Journalism in a Fractured World

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ISSN 2998-1581 (print)

ISBN 9781433197581 (paperback)

ISBN 9781433198748 (hardback)

ISBN 9781433198755 (ebook)

ISBN 9781433198762 (epub)

DOI 10.3726/b22400

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© 2025 Scott A. Eldridge II

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About the author

Scott A. Eldridge II (PhD) is an Associate Professor with the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen. His research explores the journalistic field, its boundaries, and peripheral journalistic actors. He is the author of Online Journalism From the Periphery (2018), and is editor of the Frontiers in Journalism Studies book series.

We live in fractured societies, and it is hard not to notice.

At any given moment during the past several years, it would not be unusual to step outside and find the roads and city centers in the places where we live filled with groups of protesters waving banners and shouting slogans as they stall traffic and block pedestrians. Their reasons for doing so cut across politics, cultures, generations, and ideologies, and for that reason these disruptions have come to represent differences between people who hold polar opposite views of one another. They have come to represent the fractures in our societies.

This is certainly apparent in the Netherlands where I live and where over the past few years farmers have taken their tractors from farms in the North to the Hague in the South, bisecting the country as they drove down the highway to protest what they and their supporters see as an overreaching government trying to implement policies that demand farms curb nitrogen emissions and curtail agricultural pollution. Protesters have also dumped hay bales and manure along their routes and in front of the government buildings they assembled around, decrying what they see as a widening divide between rural communities and those in power, a fracture that has left farmers feeling overlooked and angry.¹

From initially disrupting the flow of traffic on highways and in city and town centers, these protests grew into a populist political movement and gave voice to a new political party—the BoerBurgerBeweging, or BBB (Farmer-Citizen Movement)—that took the largest share of the upper house in the Dutch parliament in the Spring of 2023 and is now part of the right-wing coalition leading the Dutch government. Recently, in Germany, similar tactics were being used by farmers blocking border crossings and gathering in parking lots and public squares, behind signs that remind observers that without farmers there would be no bread, butter, or beer.² There too farmers’ messages are being amplified by the extreme-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has seized on farmers’ discontent in an effort to amass political power.³ As I finish writing this book, these protests have spread further across Europe, as farmers seek populist support and as populist politicians back them.

At the same time and in the same countries, highways are also being blocked by climate activists who hold politically opposite positions. Linking arms and gluing themselves to roadways, these protesters have taken to the streets in an effort to shake up what they see as a complacent society paying too little attention to the warming planet, prodding governments they see as doing too little to be more ambitious. Extinction Rebellion and similar movements have been buoyed by progressive and left-wing politicians attending their rallies, including Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat, who spoke to a September 2023 protest in language invoking unity: “We are all here for one reason: to end fossil fuels around the planet.”⁴

Like the farmer protests, climate protests also signal a widening chasm in society between those who see climate change as an urgent concern and those who don’t, often depicted as a division between younger and older generations. Since 2018, students have been leaving schools on Fridays to make a statement about the future of the planet they will be left with after the rest of us have moved on.⁵ For these protesters and those who support them, blocking highways, walking out of schools, and disrupting city centers is seen as a necessary tactic to get people to pay attention to a shared, global, challenge.

Despite their appeals for people to come together in defense of either farmers or the planet, these protests and protesters have not been universally well-received. In 2020 in the UK, then-Home Secretary Priti Patel called climate protesters criminals; in 2023, Dutch far-right populist Geert Wilders labeled them the “Extreemlinkse vriendjes [extreme-left friends]”⁶ of the Dutch Green-Left Party, GroenLinks; and in 2024, in the United States, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis scoffed at climate protesters who interrupted his faltering presidential campaign, labeling them with the epithet “numbnuts.”⁷ While not in nearly as antagonistic terms, farmer’s protests have been criticized as well. In 2022, the Dutch premier Mark Rutte said their tactics of dumping manure on highways was unacceptable—“Dat is ver over alle grenzen heen [That is far beyond all limits].”⁸ German chancellor Olaf Scholz said that while he took seriously the concerns raised by farmers, he warned of a “toxic mixture” of protests and political extremism “poisoning every democratic debate.”⁹