Rayner Teo

20 Jan 2015
University of Cape Town
Department of Sociology
Evaluating various South African media sources for Protest Event Analysis
Protest event analysis (PEA) uses quantitative data extracted from archives like press
reports and police records to study the occurrence of protests, and their causes and effects
(Koopmans and Rucht 2002, 231). Though PEA studies suffer from the bias of their sources,
PEA is nevertheless a systematic and comprehensive way to study significant episodes of protest
activity. Moreover, one stream of research that uses the PEA methodology seeks to study the
selection biases of PEA sources (Fillieule 1996; Barranco and Wisler 1999). This can be done by
comparing different national newspapers, national and local newspapers, different forms of
media, or even using administrative archives. For instance, the study by Barranco and Wisler
(1999) compared police and press data on public demonstration in Basel, Bern, Geneva, and
Zurich, coding for the characteristics of each event.
The University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) offers a data source called the Social Protest
Observatory, which selectively curates press reports on protest activity dating back to 21 July
2009.1 I plan to compare that against a more comprehensive archive of newspaper reports, the
SA Media project run by the University of the Free State which archives press reports from over
120 newspaper, to test for several different kinds of underreportingfor instance, whether
fewer service delivery protests feature in the Social Protest Observatory than in the SA Media
project. Scripts can be written to mine both sources for relevant data. Years of interest are
therefore 2009 present, although information dating back to when the wave of protests began
in 2004 (Alexander 2010) would be useful.
It may also be possible to request SAPS data from the Incident Registration Information
System (IRIS), under the Promotion of Access to Information Act.2 If the SAPS does accede to
this request, it would also be possible to make a comparison between the media as a whole and
administrative records. Information that would be useful to get from SAPS includes protest date,
location (ideally down to municipality or even precinct level), size, motivethese would enable
a direct evaluation of the media sources along the lines of Barranco and Wisler's (1999) work on
Switzerland or Tilly's French and British databases (cited in Ngwane (2012)).
The scope of the project will clearly depend on the availability of data. Ideally, we would
be able to compare both the SA Media project and the Social Protest Observatory against
administrative data (police records from IRIS, plus census data) to answer questions such as:

1
2

To what extent are protests in rural (or poorer) areas underreported relative to those in
urban (or richer) areas? Peaceful or approved marches compared to violent unrest?
What is the average size and duration of protest that receives media attention? What are
the outliers and why does the media report on them?

Latest report covering 15/12/2014 11/1/2015 available here: http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?2,27,3,1858

http://foip.saha.org.za/request_tracker/entry/sah-2014-sap-0018

What reasons for protest or movements gain the most media attention?

Alternatively, limiting the scope to the main metropolitan areas of Johannesburg/Pretoria, Cape
Town, and Durban could prove to be more feasible, though this limits the coverage of other
protest movements of interest (such as the municipal demarcation protests in various district
municipalities).
Bibliography
Alexander, Peter. 2010. Rebellion of the Poor: South Africas Service Delivery Protests a
Preliminary Analysis. Review of African Political Economy 37 (123): 2540.
doi:10.1080/03056241003637870.
Barranco, Jose, and Dominique Wisler. 1999. Validity and Systemticity of Newspaper Data in
Event Analysis. European Sociological Review 15 (3): 30122.
Fillieule, Olivier. 1996. Police Records and National Press in France: Issues in the Methodology
of Data-Collections from Newspapers. In Working Paper No. 96/25 of the Robert Schuman
Centre. Florence: European University Institute.
Koopmans, Ruud, and Dieter Rucht. 2002. Protest Event Analysis. In Methods of Social
Movement Research, 1st ed., 23159. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ngwane, Trevor. 2012. Some Methodological Points for the Construction of a Protest Event
Database in South Africa. In CCS Seminar: Ideology and Agency in Protest Politics: Service
Delivery Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa, 124. University of KwaZulu-Natal.
http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/Ngwane%20CCS%20seminar.pdf.