The media pays significant attention to the problem of “violent antifa” — black-clad activists who show up at white supremacist and neo-Nazi rallies, occasionally using violence to disrupt racist gatherings. Fox News panics about the menace of “leftist antifa thugs,” local news networks worry about the prospect of anarchist invaders, and think piece after think piece warns that antifa’s tactics are going too far.
Don’t fall for the antifa trap
Antifa panic reflects an old bias in media coverage of protest movements.
But so far, antifa have made up a small part of the protests they showed up at. They may look scary, but much of the hype around them is a product of sensationalized media coverage.
That’s because news cameras are incentivized to focus on the most extreme and badly behaved members of any protest. Whether it’s Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, or the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, media coverage is often drawn to sensational images of violence and property damage, even if those images only reflect the actions of a small percentage of protesters. That type of coverage creates an outlier bias, where small groups of radical protesters end up dominating coverage of protest movements as a whole.
The result is that protest movements are put in a kind of unwinnable situation: Viewers at home end up thinking most protesters are violent or dangerous, and protest leaders are forced into endless debates about tactics, rather than the issue they were protesting in the first place.
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