Douglas McLeod on Impacts of Pro-Palestinian Campus Protests

Frederica Freyberg:
The tents on the UW-Madison campus are coming down. Students for Justice in Palestine agreed to clear the protest encampment, not disrupt graduation ceremonies this weekend and not set up tents again in an agreement with UW-Madison administration. For its part, the administration will set up a meeting between protesters, the UW Foundation and Alumni Association to discuss how the university’s endowment is invested. One of the protesters’ demands was for the university to divest of investments with Israel.

Protester:
We want justice. I’ll say how. UW. Divest now.

Frederica Freyberg:
When negotiations broke down between protesters and the university mid-week, about 200 people rallied and voiced their disappointment over the chancellor saying she lacked authority to divest of investments with Israel. But in following days, talks resumed with the university eager to end the encampment which was agreed to Friday just ahead of graduation ceremonies. What are the implications of these protests at the university campus and campuses across the country? UW-Madison journalism professor, Douglas McLeod, is an expert on social protests and media coverage of it. He joins us now. Thanks very much for being here.

Douglas McLeod:
Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:
So you’ve written that media produce messages that support the status quo when covering social protests. Is coverage of these protests across the country and here supporting the status quo?

Douglas McLeod:
For the most part, yes. Most of the research that we’ve been doing over 35 years has looked at sort of mainstream media coverage in newspapers and then sort of the three-minute news packages that are produced to cover social protests and we found just a very common pattern of coverage that sort of typifies a lot of different kinds of protests. We’ve looked at left wing protesters, right wing protesters. We’ve looked at all sorts of different kinds of antiwar, anti-globalization protests, Black Lives Matter protests, and so we’ve discovered there’s a sort of common pattern when it comes to sort of mainstream news reports.

Frederica Freyberg:
So in this case, what even is the status quo potentially being hewed to?

Douglas McLeod:
Generally speaking, the status quo would refer to the policies and procedures of the institutions of power, government or corporations who are often the chosen target of protesters, but as part of this protest paradigm coverage, their chosen enemy is often ignored and instead the focus is on the actions of the protests and it’s framed kind of police versus protesters. And in that sense, the coverage tends to insulate the institutions like government or corporations from — from critical coverage of some of their policies and positions that the protesters would like to raise.

Frederica Freyberg:
And so in your mind, as an expert researcher in this field, what is the danger to kind of civic understanding if it’s really kind of one-sided?

Douglas McLeod:
I think to some degree, you can kind of see some of the dangers right now in the current protests. There’s been a lot of attention on police actions on campuses around the country. A lot of attention to encampments being removed. A lot of attention to clashes between protesters and counter-protesters, but not much mainstream news coverage that’s really explaining, hey, what’s this protest all about? What’s going on in Gaza and how are the protesters trying to effect change when it comes to that particular issue?

Frederica Freyberg:
Speaking of kind of the police movements around these protesters, as a faculty member on this campus, what was your reaction when the police moved in on the UW-Madison encampment?

Douglas McLeod:
The concerns are that some of their actions against faculty and students are sometimes more aggressive than they might need to be, and I’ve heard some charges, and I don’t know whether they’re validated or not, that on this campus and elsewhere, some of the more sort of aggressive measures taken by police officers are often directed at minorities — students and international students.

Frederica Freyberg:
How complicated is this pro-Palestinian protest when some Jewish students express feeling marginalized or worse and others feel they’re experiencing islamophobia? How complicated when passions around enduring conflict and bloodshed in the Middle East come to campus?

Douglas McLeod:
Yeah. I mean this is about as complicated as you get in terms of protests. First you start with the issue in Gaza and it’s not a simple solution. It’s not a case of this side being right and this side being wrong. It’s very, very complicated, number one. Number two, the protests are taking place right here and they’re sort of directed more at things like university investments, that’s kind of a complicated issue. They’re more indirectly connected, in some cases, to the protest defense going on in the Middle East and to some degree in the coverage of the protests, that sort of connection to these issues to some degree gets lost.

Frederica Freyberg:
So do you think the student protests move presidential policy on Israel?

Douglas McLeod:
Well, with all the different factors that are trying to shift presidential policy, it’s hard to trace it to what exactly is driving what. We know that protests can have a big impact. We don’t have to go far back into our own history to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s to see the profound impact that that kind of social protest and demonstrations had on affecting public policy. We know that is the case there. I think history is going to have to take a look at this particular case to see to what extent the protesters themselves has had an impact.

Frederica Freyberg:
All right. Professor McLeod, thanks very much.

Douglas McLeod:
Thank you very much.