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Protests Making News: New Evidence From A Nationally-Representative Sample of U.S. Events

Sun, August 17, 12:30 to 1:30pm, TBA

Abstract

Scholarship consistently finds that media coverage is a key ingredient in the success of social movements. This makes understanding why only certain protests make the news critically important. But the dearth of available non-media protest event data has constrained research on this topic. The little that we know about what explains variation in media coverage of protest events comes from studying police records. While analyses of police records provide an initial look into the factors that distinguish covered events from non-covered events, they have a number of limitations (for example, the tendency to select disproportionally smaller or peaceful events, access to only a few predictor variables, and bounded to a single city). This paper draws on a nationally representative sample of over 1,000 unique U.S. protest events and codes for their coverage in local, state, and national newspapers to break new ground in knowledge about differential media attention of collective action. Among the important findings in our study are that the number of participants increases the likelihood of coverage from all sources, contentious interactions between protesters and police renders local media attention more likely, less disruptive tactics boosts local and state media reports, dramatic tactics are associated with less local and state media attention, celebrity speakers increases local and state media coverage, and events more proximate to papers’ office are more likely to be printed.

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