This article links media and social movement studies with world society theory to explain cross-national variations in media attention to domestic social protests. We compile a novel large-scale dataset with over 1.2 million protest-related news articles from 12,644 web news sites across 140 countries/areas in 2015–2020. Our cross-national analysis shows that both media- and country-level characteristics explain news coverage of domestic social protests. Our findings show that web news outlets with high web traffic and a propensity to report conflictual events tend to cover more protests. In addition, web news sites in nations with vibrant civil society organizations report more protest events. We also find that there is a positive relationship between online censorship and news coverage in general. But this is driven by news media in democratic countries, and news sites in authoritarian regimes experiencing strong censorship cover fewer protest events. Finally, news media in authoritarian nations with more organizational ties to the international community cover more domestic protests.

本文将媒体和社会运动研究与世界社会理论联系起来，以解释媒体对国内社会抗议的关注的跨国差异。我们编译了一个新颖的大规模数据集，其中包含 2015-2020 年来自 140 个国家/地区的 12,644 个网络新闻网站的超过 120 万篇与抗议相关的新闻文章。我们的跨国分析表明，媒体和国家层面的特征都解释了国内社会抗议的新闻报道。我们的研究结果表明，具有高网络流量和报道冲突事件倾向的网络新闻媒体往往会报道更多的抗议活动。此外，在民间社会组织活跃的国家，网络新闻网站报道了更多的抗议事件。我们还发现，总体而言，在线审查与新闻报道之间存在正相关关系。但这是由民主国家的新闻媒体推动的，而在经历严格审查的威权政权中，新闻网站报道的抗议事件较少。最后，与国际社会有更多组织联系的威权国家的新闻媒体报道更多的国内抗议活动。