University Protests: Why Agreements got a Mere 1% of the Headlines

Subramaniam "Subbu" Vincent is the director of Journalism & Media Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, and a monthly contributor at Forbes. He tweets from @subbuvincent and @jmethics. Views are his own. This article, University Protests: Why Agreements got a Mere 1% of the Headlines, originally appeared on Forbes.com and is reprinted with permission.

During April 29 to May 3, there was a clear peak in news coverage of student protests on U.S. university campuses over the war in Gaza. Several universities, notably Columbia and UCLA, were the scenes of conflict, escalation of tensions, violence, and police action. A little over 2000 stories were published by one hundred U.S. news outlets during this five day peak. But a mere 23 stories, or 1%, ran with headlines about agreements that some universities struck with students during the same period. Headlines in particular are key signals of elevation in journalism. At the heart of this chasm is a story of news values.

_{Figure 1. Story volume (counts) per day over a three month period from Feb 23 to May 22, 2024, from a collection of 258 widely read U.S. news outlets. The tallest peak in coverage volume was during April 29-May 3, 2024. Source: MediaCloud.com, compound query for the keywords (student* AND (protest* OR encampment*) AND universit*). The finding on 23 headlines on agreements is taken from a custom query for the same dates.
CHART: AUTHOR. DATA SOURCE: MEDIACLOUD.ORG}

At least five universities–Brown, University of California at Riverside, Rutgers, Northwestern, and University of Minnesota struck agreements with student groups to end encampments during Apr 29-May 3. And in the weeks after May 3, Harvard, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, Johns Hopkins, and Chapman also reached agreements with protesting students. Those agreements got another 11 headlines until May 22.

_{Figure 2. The top news sources by volume of coverage on student protests and encampments, during the April 29-May 3 peak. A total of 2,027 stories were published. Fox News, New York Times, and CBS News published over 100 stories each during this five day period. Source: MediaCloud.com, applying the same compound query for the keywords (student* AND (protest* OR encampment*) AND universit*), to the period April 29-May 3.
CHART: AUTHOR. DATA SOURCE: MEDIACLOUD.ORG--}

The undercovered story of the American Spring of 2024

In all, from Apr 29 to May 22, a mere 34 stories from 18 news outlets headlined agreements or deals at 11 universities. Meanwhile the denominator - coverage of protests, confrontations and encampments in general - was a whopping 4600 stories. Agreements got less than 1% of the coverage.

The agreements themselves were the result of diverse negotiations and deliberations between student groups and university leaders. What is notable is this: One, they were nonviolent milestones and democratically legitimate resolutions to the faceoffs. Two, the agreements and deals differ in many particularities, from what the student groups won vs. gave up, and likewise what the universities agreed to do or not. For instance, some universities agreed to bring in a review of their endowment holdings, others decided to consider developing a proposal for voting at the university’s board. The factors at play are also quite varied: student groups’ composition and their demands as well as the universities’ own leadership and their legal and governance environments.

All of this offered a rich basis for diverse coverage by a large number of news outlets reporting to their own audiences. And yet the sheer lack of scale in coverage that explicitly headlined the agreements is shocking. The headline numbers are so low that the list of publishers fits into two paragraphs. ABC News headlined Northwestern University’s agreement. CBS News elevated Northwestern and UC Riverside. Fox News elevated Northwestern, Brown, and Harvard. NPR elevated Brown. New York Times elevated Brown, Rutgers and Harvard. Time and Newsweek headlined Northwestern.

Local journalism was a notable pattern here. Of those 18 outlets, six, or one-third, were local and regional publications. They headlined the deals at their top local universities. Chicago Tribune headlined the Northwestern agreement twice. Seattle Times elevated three stories on University of Washington’s agreement. TwinCities.com headlined the University of Minnesota’s agreement. Star Tribune (Minneapolis) also expectedly headlined Minnesota’s agreement. Baltimore Sun headlined Johns Hopkins, and California’s Orange County Register did it for Chapman University. Notably both Seattle Times and Star Tribune went outside their regions and headlined Northwestern’s agreement.

So if protests and encampments in U.S. universities can receive widespread national attention, shouldn’t agreements and deals too?

Beneath the stark difference in volume

It all starts with how one breaking news story might create what is called a news cycle: tens to hundreds or even thousands of stories from many outlets that follow. But why do so many different news outlets each with diverse editorial missions and teams still converge this way? It’s called news values.

News values are tacit criteria that help professional journalists quickly determine whether a particular development is newsworthy. Tony Harcup and Deirdre O’Neill’s widely cited paper on news values in the journal Journalism Studies documents a list: exclusivity, bad news, conflict (includes controversies, strikes, fights, warfare, etc.,) surprise, shareability, drama, follow-up, power elite, relevance, magnitude of impact, celebrity, good news and finally a news organization's own agenda or mission.

While news values are relatively easy to observe during news cycles, the key aspect is that they are tacit. News outlets typically do not publish their “news values” openly on their “About Us” or standards pages. These values are deep, and a part of traditional journalistic culture.

So we see scores of stories on conflict and controversy because those are news values. The university protests were not different. But a key pattern that media studies show is all news values are not equal. “Bad news” coverage outstrips “good news” coverage by orders of magnitude. Deliberative resolutions that avert further escalations and violence are not seen in journalism at the same level of newsworthiness as conflict itself.

The consequences of under-headlining

A common counter argument is that we, the people, are at fault, not the media. But this argument would stick better if fair proportions of headlines on conflict and agreements were supplied into the distribution. But if the supply itself is so low, the question of reach and spread does not even arise.

It is not that headlined coverage of protests and conflict on America’s university campuses is not necessary. It is also not that all conflict is inherently bad. Especially because conflicts at many historical moments do raise critical moral questions. The question is proportionality and range of inquiry.

It will not be the American public’s fault if most people polled do not recall that ten or so major universities actually did reach agreements, why, and what is to come next. The consequences of this disproportionality are deep for democratic culture where conflict is expected but equally, resolutions need to be interrogated and understood widely for the norms they highlight. At this level of volume disparity, we drown out other norms in the noise.