and underlies the logic of illiberalism.