'Flexing some democratic muscle': The representations of Brexit demonstrations in daily national UK newspapers

Recent laws have been put in place in America that increase penalties for protesting in groups, ban protesters from wearing masks, and protect drivers from liability if they hit a protester. More and more anti-protest laws are being introduced, creating hostility towards protesters and putting strain on rights to free speech and democracy (Gabbatt, 2017). For example, in prisons across the US, inmates protesting for the right to vote have been threatened with solitary confinement, transfers to different penitentiaries, and had their cell windows painted black so they do not know whether it is night or day. Furthermore, in England, six activists who were protesting against the felling of trees in Sheffield were arrested on false grounds to be kept 'out of the way' (Pidd, 2018). Similarly, a student protestor was charged for violent disorder, hit with a police baton, and put to trial despite only marching in the 2010 student protests (Segalov, 2015). Police also arrest protesters and publicly shame them on social media by posting their pictures, names and addresses (Levin, 2018).

By pursuing protests and protesters as a research topic, I intend to analyze the ways in which political protestors are represented in British and American newspapers with different political alliances. My study will aim to answer the following four questions:

Is there a correlation between newspaper political alliance and how protestors are represented?
If so, do these representations impact democracy and freedom of speech?
Will negative representations of protestors lead to further restrictions on political gatherings and activism?
Have these representations changed over time?

Although the representation of political protesters has been studied in recent years, these studies seem to focus on individual protests, rather than the representation of political protesters on a national or global scale (see Ebrahim, 2018; Koca-Helvaci, 2016). These studies therefore cannot draw conclusions about public and political perceptions of protesters on a broad scale. Changing discourses over time have also recently been researched, but they take one narrow topic. For example, Kay and Mendes (2018) researched how British suffragette Emily Wilding Davison was represented in newspapers from 1913-2013. Although this paper considers the newspapers representations and its implications on feminism, it does not consider democracy as a whole, as my project seeks to do. Currently, I feel Britain and America are both very divided countries; since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States of America, 'the country is more divided and angry that it has been in decades' (The Economist, 2018: 11), and Brexit has left England as 'a land divided' (Freedman, 2016). Given the current political climate, I think it is now more important than ever to research our democracy and freedom of speech on a national and global scale, and analyze the language used about protests and protestors in an attempt to help stop the marginalization and prosecution of protesters and ensure everyone's voice is heard. Protesters help alter political agendas and start debates (Norman, 2017), so are absolutely vital to our democracy.

Additionally, some studies have shown how the representation of protesters in newspapers is one of negativity. For example, Ebrahim (2018: 361) found in her study of South African university student protests, newspapers 'foregrounded students' violence at the expense of their positions as agents of transformation', and constructed them as 'vandals', 'violators' and 'law-breakers' (Ebrahim, 2018: 363-366). However, Lee (2014) found that newspaper protest coverage has become less negative over time, particularly when protests address a political matter. It will also be important to my study to note whether representations of protesters have changed over time, and if these changes correlate to particular newspapers or political alliances, so we