Pamela E. Oliver
Professor of Sociology

Soc 924 – Media and Movements

Assignment: (I) Selection bias. I have put * by two reviews (Earl et al 2004 and Ortiz/Myers 2005) that draw different conclusions about the state of selection bias research. I also put a more hesitant (*) by the Amenta et al 2009 study, because I have only skimmed it so far, but it represents the latest iteration of a study of “what get’s in the news.” I have some old lecture slides on this subject that I think will interest/amuse you. The issue is whether & how newspapers can be used to study the rise and fall of protest cycles. (II & III) Read at least 2-3 empirical articles from anywhere in sections II (media effects on movements) or III (how media cover movements). It is also ok to read one or more empirical pieces from section I. I have put (*) by the empirical works that I have found particularly useful.

I. Selection Processes – Articles about factors predicting whether protests and demonstrations get news coverage.

  2. McCarthy, J. D., C. McPhail, et al. (1996). “Images of Protest: Dimensions of Selection Bias in Media Coverage of Washington Demonstrations, 1982 and 1991.” American Sociological Review 61(3): 478-499. PDF file
  3. * Earl, Jennifer, Andrew Martin, et al. (2004). “The Use Of Newspaper Data In The Study Of Collective Action.” Annual Review of Sociology 30(1): 65-80. A summary of the use of newspaper data and issues of selection. The “hard news” of the event, if it is re-ported, tends to be relatively accurate. However, a newspaper’s decision to cover an event at all is influenced by the type of event, the news agency, and the issue involved. Discusses approaches to detecting bias, as well as ways to factor knowledge about bias into interpretations of protest event data. PDF
  4. * Ortiz, David G., Daniel J. Myers, et al. (2005). “Where Do We Stand with Newspaper Data?” Mobilization: An International Journal 10(3): 397-419. Reviews literature on selection bias in media-based data & propose a theoretical model of the sources of these biases. Concludes that newspaper data often do not reach acceptable standards for event analysis & that using them can distort findings & misguide theorizing. Furthermore, media selection biases are resistant to correction procedures largely because they are unstable across media sources, time, & location. PDF
  5. (*)Myers, Daniel J. and Beth Schaefer Caniglia (2004). “All the Rioting That’s Fit to Print: Selection Effects in National Newspaper Coverage of Civil Disorders, 1968-1969.” American Sociological Review 69(4): 519-543. This study examined selection effects in newspaper reports about civil disorders in the late 1960s. A comprehensive set of events recorded in newspapers across the United States was compared with the subsets of these events recorded in two national newspapers often used to construct collective event data bases-the New York Times and the Washington Post The results demonstrate that fewer than half of all disorders are covered in these two newspapers combined, and that those reported are selected on the basis of event intensity, distance, event density, city population size, type of actor, and day of the week To demonstrate the effects of these selection patterns on substantive analysis of civil disorder the authors replicated earlier studies using all reported events, and then repeated the analyses using only the events reported in the Times and the Post This procedure showed some substantial differences in results. PDF
  6. “Political Processes and Local Newspaper Coverage of Protest Events: From Selection Bias to Triadic Interactions” (Pamela E. Oliver and Gregory M. Maney) American Journal of Sociology 106 (2 September) 2000: 463-505 PDF file. Examines only protest events in Madison 1993-6: ties to institutional politics increase coverage, but events compete with the legislature for space in the news hole.
  7. Pamela E. Oliver and Daniel J. Myers. “How Events Enter the Public Sphere: Conflict, Location and Sponsorship in Local Newspaper Coverage of Public Events.” American Journal of Sociology 105: 38-87. 1999. PDF file Assesses coverage of protest events relative to others: conflict gets you in the news, location and sponsorship matter. Non-conflictual message events have very low rates of coverage.
  8. Mueller, Carol. “International Press Coverage of East German Protest Events, 1989” American Sociological Review; 1997, 62, 5, Oct, 820-832. Comparison of six nations’ coverage of East German protests in light of media selection models. PDF file Proximity to the event matters the most.
  9. Mueller, Carol. “Media Measurement Models of Protest Event Data.” Mobilization; 1997, 2, 2, Sept, 165-184. Mueller, Media measurement models of protest event data A theoretical article that gives a very clear review of the relevant theoretical and empirical issues.
  10. Hug, Simon; Wisler, Dominique. “Correcting for Selection Bias in Social Movement Research.” Mobilization; 1998, 3, 2, Oct, 141-161. This suggests that one can use data about selection processes to reason backwards to the events that were not covered.
  11. Almeida and Lichbach, “To the Internet, From the Internet: Comparative Media Coverage of Transnational Protests.” Mobilization PDF Compares news coverage of 1999 Seattle WTo protests in electronic copies of newspapers and activist web sites; activist sites cover more events and are also less influenced by the intensity properties of protest events.
  12. (*)Amenta, Edwin, Neal Caren, et al. (2009). “All the Movements Fit to Print: Who, What, When, Where, and Why SMO Families Appeared in the New York Times in the Twentieth Century.” American Sociological Review 74(4): 636-656. Why did some social movement organization (SMO) families receive extensive media coverage?Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analyses (fsQCA) draw on data from the New York Times across the twentieth century on more than 1,200 SMOs and 34 SMO families. At the SMO family level, coverage correlates highly with common measures of the size and disruptive activity of movements, with the labor and African American civil rights movements receiving the most coverage. Addressing why some movement families experienced daily coverage, fsQCA indicates that disruption, resource mobilization, and an enforced policy are jointly sufficient; partisanship, the standard form of “political opportunity,” is not part of the solution. PDF
  13. Martin, Andrew W. (2005). “Addressing the Selection Bias in Media Coverage of Strikes: A Comparison of Mainstream and Specialty Print Media.” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 26: 143-178. Compares coverage of strikes in the mass audience New York Times & the Daily Labor Report, a newspaper which targets industry & labor leaders & garners its revenue from subscriptions, not advertising. Uses government data to construct the population of events. Finds that both newspapers select strikes in a manner that resembles coverage of other forms of protest. Important variables include size, length, & disruptiveness. The main difference between the two newspapers is the New York Time’s attention to strikes in industries that affect the public & consumers & its strong regional bias. These findings indicate that not only do similar media selection processes work for both protest & strikes, but also that, despite some differences, media type did not affect selection greatly.
  14. McCarthy, John D., Larissa Titarenko, et al. (2008). “Assessing Stability In The Patterns Of Selection Bias In Newspaper Coverage Of Protest During The Transition From Communism In Belarus.” Mobilization 13(2): 127-146. Analyses of selection bias in the coverage of protest events in Minsk, Belarus between 1990 and 1995 are presented. Police records of 817 protest events were used to create a protest event dataset, and Minsk’s four daily newspapers were read for the entire period in order to establish estimates of event coverage. Results show that large events, events with strong sponsors and, in two of the four newspapers, events accompanied by arrests are each more likely to receive coverage. These effects remain stable through phases of the transition for the combined coverage in any of the papers. The selection factors of event size and event sponsorship also display stability across media source, although the impact of arrests is not always consequential.

II. Media and Mobilization – Articles about how the media aid or deter mobilization or affect the trajectory of action

  1. Deana Rohlinger and Catherine Corrigall-Brown. “Social Movements and Mass Media in a Global Context.” Chapter 7 in Snow et al Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Social Movements. How activists use media depends on the political context (open or closed). Discussion of media use in open systems and in closed systems.
  2. Jennifer Earl. “Technology and Social Media.” Chapter 16 in Snow et al Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Social Movements. Digital media are important, disciplinary differences in studying digital technologies and protest, major findings, continuing debates.
  3. Sampedro, Victor The Media Politics of Social Protest. Mobilization; 1997, 2, 2, Sept, 185-205. Spain, media opportunities usually coincide with political opportunities, but sometimes there is a chance in the media. Sampedro, Media politics of social protest
  4. (*) Roscigno, V. J. and W. F. Danaher (2001). “Media and Mobilization: The Case of Radio and Southern Textile Worker Insurgency, 1929 to 1934.” American Sociological Review 66(1): 21-48. A nice piece, showing that worker-oriented radio stations facilitated insurgency. Available in JSTOR.
  5. Tarrow, Power in Movement, Chapter 3.
  6. Gamson, William A. (2004). Bystanders, Public Opinion and the Media. The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements. D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule and H. Kriesi. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK, Blackwell Publishing: 242-261. Role of mass media, bystanders as imagined community. Nature of public opinion, framing complexities. Movements carry symbolic interests. Movement framing strategy: discursive opportunity structure, depth of challenge dilemma, access dilemma, need for validation dilemma, weak control dilemma. Media as source of power: cultural resonance, marketing a constituency, mainstreaming, consumers vs citizens, embarrassing.
  7. (*)Koopmans, Ruud and Susan Olzak (2004). “Discursive Opportunities and the Evolution of Right-Wing Violence in Germany[1].” American Journal of Sociology 110(1): 198-230. This article explores the link between violence and public discourse. It suggests that media attention to radical right violence and public reactions to violence affect the clustering of targets and the temporal and spatial distribution of violence. The notion of “discursive opportunities” is introduced, and the article argues that it can serve to link political opportunity structure and framing perspectives on collective action. Using a cross-sectional and time-series design to model event counts in states in Germany, this study finds that differential public visibility, resonance, and legitimacy of right-wing violence significantly affected the rate of violence against different target groups.
  8. Earl, Jennifer (2006). “Pursuing Social Change Online: The Use of Four Protest Tactics on the Internet.” Social Science Computer Review 24(3): 362-377. Abstract: This article examines the distribution & architecture of web sites hosting or directly linking to opportunities to participate in four online activist tactics: online petitioning, boycotting, & e-mailing & letter-writing campaigns. Specifically, this article addresses five basic structural questions: (1) Are opportunities to engage in these tactics usually organized around social movement organizations &/or actors? (2) Do sites tend to host or link to these tactics? (3) On average, how tactically specialized or tactically diversified are sites? (4) How are these tactics distributed across different types of sites? & (5) How many implementations of each tactic were offered per web site?
  9. Earl, Jennifer and Alan Schussman (2003). “The New Site of Activism: On-Line Organizations, Movement Entrepreneurs, and the Changing Location of Social Movement Decision Making.” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 24: 155-187. Using the online strategic voting movement during the 2000 US Presidential Election as a case study, we argue that the application of prior theory often overlooks the ways in which movements that emerge & thrive online function differently from conventional movements. Specifically, we argue that movement entrepreneurs, instead of social movement organizations, were largely responsible for organizing the strategic voting movement. This more entrepreneurial movement infrastructure brought with it changes in decision-making processes & concerns.
  10. Earl, Jennifer and Alan Schussman (2004). “Cease and Desist: Repression, Strategic Voting and the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election.” Mobilization: An International Journal 9(2): 181-202. This is a study of vote-swapping sites, where Gore voters in “safe” states could agree to vote for Nader so Nader votes could vote for Gore in “swing” states and the Nader national total would not be affected. There was a lot of official repression of these sites, declaring them to be illegal vote trading. The article studies this repression and how the web sites responded, generally arguing that the repression worked.
  11. (*) Andrews, Kenneth T. and Michael Biggs (2006). “The Dynamics of Protest Diffusion: Movement Organizations, Social Networks, and News Media in the 1960 Sit-Ins.” American Sociological Review 71(5): 752-777. The authors use event-history analysis to trace the diffusion of sit-ins throughout the South and to compare cities where sit-ins occurred with the majority of cities where they did not. They assess the relative importance of three channels of diffusion: movement organizations, social networks, and news media. The authors find that movement organizations played an important role in orchestrating protest; what mattered was a cadre of activists rather than mass membership. There is little evidence that social networks acted as a channel for diffusion among cities. By contrast, news media were crucial for conveying information about protests elsewhere. In addition, the authors demonstrate that sit-ins were most likely to occur where there were many college students, where adults in the black community had greater resources and autonomy, and where political opportunities were more favorable.
  12. Vliegenthart, Rens, Dirk Oegema, et al. (2005). “Media Coverage and Organizational Support in the Dutch Environmental Movement.” Mobilization: An International Journal 10(3): 365-381. Though social movement organizations (SMOs) depend heavily upon the media for their communication to the public, little is known about the relationships between media coverage & public support for SMOs. This research uses computer-assisted content analysis to assess the relationship between media coverage & membership figures for Dutch environmental organizations over the period 1991-2003. Our analysis provides evidence for direct influence of visibility of the organization & its main issue on membership support, while membership support does not influence visibility of an SMO & its issue. Furthermore, an SMO’s media visibility is negatively affected by the visibility of other SMOs within the same sector. These results point to the necessity for SMOs to compete for attention in the public sphere & to the importance of using various strategies to compete for the limited space available in the media.

III. Constructions – Articles about how the media portray movements.

  1. (*) William Gamson and Andre Modigliani. 1989. “Media Discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear power: A Constructionist Approach.” American Journal of Sociology 95: 1-37. Analysis of media frames about nuclear power across time + qualitative citing of trends in survey data. PDF file.
  2. William A. Gamson, David Crotequ, William Hoynes, and Thodore Sasson. “Media Images of the Social Construction of Reality.” Annual Review of Sociology 1992, 18: 373-93. literature review on media frames, how viewers/readers interpret them. PDF file
  3. Smith, J., J. D. McCarthy, et al. (2001). “From Protest to Agenda Building: Description Bias in Media Coverage of Protest Events in Washington, D.C.” Social Forces 79(4): 1397-1423. Protest coverage focus on events, not issues, may undermine movement agendas. PDF file
  4. Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda. “Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction.” Annual Review of Sociology 20: 149-71. 1994. not located in social movements literature but addressing issues of the media and elite construction of moral revivals, etc. PDF file
  5. John D. McCarthy. “Activists, Authorities, and Media Framing of Drunk Driving.” LJG 133-167.
  6. Klandermans, B. and S. Goslinga (1996). Media Discourse, Movement Publicity, and the Generation of Collective Action Frames: Theoretical and Empirical Exercises in Meaning Construction. CP: 312-337. Detailed theoretically-grounded case of a class of media frames (or political icons, using Szasz’s term)
  7. Todd Gitlin. “News as Ideology and Contested Area: Toward a Theory of Hegemony, Crisis, and Opposition.” Socialist Review, no. 48 (Nov.-Dec. 1979): 11-54. A synopsis of the main theoretical argument of his book The Whole World is Watching, about media coverage of SDS in the 1960s. [[I have not been able to find an electronic copy of this]]
  8. Harvey Molotch. 1979. “Media and Movements.” Pp. 71-93 in Zald and McCarthy, The Dynamics of Social Movements. How the media operate and why they provide distorted views of movements.
  9. Rohlinger, D. A. (2002). “Framing the Abortion Debate: Organizational Resources, Media Strategies, and Movement-Countermovement Dynamics.” The Sociological Quarterly 43(4): 479-507. How opposed SMOs, the National Organization for Women (NOW) & Concerned Women for America (CWA), get media coverage during critical moments of the abortion debate. Strategic construction of frames, responses to opponents, success in getting coverage.
  10. Ruud Koopmans & Paul Statham, “Political claims analysis” Mobilization 4:40-51 (1999)Local web site copy (rotated so it can be read on the screen) Argues that study should be of claims and counter-claims in the media, not protest events.

I. Selection Processes – Articles about factors predicting whether protests and demonstrations get news coverage.

II. Media and Mobilization – Articles about how the media aid or deter mobilization or affect the trajectory of action

III. Constructions – Articles about how the media portray movements.