Suchergebnisse

How do movements change culture? This dissertation begins to answer this question by analyzing mainstream newspaper coverage of homosexuality since 1950. Using regression analysis, qualitative comparative analysis, and social network analysis, I explore what factors explain the amount of attention paid to homosexuality generally, attention paid to gay and lesbian movement organizations specifically, and the association of claims about homosexuality as they appear together in the same article. I find that the movement was instrumental in explaining each of these outcomes, but that exactly how the movement influenced coverage was predicated on the political and social context in which the movement operated. Specifically, a legacy of policy successes set up large, well resourced movement organizations to be influential in coverage. However, during times of crisis, smaller, protest oriented organizations had the opportunity to become highly influential.

The Great Depression and the Great Recession in the United States both saw upsurges of social movement activity and newspaper coverage, but why did movements of both the right and left surge during the leftwing regimes of these periods? Why did the Barack Obama administration not produce the lasting leftwing mobilizations characteristic of the Franklin Roosevelt era? To address these questions and locate these episodes in historical perspective, we elaborate a political reform model, a macro-political theory that explains variance in movement presence. At its core, the political reform model holds that highly partisan political regimes and policy enactments interact to spur the presence of movements. We illustrate the argument and place these episodes in historical perspective with data from the Political Organizations in the News Project on all national movement organizations appearing in four major newspapers across 115 years. Historical analyses indicate that all periods of right or left partisan dominance, including leftwing partisanship under Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s and Republican dominance in the 1920s and 1980s, induced waves of movement coverage, regardless of whether there was an economic crisis. Comparisons across movements in similar periods indicate that those with advances in policy boosted their long-term attention. We find lasting leftwing mobilizations occurred more extensively in the wake of the Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson eras because of their greater policy achievements.

A comprehensive account of the media's coverage of social movements in the United StatesA new view of twentieth-century US social movements, Rough Draft of History examines how national newspapers covered social movements and the organizations driving them. Edwin Amenta and Neal Caren identify hundreds of movement organizations, from the Women's Christian Temperance Union to Occupy Wall Street, and document their treatment in the news. In doing so, Amenta and Caren provide an alternative account of US history from below, as it was refracted through journalistic lenses.Iconic organizations in the women's rights, African American civil rights, and environmental movements gained substantial media attention. But so too did now-forgotten groups, such as the German-American Alliance, Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and Peace and Freedom Party. Amenta and Caren show why some organizations made big news while others did not, why some were treated well while others were handled roughly. They recover forgotten stories, including that of the Townsend Plan, a Depression-era organization that helped establish Social Security. They also reveal that the media handled the civil rights movement far more harshly than popular histories recount. And they detail the difficulties movements face in today's brave new media world.Drawing from digitized newspapers across a century and through to the present, Rough Draft of History offers insights for those seeking social and political change and those trying to make sense of it

When social movement organizations receive extensive newspaper coverage, why is it sometimes substantive and sometimes not? By "substantive," we mean coverage that reflects serious treatment of the movement's issues, demands, or policy claims. Scholars agree that the news media are key to movement organizations' influence, helping them alter public discourse and effect political change, but often find that protests are covered nonsubstantively. Employing insights from literatures on historical institutionalism, the social organization of the news, and the consequences of movements, we elaborate an "institutional mediation" model that identifies the interactive effects on coverage of news institutions' operating procedures, movement organizations' characteristics and action, and political contexts. Although movement actors suffer compound legitimacy deficits with journalists, the institutional mediation model identifies the openings news institutions provide, the movement organizational characteristics, the forms of collective action likely to induce substantive news treatment, and the political contexts that will amplify or dampen these effects. We derive four interactive hypotheses from this model, addressing the effects of organizational identities, collective action, and political contexts on news outcomes. We appraise the hypotheses with comparative and qualitative comparative analyses of more than 1000 individually coded articles discussing the five most-covered organizations of the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement across four national newspapers. We find support for each hypothesis and discuss the implications for other movement organizations and the current media context.

AbstractWhy do newspapers cover social movement actors, and why is this coverage sometimes favorable? Early scholarship saw the news media mainly as a source of data on collective action, and sought to ascertain its biases, but scholarship has increasingly focused directly on why movements gain coverage, especially coverage that can advance their goals. To understand why and how newspapers cover movement actors, we start with the insight that movements rely on the news media for many reasons, but their coverage is largely in the control of news institutions. In this review, we focus on perspectives that specify 3‐way interactions between the characteristics of newspapers, social movement actors, and the social and political contexts, but we begin with how news media institutions are organized. We conclude with suggestions for future research that take advantage of the digital revolution of the last generation.