Misleading campus protest coverage is a longstanding concern, writes a former higher ed reporter. Let’s not repeat the same mistakes in 2024-25?
By Jeremy Bauer-Wolf
A common refrain in the media is that education is a “starter beat” — a topic a cub reporter can tackle, with the implication being that schools are easier to grasp than the thorny dynamics of, say, politics or health care.
This sentiment often inspires eyerolls from me, a former full-time education journalist.
Until recently, I covered higher education for Higher Ed Dive and previously Inside Higher Ed. So I know merely attending a K-12 school or earning a college degree doesn’t grant know-how of the intricacies of U.S. educational systems.
Broad societal issues cross-cut education — campuses can be cities in themselves, superintendents and college presidents must function as politicians just as much as elected officials. It’s not an easy beat to cover well.
Unfortunately, in recent months, the very people best positioned to dispel oversimplified narratives — on-the-ground journalists — were sometimes the ones pushing them in their coverage of student protests roiling college campuses. I saw this back when I was a student journalist, and I saw it again this past spring.
I saw this back when I was a student journalist, and I saw it again this past spring.
After the Israel-Hamas war reignited in October, campus protests popped up at colleges nationwide.
These movements varied — often campuses saw pro-Palestinian students setting up encampments on lawns and quads, demanding their administrators divest from companies linked to Israel. Sometimes protests would morph into physical confrontations.
However, scores of media outlets glommed onto unsophisticated storylines. They highlighted “violence” and campus disruption, but with little context.
Flawed coverage of breaking news is one thing. But some news outlets pushed a simplistic narrative long after the first wave of protests, rather than pursuing nuanced reporting that was required. Some still are.
If and when campus protests resume, coverage should describe events clearly, challenge official assertions of violence or disruption, and seek out alternative sources — including student participants — rather than relying solely on easily available information.
Coverage should describe events clearly, challenge official assertions of violence or disruption, and seek out alternative sources.
It’s not hard to find examples of flawed campus protest coverage from the spring and early summer.
Consider CBS News’ dispatch from late June on a protest at the University of California, Irvine.
The first several paragraphs offer scant detail except where students gathered, in this case outside of a lecture hall. CBS News references a UC Irvine spokesperson describing the protests as violent, but doesn’t challenge that characterization whatsoever. The initial part of the article doesn’t even highlight students who attended.
Instead, the piece prioritizes statements from local officials condemning a protest that the news outlet failed to even adequately describe. Only in the final section does CBS News give room for an interview with a protester and demands students made.
Of course, it is a greater effort for reporters to find these sources, as more often they tend to quote university and government officials with whom they already have relationships.
The New York Times’ play-by-play of campus protests from May also illustrates this lazy approach. Not only did the coverage largely center on illustrious private colleges, but it also cherry-picked some of the most sensationalist pieces, including angry statements from donors, arrests, and political pressure on campus leaders.
The Times’ readers deserved nuance on how these demonstrations developed.
It’s not hard to find examples of flawed campus protest coverage from the spring and early summer.
Herein lies the apparently perennial problem of protest coverage.
National media particularly tends to elevate only one part — often the bloodiest piece — of conflict, missing complex history and the myriad factors that compel college administrators to, for instance, call the police on their own students.
And not just in coverage of war-related protests. A 2022 study from Danielle K. Brown, now a Michigan State University professor, found that reporters followed the “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality with Black Lives Matter reporting, too. Prominent media players, including The Associated Press and CNN, produced consistently one-note, negative narratives about BLM protests, the research found.
“Our findings suggest that persistent negative patterns of protest coverage continued to dominate news headlines, with a major emphasis on negative actions, disruption, and violence in centrist- and right-leaning media coverage from the Associated Press, CNN, and Fox News.”
This is not surprising. As my former colleague Greg Toppo detailed in a column in The Grade, journalists often find it easy to write about fights. They can spin a tidy narrative — one side said this, the other said that. College students set up a pro-Palestinian encampment, police swept it away.
Yet this portrayal does a disservice to the public, whose faith in higher education has generally fallen over the last several years — a new Gallup poll found about a third of U.S. adults have little to no confidence in colleges.
Herein lies the apparently perennial problem of protest coverage.
Everyone from locals to lawmakers are less likely to have a positive opinion of the college down the street — and postsecondary education at large — if all they’re reading is about in-fighting.
But college campuses have long been bastions of freedom of expression. The subject of demonstrations may change, but the prevalence of protests does not.
In fact, while conservatives have been some of the most vocal in railing against demonstrations and urging punishment, not even a decade ago it was Republicans bemoaning that colleges weren’t adequately protecting free speech.
That was when right-wing speakers and even white supremacists were touring college campuses, also spurring student protests.
Journalists who report on such matters should draw on this background. Politico published a piece in April pointing out that state governors in red states were struggling to square their past vociferous defense of free speech with their new demands that colleges come down on protesters.
This showcased some of the best of national coverage — an unexplored angle challenging the predominant narrative and that leveraged the reporter’s knowledge of the entire country.
Consider a new dispatch from the Associated Press this month. It hones in on one element of the protests — arrests made during them — mapping out how many occurred and the fallout for individual students. But it also illustrates the broad developments in these protests and raises important questions, like whether it was worth it to charge students. And it also provides an on-the-ground, human look at students who were arrested, which is journalism at its best.
Of course, some of the most effective campus protest coverage has been produced by student journalists, who tend to provide generally the most clear-headed news takes.
More than a decade ago, when I was a cub journalist on the campus of Towson University, outside Baltimore, my staff and I covered the saga and protests related to one student attempting to start a “White Student Union.”
National media parachuted in at the time to capitalize on the buzz. One important point about the group was that it technically wasn’t university affiliated, which some media outlets did note — but many did not.
We as student journalists understood that context. We knew that really only a couple of students, like the group’s leader, white nationalist Matthew Heimbach, publicly were supporting this movement. It disgusted the rest of campus.
Yet time and again, outside news media portrayed Heimbach’s crusade and his detractors as having near equal weight and importance.
When reporters live among their subjects as the students do, they understand the gravity of needing to present this nuanced and complete view. In the case of the most recent protests, the editorial board of Columbia University’s The Spectator wrote a takedown of the administrator response to the protest in April.
The student reporters there did not shy away from challenging powerful forces — the college administration — but did so in a way that cited specific incidents that built a case that top executives cared more about image than their students.
And as Michigan State’s Brown also noted, The Indiana Daily Student, the student press for Indiana University Bloomington, in April dissected the campus’ free speech policies, reporting on how officials quietly changed them ahead of anticipated protests.
These two pieces revealed administrators’ thinking on a deeper level — if Indiana University had not changed their rules, would protesters still have been arrested? This added an essential layer of context compared to if the student reporters had only covered the demonstration.
Of course, some of the most effective campus protest coverage has been produced by student journalists.
Ultimately, contemporary protest coverage reflects a need for news outlets to invest in reporters — of course, hiring skilled ones who can ferret out the behind-the-scenes context, but also just ensuring reporters they do bring on stick around.
A journalist with even a few years at their local newspaper can bring empathy and understanding often lacking in national-level reporting. These journalists should be the first read for those seeking a scoop.
Jeremy Bauer-Wolf investigates predatory colleges and entities that work with them for New America, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. He was a professional journalist for more than a decade, mostly in higher education. You can read his work on New America’s website and follow him on X at @jbeowulf.
Previously from The Grade
Protest coverage critique
Student journalists probably look up to you; ‘comport yourself accordingly’ when covering campus protests
What happens when education reporters write about politics (and vice versa)?
‘Varsity Blues’ scandal reveals troubling blind spot in college admissions coverage
Shut up about Harvard (and TFA, charters, closings)
