Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
If you were flipping through an American newspaper earlier this week, looking for news about the “Hands Off!” anti-Trump street protests that consumed much of the country over the weekend, you might have had a hard time finding it. Despite more than a thousand rallies at sites across all fifty states—including substantial turnout in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles—a number of major newspapers deemed the actions not quite front-page news, as several keen-eyed observers have noted recently, burying it on page eleven (the Boston Globe) or eighteen (the New York Times) or in a second section entirely (the LA Times).
But glance at some newspapers overseas, where stories about American politics often come with Trump-size levels of intrigue, and the impression is very different. “Más de mil 200 protestas en urbes de Estados Unidos” (More Than 200,000 Protesters in US Cities), read the banner headline in Mexico’s La Jornada on Sunday. “Zehntausende protestieren gegen Trump” (Tens of Thousands Protest Trump) was the top story on the front page of Monday’s Die Welt, the major German daily. And at Italy’s widely read La Repubblica, a photo from the Boston rally was accompanied by the headline “Trump, prime crepe” (Trump, First Cracks).
Gianni Riotta, a veteran journalist and columnist for La Repubblica, told CJR that the decision to highlight the protests was consistent with the paper’s center-left editorial identity: “La Repubblica has always been a paper of alignment, a paper that takes a position. And so it sees in these American protests the brothers and sisters of its own Roman square.” Just a few weeks earlier, La Repubblica had heavily featured a pro-Europe rally held in Rome, which was initiated by one of its own journalists, Michele Serra, who’d written an editorial calling for the country to “Stand for Europe,” to counter what he described as an existential crisis for the continent’s democratic identity owing to the Trump administration’s policies, particularly toward Ukraine. “In this case,” Riotta said, “it fits with the traditional DNA of a liberal newspaper that has always been pro-European.”
At El País, Spain’s leading newspaper, the protests were seen not just as a component of American politics, but as something directly intertwined with the lives of the paper’s global readership. “We approach the situation from a perspective that includes Spanish and European society, the entire Ibero-American sphere, and the more than sixty million people who make up the US Latino community,” said Pepa Bueno, the paper’s editor in chief. El País, unlike several other Spanish papers, did not put the protests on the front page, but did feature them prominently inside the paper, where they were described as “the first mass mobilization against the Republican administration and the owner of Tesla”—Elon Musk. “From a journalistic standpoint, the current situation represents a major challenge,” Bueno said. “The trade war has turned the world as we knew it upside down. Immigration policy has led to mass deportations and the expulsion of visa-holding residents. All of this unfolds at breakneck speed, and it is often difficult to distinguish between what is announced and what actually goes into effect.”
The protests also got some play from more conservative outlets, like Die Welt, which featured a large photo from the demonstrations above the fold. “In Europe, everybody was kind of waiting for something to happen,” said Jennifer Wilton, the paper’s editor in chief. “It was a very common question: Why is nobody opposing what is threatening democracy?” Wilton added: “I would say the vast majority of the German press, and also broader media, are quite critical of Trump. There’s a strong conviction that this moment marks the end of the post–World War II order.… An American president who seems so unpredictable—and is only predictable in the worst scenarios—is a common concern across the press.”
Still, the coverage of the protests, while prominent, wasn’t entirely effusive. In El País, the central article observed that, in contrast to the dramatic protest movements that surged in response to Trump’s 2016 victory, this time “the general trend has been one of lukewarm opposition.” The European perspective on American affairs can sometimes have a distorting effect, noted Riotta, the Repubblica columnist. “The Italian and European press always feels the need to exaggerate things,” he said. “So the US is no longer just a country with some questionable policies under Trump—no, according to them, there’s already been a coup.”
And Wilton told CJR that Die Welt’s prominent coverage of the protests may have stemmed in part from the German public’s misreading of the movement’s true scale. “Probably we thought it was more than what it was,” she said. “People here believed that this was a broad opposition, but later we understood it was actually small groups, not a national movement.”
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
