Last weekend, thousands of Manchester United fans marched in protest at their club’s ownership. A week earlier, there was a similar march at Chelsea, and there are rumblings of discontent at Tottenham and Fulham too. In other words, it seems there are problems to be solved at roughly three-quarters of Premier League clubs.
The fact that fans are stepping up their protests shows that fandom is not just a form of entertainment or a sign of a fanatic attachment to a team. It can also be a powerful tool for social change. During the Civil Rights Movement, Black people turned their fandom of football into a nonviolent weapon of resistance against segregated seating and discrimination at their local stadiums. They marched, boycotted games, plastered their communities with banners, and demanded equality from their teams and the sportswriters who covered them.
This article examines the role that journalists play in humanizing and legitimizing the protesters they cover, especially when those protesters come from underrepresented groups. It looks at how telling a story about a protest in either a humanizing or delegitimizing way can affect how people perceive the teenager whose death spurred the protest, as well as their attitudes toward the protest itself and its participants.
Newsrooms can help to improve how they report protest stories by humanizing the person whose death prompted the protest and by using language that legitimizes, rather than delegitimizes, the protesters. This can increase the likelihood that people will support the protesters and their cause and believe that the news story is credible.