Free Education Now!: News Coverage of Student Protests in England and Turkey

• In Event: 474 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 10. Media and Movements

Abstract

How do the media cover social movements in the absence of well-established Social Movement Organizations? Do we observe similar trends in different media cultures? There has been particular attention paid to big social movement organizations or contemporary movements that are horizontally organized and reject traditional organizational structures. However we know very little about the cases when there are multiple small organizations or groups that basically function on a somewhat hierarchical but voluntary basis with limited resources. In order to tackle this issue I compare the coverage of a wave of student protests in two countries with different media cultures: England and Turkey. I analyze 14 years of newspaper coverage of student protests in The Guardian and Hürriyet by looking at word frequencies, topic modeling, and qualitative coding. Analyses of 1589 news articles suggest that during the electoral cycles, if the social movement issue became part of the debates, students get more substantive coverage. Non-violent protests are suggested as important for substantive coverage in the literature. However, routinized annual protests do get covered but they have poor substantial coverage similar to violent protests. The analysis also pays particular attention to legislation driven coverage and the possible impact of broader mobilization trends in the social movement scenes of both of the countries.

Author

• Didem Turkoglu, University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill