Mediating the Message

1. Mediating the Message • Activists need the news media to convey messages to wider audiences • The quality of the message depends on the way the protest event is represented by the media (how it is “framed”) • Media coverage can help marginalized actors set a social and political agenda • But how often does it help?

2. Bias in Reporting Selection Bias • Which protests get covered? Description Bias • How is protest described? Explaining Bias • Organizational Factors • Structural Factors • Ideological Factors

3. Explaining Bias Organizational Factors • Media routines effect coverage • Reporters are generalists, not specialists • Choice of Sources→ often leads to use of Government or other “official” sources • Legitimacy • Structure • Routine • Relationship

4. Explaining Bias Structural Factors • Media is embedded in capitalist system • Media dependent on advertising revenue

5. Explaining Bias Ideological Factors • Reporting supports existing power arrangements • Public interest

6. Hegemony “…a ruling class’s domination through ideology, through the shaping of popular consent” “…the systematic (but not necessarily or even usually deliberate) engineering of mass consent to the established order" Todd Gitlin : The Whole World is Watching

7. Role of the Media (in democratic societies) • Norm of objectivity • Enable a “Marketplace of ideas” • Gatekeeper • Media rewards controversy, spectacle • Institutional politics rewards predictability, compromise, moderation • A 3rd party to publicize activists’ efforts But also : To reproduce the dominant view

8. Framing • “Persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or formal"

9. Framing • Cultural process • Construction of meaning • Resonates with ideologies, values and beliefs Core Framing Tasks • Diagnostic – define problem and its source • Prognostic – creating a strategy of redress

10. Activist’s Framing Tasks • Social movements must frame injustices to convince as wide an audience as possible • That a problem exists • Collective efforts at redress are efficacious

11. Activist/Media Conflict Media Framing of Protest • Trivialize • Polarize • Emphasize internal dissention • Marginalize • Under-count participation • Disparage activist effectiveness

12. Questions • What role does the media play in social movements? • How does the media portrayal of events differ from activists’ portrayal? Is this in conflict or in accord with movement goals? Is this conflict/accord inevitable? Why/Why Not? • How can social movement actors respond to unfavorable media coverage? • How can the public evaluate media, whether commercial or independent? • How can relationships with the media affect social movement outcomes? What are the likely implications for • Gaining sympathizers • Gaining movement adherents • Affecting change