Protests can be considered an important determinant of the contemporary era, both in a global and a national context. The last few decades have been marked by gatherings of people around various issues in different public spaces, from the Arab Spring, through the Indignados movement, Occupy Wall Street, the Umbrella Revolution, to Protests against violence. Protests and movements always present a challenge for democratic politics and institutions regardless of whether they fight for an alternative future and against precarious living, or, on the contrary, advocate for a return to a homogeneous people, pan-European nationalism, or other ideas opposed to democratic principles. This lecture assumes that protests always carry democratic potential even though they materialize in various forms, and therefore it is important to continuously consider protests in relation to the democratic order. Depending on the type of political regime, political regimes treat protests differently and the media portrayal of protests is an important reflection of the degree of democracy, media freedom, and societal polarization. Based on a forty-year tradition of researching media representation of protests mostly in liberal democracies, patterns of media reporting have been identified that support the status quo as opposed to the demands that social groups express in public space, marginalizing their goals and means. These patterns, known as the protest paradigm, include framing protests negatively (presenting protestors as violent, socially deviant, a minority usurping the rights of the majority), favoring official sources (government, police) over the protestors’ perspective, and questioning the goals and authenticity of protests. Relying on the protest paradigm, the goal of this lecture is to show how protests are discredited in hybrid regimes, referring to analyses of media representation of protests in Serbia (Protest against dictatorship, Protest against violence) and Hungary.

Ana Milojević is an associate professor at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Political Sciences, engaged in journalism and communication studies. She is an alumna of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship, which she utilized as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bergen, Department of Information Science and Media Studies (2020–2022). In her research, she focuses on digital and democratic transformations of media and journalism, as well as the relationship between democracy and media, including media representation of protests and migrations.