Mediatization of Student Protests Against Israeli Action in Gaza: A Cross-European Analysis

Research into student political activity, across Europe, has shown how the media can play a key role in shaping how such activity is framed. For example, emphasis within the Spanish press on the violent nature of student protest has tended to divert attention away from the specific concerns of students and present students, rather than the issues that they were protesting about, as a threat to society (Brooks et al., 2022). Moreover, press coverage of student political activity in the UK has also frequently constructed students as a threat. In this case, however, it is longstanding traditions of intellectual debate that are presented as threatened – from students’ desire for ‘safe spaces’ (spaces for discussion without the threat of violence, harassment or hate speech) and implementation of ‘no platforming’ (not providing a platform to a speaker representing ideas deemed to be harmful) (Brooks et al., 2022; Finn et al., 2021). The current paper will develop this analysis, of the role of national newspapers in mediating student protests, by focusing on coverage of protests, against Israeli action in Gaza, which took place in many European countries in the summer of 2024. It will explore how the protests were covered in two national newspapers in each of Denmark, France, Ireland, Spain and the UK, and the extent to which such coverage positioned student political activity as a threat. Moreover, given some national difference in response (e.g. in Ireland, one university responded by agreeing to divest from Israeli companies) and in policy positioning (e.g. Spain has historically been more supportive of Palestinian causes than some of its European neighbours), the paper will examine whether this heterogeneity is also played out in media reports. It concludes by assessing the likely impact of the coverage on societal understandings of students as political actors.