Discursive Construction of Radicalness. Journalistic Depiction of Contestation Against Critical Infrastructure

How does the news media make sense of norm-violating, disruptive protest events against Alpine transportation infrastructure over 44 years? While news outlets and the public tend to condemn protest events that disrupt everyday life, prior research has shown that such disruptions can garner support for the issue-owning party. I shed light on this puzzle by examining 42 protest events against the Swiss Gotthard Road Tunnel, vital for heavy goods transport on Europe's north-south axis, organised between 1980 and 2024. Guided by critical discourse studies as an analytical practice, I conduct a structuralist narrative analysis of 452 newspaper articles from 48 newspapers across Switzerland's three language regions. Contrary to the literature, my findings show that Swiss newspapers tended to acknowledge and empathise with the concerns of the disruptors. This said, I also find that journalists disproportionately condemned protest events in which non-Swiss and working-class actors were involved, thereby reproducing negative stereotypes tied to social position. Furthermore, media discourse was more heated when disruptions targeted individual mobility as a cause of climate change. These patterns suggest that understandings of national identity and patriarchal structures nourish dominant views of the human-nature relationship that underpins media coverage of disruptive protest events, which ultimately captures a larger conflict over the green transition.