Both right and left-wing media gave a platform to the more militant voices in the recent student protests

Abstract

The massed protests against the government’s rise in tuition fees last winter illustrated that the public was willing to take to the streets -and in some cases use violence – to show their disapproval of the government’s policies. Bart Cammaerts explores how the media on both sides of the political spectrum covered these protests, and finds that while the symbolic violence of the protesters did not obscure the issues that were being protested, the internal conflicts within student groups were actually more detrimental to the reporting of the issues