Chapter 13: Depictions of Emotions in News Media's Visual Framing of Small-Scale Protests in Greece

Following the global contagion of the financial crisis from 2007 onwards, an increasing number of protests and demonstrations erupted around the world, initially triggered by socio-economic inequalities and against the austerity measures imposed in many countries (not least in Southern Europe) dissent expanded to embrace various socio-political issues; from racialised discrimination and structural violence (the Black Lives Matter movement, for example) to gender-based violence and gender rights (such as the MeToo movement). News agencies' media images of these protests and demonstrations have circulated widely offline and online, and constitute a main source of public information of these events. As Cottle (2008, p. 854) expounds, ‘the co-present public at demonstrations no longer count the most’ as compared to the ‘mass audience watching and reading the media coverage at home’. While Cottle's account may have been impacted by user-generated content and the ways in which activists and populations in general appropriate new technologies to produce their own stories, mainstream media remain a central source of information.