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Current literature often links contentious protests with media hostility, showing that news outlets typically portray protests involving disruption or violence in a negative light. Contesting this literature, this work introduces an intersectional approach—focusing on geopolitics, protest goals and actions—to theorize divergences in the media framing of protests that entail violence. To illustrate these divergences, we use mixed methods—network analysis and content analysis—to examine an original dataset on U.S. media coverage of three large movements in different countries. These movements share similarities in their anti‐status quo goals and contentious actions but differ in geopolitical locations: one taking place in the U.S., the second in a U.S. ally country, and the third in a non‐ally country. As the first to apply network analysis in movement‐media studies, this comparative study contributes to a systematic examination of media framing variations both within and across social movements. This work also complicates our understanding of violence and media representation by introducing a theoretically‐informed approach that considers multiple factors simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]