Strategies and Tactics Employed in Representing Protest Movements in Contemporary English-Language Print Media

Protest movements have become one of the most common and efficient forms of social activism in the last decades. Information about protests mainly becomes available through the Mass Media, which view protests from diverse perspectives and have the power to shape the public perception of this activity. The aim of this research is to explore and compare the language that the contemporary English-language media use to represent protest movements as well as to identify some key manipulative strategies and tactics employed in protest representation. Specifically, the study focuses on the examination of the news coverage of the Yellow Vests movement in France. The research is carried out within the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, including the approaches proposed by Christopher Hart and Norman Fairclough, and is mainly aimed at revealing the ideological bias behind news texts. The analysis is based on a sample of 50 articles from English-language online news editions of reputable newspapers.