On October 18, the next wave of “No Kings” protests will put American voters, and American newsrooms, to the test. Whether, where, and how journalists cover these demonstrations—and how the public perceives them—carries immense consequences for our collective civic health.
Demonstrations can be hard to describe and easy to discredit. Crowd counts matter but are deeply disputed. Is the atmosphere festive or fearful, and in whose judgment? How many people bring signs, and are they original or mass-produced? Are officers masked, armed, and antagonistic? Or are they partners in the pageant of free expression, making sure rules are followed, safety protected and lawbreakers held accountable?
Once a demonstration reaches a certain size, it’s more likely that conflict erupts somewhere. Thousands may be marching peacefully, but if there is a clash with police or property damaged, it can change the perception of the entire event. And if a protest turns violent, who or what exactly lit the fuse? There’s a critical difference between a riot and a hijacking.
As journalistic cliches go, “If it bleeds, it leads” ranks among the most enduring. But too often, this instinct to chase conflict distorts reality and confuses the public. Consider: in 2023, 78% of Americans believed that crime was rising, even as FBI data showed violent crime near 30-year lows. Standard practice suggests that a protest stands a better chance of winning the attention wars if it is a spectacle, especially a violent one: burning cars, tear gas clouds, police in riot gear confronting protesters with rocks.
But peaceful protest is news too—just of a different kind. When large and small crowds in large and small towns gather respectfully, even exuberantly, to register their response to the country’s direction, measuring newsworthiness by body count or damage tallies misses the critical story. And here, independent witnesses serving as citizen journalists play a critical role expanding coverage to places and audiences that hollowed out local newsrooms struggle to reach.
Covering a peaceful protest is not the same as covering a plane that lands safely. Peaceful protests are newsworthy. If you voted for the president and now have doubts, a peaceful protest may signal that you are not alone. And if you are patriotic to your core and associate protest with anti-Americanism, seeing a sea of flags held by veterans, small business owners, clergy, seniors and students may open new emotional terrain.
That happened last June, on President Donald Trump’s birthday, when demonstrations filled streets from Boise to Birmingham—not to tear down, but to testify. Protests sprawled across red and blue America, the ultimate feast day for democracy and its gifts—that we can (for now) stand up and speak out, in the streets, waving placards, honking horns, declaring independence one by one by one.
You could read the range of motives just by scanning the signs.
“When cruelty becomes normal, compassion looks radical,” stated one sign in Austin Texas.
“There are more of us than of them,” declared a sign in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
“Unpaid protesters,” reassured a sign in Houston, Texas.
In St. Paul, Minnesota, where protests proceeded despite being technically canceled after the recent assassination of state representative and former Democratic House Speaker, Melissa Hortman, one sign asked: “Who would Jesus deport?”
And across America, protesters carried signs pleading to “Make America America Again.”
The sheer variety of these slogans—the irony, the humor, the grief—made the point: this is not a movement with a single ideology or identity. That’s its strength.
The battle to preemptively discredit the next wave of protests is well underway. Republican leaders echoed House Speaker Mike Johnson’s characterization of the No Kings events as “hate America” rallies brought to you by “Antifa.” Meanwhile warm-up demonstrations in Portland feature protestors in inflatable animal costumes—lots of frogs, along with unicorns, chickens, dinosaurs dancing in the streets, providing an alternative visual to the menace of masked enforcement agents.
Nonviolence is a moral principle and a strategic choice. It invites broader participation, builds solidarity, and reduces the risk of repression—and that matters at a time when President Trump vows “full force” in his call for deployment of troops to “war-ravaged” Portland to fight a war that does not exist. It’s easier to plan, easier to spread, and harder to vilify. And it works.
Harvard’s Erica Chenoweth, director of the Non-Violent Action Lab and one of the world’s leading scholars of protest movements, has shown that peaceful resistance is twice as likely to succeed as violent resistance. Why? Because mass participation matters more than militancy. When ordinary people join in—nurses, teachers, retirees, cops—it signals a tipping point, the moment when history bends to popular will. And as civil rights protesters proved decades ago, a righteous, peaceful protest that is met with brutality can unmute even a silent majority.
Chenoweth and colleagues formulated a much-cited “3.5% rule”, that historically, when just 3.5% of a population engaged in sustained civil resistance—protests, boycotts, sit-ins, work stoppages—dramatic political change became possible. In the U.S., that’s about 11 million people.
Movements that reach that scale—without purity tests or partisan labels—succeed not because they’re perfectly aligned, but because they’re united in purpose. Creating that kind of a coalition requires a spirit of solidarity. “It means holding hands not just with admirable men and women, but with people you don’t like” argues columnist Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark, “a posture which treats an attack on anyone as an attack on everyone. NATO’s Article 5, but for a domestic political system.”
In that sense, if narrative runs on conflict, the differences among protesters are not a bug—they’re the story.
And the number of protesters is news. They are too many, from too many zip codes, for George Soros to have hired them all.
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