Beyond Technological Optimism: Why Legacy and Digital Journalism Converge in Protest Coverage

Research on digital journalism often assumes that online-native newsrooms expand discursive diversity and challenge legacy media’s dominance. Yet, growing evidence suggests that digital platforms may reproduce rather than transform established framing norms. Contributing to this debate, this study examines how news organizations with different institutional profiles frame political crises, assessing whether digital-native outlets meaningfully diverge from legacy-affiliated journalism. Focusing on coverage of Kenya’s 2024 anti-Finance Bill protests, the analysis compares Citizen Digital, a legacy-affiliated outlet, and Kenyans.co.ke, a digital-native platform. Using qualitative content analysis of 100 news articles from each platform, this study identifies three dominant frames—law-and-order, victimization, and political critique—with the law-and-order frame appearing most frequently (Citizen Digital, 32.6%; Kenyans.co.ke, 30.0%). Despite their organizational differences, both outlets exhibited similar framing patterns, challenging assumptions that digital-native platforms inherently diversify political discourse and instead raising questions about the macro-level conditions shaping editorial practices across media fields. The findings suggest that shared structural constraints within the media environment may sustain framing norms typically associated with legacy journalism.