Feb. 12 by Andy Lee Roth and Shealeigh Voitl

https://www.projectcensored.org/frame-checking-insurgency-minnesota/

Trump administration officials, joined by a chorus of Republican politicians and right-wing media pundits, have been referring to public demonstrations against ICE in Minneapolis as an “insurgency,” a term typically used to refer to violent, armed rebellion, especially when it involves irregular forces opposing a larger, well-equipped military or state power.

On the surface, the use of the term to characterize these demonstrations appears aimed at justifying Donald Trump’s invocation of the Insurrection Act, which grants presidents authority to deploy military forces domestically to suppress civil disorder. But a closer analysis of how the use of “insurgency” frames the demonstrations reveals even higher stakes.

As an interpretive frame for making sense of events in Minneapolis, “insurgency” characterizes demonstrators as military adversaries of the United States and thus legitimizes federal agents’ use of physical force against them. Frames are central organizing ideas for making sense of events and suggesting what is at stake.

Seeing recent headlines, we began reflecting on lessons from Project Censored’s guide to frame-checking, a term we coined to promote critical inquiry into news stories that might be fundamentally misleading even when they are factually accurate. In Beyond Fact-Checking, we likened frame-checking to a pair of X-ray glasses that help reveal “the hidden structures of a news story that might otherwise influence our understanding of an issue without our awareness.”

Frame-checking claims of “insurgency” exposes how Trumpist interests sought to establish the insurgency frame, how it distorts understanding of events in Minneapolis, and what people can do to establish community protection, civil resistance, and human rights counterframes.

Establishing “Insurgency” as an Interpretive Frame

On January 15, a week after an ICE agent murdered Renée Good, Trump accused “professional agitators and insurrectionists” of “attacking the Patriots of I.C.E.” and threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. A wide range of establishment news outlets quoted Trump’s Truth Social post, including the Washington Post, USA Today, and The Hill, though none referenced “insurgents” or “insurgency” in Minnesota.

Those characterizations were the work of White House officials, congressional Republicans, and right-wing pundits.

Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, for example, told The Charlie Kirk Show that Minnesota lawmakers were leading “an insurgency against the federal government,” while Rep. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, a Navy SEAL veteran, posted on X, “This needs to be addressed for what it is: an insurrection, domestic insurgency.”

Right-wing media amplified the theme of “insurgency” in Minneapolis. Asserting that the “death of Renee Good … has been used to propagandize against ICE,” Rich Lowry, the National Review’s editor-in-chief, wrote, “Insurgencies feed off their martyrs.”

Earlier, the January 12 episode of Fox News’s “Ingraham Angle” featured “An Insurgency, Not a Protest” as its headline, accompanied by the image of a red Democratic donkey emblazoned with a communist hammer and sickle. As Media Matters for America reported, show host Laura Ingraham “described pro-immigrant activists in Minnesota as ‘insurgents’ and as an ‘insurgency’ multiple times” throughout the episode, “practically begging Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.” Trump may not have acted on Ingraham’s pleas, but it seems likely that her monologue informed and perhaps inspired his January 15 Truth Social post.

A January 30 Fox News segment, “How Minneapolis Agitator Networks Use Insurgency Tactics to Hinder ICE,” sought to cement the frame’s validity. Fox extensively quoted a “retired CIA senior operations officer,” Rick de la Torre, who “tracked insurgency groups globally for 20 years”—and provided links to CIA and US Army manuals on insurgency. de la Torre described “anti-ICE tactics in Minneapolis” as “textbook violent revolution.”

The Fox report concluded with a timeline of a dozen incidents leading up to and following the killing of Alex Pretti by US Customs and Border Protection agents, detailing the tactics allegedly used by ICE Watch and each incident’s corresponding “insurgency doctrine.” Fox’s interpretation of the latter exemplifies many of the pitfalls of selective interpretation of orthodox texts, not least of which are confirmation bias and the illusory truth effect, which the Propwatch Project identifies as “core drivers” of propaganda.

Impact of the “Insurgency” Frame

Some of the more extreme claims in right-wing reporting and commentary on the Minneapolis “insurgency” are demonstrably false. They do not withstand fact-checking, which focuses on whether reporting accurately reflects the world, and is an elementary component of media literacy. But other claims require critical analysis that goes beyond fact-checking.

Consider, for example, the evidence provided by Fox News on January 26 to support pundit Jesse Watters’s claims that the Minnesota insurgency is “more sophisticated than you think.” The segment then cut to live coverage from one of Fox’s field reporters, who asserted, “This is an organized movement here. There’s communication. There’s food. There’s notices. There’s notifications.”

He forgot to mention the whistles! Or that, on the other side, ICE and CPB agents were armed with military-grade weaponry, including advanced weapons lasers and firearm suppressors, which the New York Times described as “instruments of war, fine-tuned and perfected for killing at short range.”

Frame-checking alerts us to what’s left out of frame, as in the case of Fox’s allegation of “insurgency” on the basis of demonstrators’ use of Signal groups, while ignoring ICE spending to arm its agents. But frame-checking also helps news readers and viewers see more clearly how, at its most basic, the insurgency frame situates community members engaging in constitutionally-protected activities—including the First Amendment rights to assemble and to petition the government—as military adversaries.

“When you start using the language of warfare and treating someone who has an opposing view as a terrorist or an insurgent,” Seth G. Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the New York Times, “that legitimizes use of violence against them.”

Lessons from Standing Rock

Jones’s point is underscored by 2017 research on media coverage of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Natalie Gyenes and her colleagues examined important distinctions between characterizations of participants as “protesters” and “protectors.” Media coverage tended to characterize participants as “protesters,” even though Gyenes and her team found that this label provided “a narrow view of events,” focusing on environmental concerns rather than broader resistance or Native sovereignty rights.

Instead, Native American demonstrators, such as Iyuskin American Horse of the Sicangu/Oglala Lakota, characterized themselves as “protectors,” who were “peacefully defending our land and our ways of life.” As Gyenes and her colleagues concluded, the language of “protectors” underscored “what these individuals and communities were fighting for, not fighting against.”

These insights shed light on a second critical aspect of framing in the Minneapolis case. The insurgency frame not only situates demonstrators as military adversaries, but it also characterizes their aims as anti–American, while erasing what they are demonstrating for.

“What these groups are trying to do is destroy everything that makes America great. … That means the end of free enterprise and America as we know it,” de la Torre, the retired CIA officer, told Fox.

Similarly, in her January 12 commentary, Ingraham warned viewers of “foreign agitators” and a “hard left” that believes “America and our system is irredeemable,” effectively portraying demonstrators as ignorant dupes.

By contrast, Media Matters for America covered many of the same points in a report whose title contrasted dramatically with the right-wing “insurgency” news frame. In “Right-Wing Media Are Describing Pro-Immigrant Minnesota Activists Using the Language of War,” John Knefel and Sophie Lawton characterize the demonstrators as “activists” who are “pro-immigrant” and engaged in “civil resistance.” These three terms provide a fundamental counterpoint to right-wing claims of insurgents using guerrilla tactics to provoke “civil war” against the United States.

Counterframing

News frames pervasively shape our understanding of events and interpretation of facts, but they are neither deterministic nor permanent. Right-wing framing of civil resistance in Minneapolis as “insurgency” doesn’t make it so, even if the aim is to persuade people that it is. Frames gain cultural traction not because they are absolutely true, but because they are repeated across outlets and platforms—often in a sensationalistic or fear-mongering way, as seen in Ingraham’s Minnesota coverage—and resonant with people’s pre-existing beliefs.

Counterframes, therefore, must offer coherent narratives that resonate with audiences’ lived experiences and existing values. Further, they should disrupt corporate media’s facade of “objectivity” by identifying deliberate slant embedded in storytelling, including charged metaphors, analogies, and word choices.

Frame-checking highlights how news coverage is frequently the site of subtle but consequential conflicts between competing factions to establish the prominence of their preferred interpretive frames. And ultimately, whether civil resistance is understood as a democratic right or an existential threat has material consequences for how the public responds, and how authorities justify their actions and potentially evade accountability. In other words, when the establishment press frames human rights protests as “disruptions,” your alarms should sound.

Counterframes challenge how corporate media and right-wing politicians treat dissent.

Consider how community protection, civil resistance, or human rights frames might complicate and contest right-wing reporting. Who might a journalist consult to tell these stories? For example, speaking with community members and organizers, rather than politicians, who are distantly connected to the issue or have differing interests, allows for interconnected, solutions-based, people-centered coverage. Frames focused on community protection or human rights should ideally prioritize the voices of those directly affected, including families, legal observers, medics, and grassroots advocates.

How, too, might journalists situate contemporary action in the context of history, of US traditions of civil rights and antiwar protests? If we put on our X-ray glasses when we read the dominant narratives about Minneapolis ICE protests, we can see how much of what is presented as “common sense” reporting is, in fact, the product of layered framing decisions. But this type of reporting recklessly strips protests of historical context, severing them from long US traditions of civil disobedience, abolitionism, labor organizing, and civil rights protests, in which leaders and status quo media alike condemned protesters as dangerous, unruly, or distinctly un-American.

Who gets to define “violence,” “order,” or “safety”? These decisions are never neutral.

When property damage or traffic delays are reported more prominently, or exclusively, over deportations, family separations, the expansion of surveillance, or deaths in detention centers, the audience is nudged toward identifying with the state rather than with those being harmed by it.

Counterframes contest status quo narratives; provide platforms for those engaged in dissent to voice their experiences and aims; and remind the public that when right-wing media invoke the language of war to report on community protest, it is often a distraction from another disturbing reality.