'With a flag you lead men, for a flag, men live and die'. An Exploration of media representations of the union flag protests in Belfast.

On December 3rd 2012 Belfast City Council voted to limit the number of days the Union Flag would fly from Belfast City Hall. The vote and subsequent removal of the flag was met with an angry response from loyalists who saw this as an attack on their cultural identity. Throughout the following months protests were held throughout Northern Ireland on a daily basis, with a percentage of these sparking riots and clashes between loyalists and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). Extreme violence was reported by newspapers worldwide. This article examines the media representation of these protests and the reactions of the protestors to those representations .My work is informed by Bennett (1982) who looked at the media as definers of social reality through the use of propaganda, moral panics and the deviant other.