No Surrender. No Challenge. No Protest Paradigm: A Content Analysis of the Canadian News Media Coverage of the “Yellow Vest Movement” and the “United We Roll Convoy”

This study's exhaustive content analysis (N = 538) examines how Canada's mainstream news media covered the nascent yellow vest movement from the first Canadian protests in December 2018 culminating in the February 2019 cross-country United We Roll convoy. We demonstrate that Protest Paradigm scholarship does not offer a useful analytic for understanding the coverage of this right-wing social movement whose tactics were banal and law abiding. Furthermore, we argue that Canadian news media coverage of the protest movement was largely uncritical and decidedly hegemonic, raising questions about normative watchdog conceptions of the news media in Canadian democracy.