'It is not the time for intifada': a framing and semiotic analysis of televised representations of the 2013 cypriot protests

Abstract

The study of the media–protest relation ‘is perhaps the oldest and most-travelled trail in studying the media/social movement dynamic’ (McCurdy, 2012, p. 244). Yet although ‘social movements and the protests they launch are essentially visual phenomena’ (Mattoni and Teune, 2014, p. 876), scant attention has been paid so far to the visual as a site of semiotic struggle over media representations by protest movements (exceptions being Corrigall-Brown and Wilkes, 2012; Doerr et al., 2013; Phillips, 2011). Television, as a prime site for visual rhetoric, has been shown to be deeply ambivalent towards protest, oscillating between delegitimising and legitimising practices (Fahlenbrach, 2014). The Cypriot protests in March 2013, addressed in this chapter, failed to evolve into a robust anti-austerity protest movement (Charalambous and Ioannou, forthcoming). As mainstream media constitute an important ‘opportunity structure’ for social movements (Cammaerts, 2012) and define, along with other factors, their dynamics, it is important to study media representations of the Cypriot protests.