How Media Demagogued Virginia Parent Protests in 2021

Part 1

We easily distort into simply clarity that which we should comprehend in complexity

As promised in my Digigoguery introduction post, I am posting my attempt at assessing the complex demagoguery in digital news articles surrounding a single news event: Fairfax and Loudoun County parent protests in from 2019 to 2021. In Part I, I am showing here how specific media articles simply characterize parents via Binary Us/Them Thinking and Naive Realism. In Part 2, I then use Kenneth Burke’s terministic screens to illuminate the media’s ideological patterns. My main question is: as a voter and reader of what was available to me in late 2021, what would I learn from media about the protesting parents?

A Little Background:

I conducted the first analysis of these articles in a Fall 2021 doctoral course on Modern Rhetoric. In the seminar paper, I applied Patricia Roberts-Miller’s demagoguery definition as a framework for understanding how 40 media articles portrayed the protesting parents. At that time, I was (and still am) a father of 4 K-8 girls (now aged 5-12) in Virigina and began to read some 2021 articles that depicted parents as ignorant. And worse. I became curious, and though I didn’t live in Fairfax or Loudoun County, I wanted to know how the media represented people like me to the broader national public.

My Method

For this post, I selected 8 articles from each of the 5 ideological bias columns found in the Allsides.com Media Bias Chart (Figure 1), 40 articles total. Each outlet that had at least 1 article included in this study is boxed in green on the bias chart (below). I found each article by searching ‘Loudoun County’ and ‘parents’ in the Bing search engine. I’m sure Google would have returned different search results to a certain extent. I chose to only focus on how the media depicted parent protests at schools in Fairfax and Loudoun counties from 2019 (when the first small protests started) until November 2021, and these articles were the available consumable content about this issue at the time. I’ll list links to all 40 articles at the end of the final post so you can read them and conclude their level of demagoguery for yourself if you wish.

Figure 1

After scraping all the text from each of the 40 articles, I pasted each article’s text into one of 5 documents representing the corresponding ideological Allsides column to which its outlet belonged (Huffington Post – Left). I conducted a simple ‘ctrl + F’ search for every instance in which the ideological category’s outlets used the term parents to observe whether and to what extent LCPS parents were even discussed (Table 1).

Table 1

4 Critical Demagoguery Data Points

I argue the Left articles demagogued parents most (as ideological/political out-group) in 4 ways while the Right also does so, yet to a lesser degree:

1. 23 instances of the term parent in Left articles totaled only 7% of all 332 parent instances (Figure 2)

2. Left articles quoted 45 political or institutional officials and only 1 parent – a 45:1 ratio (Figures 3 and 4)

3. The Left articles mention the term conservative the most at 39 instances, 4x more than the Right column and 6x more than the Lean Right column (Figure 5)

4. The Left mentions CRT 44 times and Critical Race Theory 90 times (Figure 6)

Figure 2

When discussing how much representation protesting Loudoun County parents received in online media coverage, the answer would be not much (Fig. 4). However, while each ideological column quoted parents much less than officials (Fig. 3), the Lean Left and Lean Right each quoted 10 parents while the Right quoted the most at 13 parents.

Figure 3

By quoting 45 officials and only 1 parent, Figure 3 shows the Left includes perspectives from everyone but parents: school board members, political nonprofit groups, board member spokespersons, political candidates, teachers, etc. In fact, the Left articles quote officials to parents at a ratio of 45:1. If I only read the Left, then I would know little of what parents thought, and I might even suspect that these parents were certainly politically partisan, manipulated, ignorant, and not genuine in their concerns. We can visualize these ratios differently:

Figure 4

We can summarize these ratios here:

Table 2

Despite the Center quoting officials the least and parents second-to-last, the Left, again, overwhelmingly quotes officials over parents and uses the term conservative the most to describe the people involved in this Loudoun County parent protest. Since no one else uses liberal or progressive nearly as much to describe the protest, then we must begin to conclude that the Left has framed or seen this event in a unique way.

Figure 5

The Lean Left overmentions parents 124 times and presents the political party binary of Democrats and Republicans more than all other columns combined. But that is largely the result of discussing a survey where respondents identified with either party. The Lean Right, on the other hand, underperforms in this binary by barely mentioning Democrat or Republican. In addition to barely mentioning conservative with zero progressive instances, it seems Lean Right sticks to mentioning parents as parents. As initial evidence of demagoguery, the Right mentions Democrat more than Republican and the Left mentions Republican more than Democrat, a function of who they choose to focus on (more on that in Part 2).

Figure 6

Here, the Left sticks to covering total CRT/Critical Race Theory instances more than other columns, even though CRT acronym instances are on par with Lean Right and Right. And reading the articles reveals they are trying to define CRT, defend it, and even paradoxically argue it is and is not in schools in an effort to dismiss parent concern over opposition to its teachings as merely politically motivated by conservative shadow groups and funding.

I began to see how the Left approached the parent protests by quoting officials and discussing an academic theory that was one concern among others (transgender rape cover up, mask policies, vaccine mandates, school closures, etc.). If you read the articles, they are trying to argue that political operatives injected opposition to CRT and antiracism, and not parents. I don’t think they make the case, at leats not initially. Even if they did make that case, the nonparent emphasis remains, presenting a politically and ideologically demagogued discourse to its readers.

Summary

This study presents recognizable categories into which parents have been placed (conservative, Republican) that function as markers of undesirable and desirable qualities and values. Yet, moreso by the Left outlets, these qualities and values function as foils to narrate an outlet’s own sense of virtue and virtuous identity, to guide readers to identify the in-group and out-group in this protest event. From the sampled media sources, the initial findings demonstrate that all sources demagogue, yet those on the Left demagogue parents the most as an out-group, scapegoating them and conservative media, viewing officials like teachers and school administrators as an in-group needing protection whereas the Right demagogues the parents as an in-group needing protection and school administrators as out-group. You would not be mistaken in thinking we were reading about two different events here...

Part 2 coming soon…