What Explains the Quality of the News Coverage of the Civil Rights Movement?

• In Event: 219 - Regular Session. Social Movement Participation and Methods

Abstract

What accounts for the quality of coverage of the 1960s civil rights organizations that gained extensive attention in national newspapers? To answer this question, we examine all front-page articles in extensive, consecutive runs of coverage of the Big Four civil rights organizations: the NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality, and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Elaborating a story-centered model based on political mediation thinking, we argue that the quality of coverage depends on the interaction between news media organization, practices, and news values and a movement organization’s characteristics, the collective action covered, and the type of article. Radical or violence-prone organizations will have more difficult paths to substantive coverage than more moderate ones. The coverage of assertive action, in which movement organizations challenge institutional political actors, boycotts, and strikes typically promote substantive coverage, as does movement-wide action, whereas violent action deflects substance. As for the type of article, the movement organization being the initiating agent behind articles typically leads to more substantive coverage, whereas state-initiated coverage in which the organization is acted upon deflects substance. Through comparative analyses across the Big Four and four other civil-rights related organizations in the 1960s, regression analyses, and qualitative comparative analyses (QCA) of approximately 1000 individually coded articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, we find support for our arguments. The research also provides an account of which organizations dominated coverage of this important movement in its heyday.

Authors

• Edwin Amenta, University of California, Irvine

• Thomas Alan Elliott, University of California Irvine

• Nicole Clorinda Shortt, University of California, Irvine

• Amber Celina Tierney, University of California, Irvine

• Didem Turkoglu, University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill

• Burrel James Vann, University of California, Irvine