Beyond Protest Events: Cascades of Coverage and News Quality for America’s Most-Prominent Challengers

• In Event: 50216 - Narrative Strategies in Political Sociology

Abstract

When social movement organizations make extensive news, why do they sometimes receive
favorable news coverage and sometimes negative news? When movement actors command long-
running public attention, they can influence political agendas, social problems, and public
opinion, and most news attention to movement organizations comes during these news cascades.
But research is dominated a focus on one-off protest events and case studies. Here we address
this imbalance by analyzing cascades of news attention for the 100 most-covered U.S. movement
organizations in the twentieth century. We examine two key aspects of news quality—addressing
substance through the hand-coding of articles and stance through large language modeling. We
then appraise the influence of four main sets of determinants on the quality of movement news:
organizational characteristics, political contexts, news contexts, and organizational action.
Employing topic modeling, we find that these cascades are centered on specific lines of action,
but not typically protest. Regression analyses on 342 articles from a sample of the 100
organizations provide some support for each argument but indicate that the types of actions
behind the news strongly influence its quality. The results suggest that scholars need to pay
closer attention to cascades of news coverage by challengers, actions beyond protest events, and
different dimensions of news quality.

Authors

• Edwin Amenta, University of California-Irvine

• Neal Caren, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

• Weijun Yuan, University of Chicago